By Shalise Manza Young
One day there will be a Better Time, a time I have to believe, for the children’s sake, is coming. And in that Better Time, the vile, despicable, depraved decision Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his team made will be recorded by history as vile, despicable, and depraved, and reactions to it will reflect as much.
It will not — cannot — be minimized or swept aside. It is still necessary to remind each other that none of this is normal or ok, and even by the immoral and offensive standards of his MAGA peers, the attack ad that debuted this week in support of Ramaswamy against his Democrat opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, shows that there truly is no line that will not be crossed by some Republicans.
It features Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, saying the candidate has a “serious problem … she’s lied her entire life. Don’t vote for her.”
That’s the crux of it. No context, no further information. Like so much of the right-wing propaganda infecting our citizenry, the hope is that you’ll just take Arthur at her word and vote for Acton’s opponent, ignoring that you can readily find that crucial context with a basic search.
Because Arthur’s truth is that she sided with an abusive pedophile monster over her own children. It is she who has serious problems.
As do Ramaswamy and his team.
Acton and her brother, Phillip Stearns, have not spoken to their mother in nearly 50 years. After divorcing Acton’s biological father when Acton was a toddler, the mother married Cledith Arthur in 1975; based on the available timeline, it was not long after that that Cledith Arthur began sexually abusing young Amy; Stearns has said he was physically abused as well.
In 1978, when Acton was just 12 years old, she told her biological father, Jerry Stearns, about the sexual assaults she had been enduring for at least two years. Her father went to police. Cledith Arthur was indicted on a rape charge by a grand jury, and pleaded not guilty. Donna Arthur lost custody of Acton and her brother. Acton told a reporter in 2019 that at the courthouse, she leaned in to kiss her mother on the cheek and her mother turned her face away.
Rather than face trial, Cledith Arthur became a fugitive, skipping bail. Donna Arthur went with him, and she hasn’t seen her children since.
Acton has shared her story for years; she didn’t dredge up this trauma for political gain when she began her run for governor. Plus, there’s documented evidence of the allegations: the Youngstown, Ohio, newspaper had a short item on Aug. 11, 1978, announcing Cledith Arthur’s arrest and indictment, and court records confirm the major details.
And somehow Ramaswamy believes that trotting out Donna Arthur — who remained married to Cledith Arthur until his death in 2004 and as recently as 2021 was charged with animal neglect — to imply that Acton’s childhood rape is fiction will help him gain ground in what was already a contentious race, telling Axios on Monday night that he planned to spend $4 million in media buys for the appalling ad.
Let’s be clear: Ramaswamy isn’t just harming Acton. He’s telling victims and survivors of childhood sexual abuse in Ohio and beyond that they should not be believed, that they are not worthy of empathy.
“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Phillip Stearns said in a statement. “This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core — a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”
Major polls done since September, including one by Marist last week, show Acton up between 4 to 9 points.
In nearly any other timeline, in the Better Time we so desperately need to arrive, this attack would end Ramaswamy’s bid for governor and force him out of the public eye for the rest of his pitiful life.
But the unfortunate reality is that our political present handsomely rewards puerile public discourse. The individual occupying the White House is and has always been an entitled, narcissistic bully who has spread his venom at rallies around the country for a decade and from the Resolute Desk for one and a half presidential terms; as they say, the fish rots from the head.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Connie Luck, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy’s campaign, released a statement defending the ad by saying in part, “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth.”
A serial fabulist. As if there aren’t literal court records and an indictment affirming Acton’s allegations against her stepfather.
Since fabulists were brought up: Mr. “Haitians are eating the cats and dogs” himself, JD Vance, upped the disgust level on Wednesday before a campaign event in support of Ramaswamy when he said the appropriateness of the ad “is not really my concern.”
“I have to admit that I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the Congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Vance said.
And yesterday, the president joined the defense of Ramaswamy.
So let’s see if we understand: Members of the MAGA-verse prattle on about being pro-life and protecting girls from the — gasp! — non-existent scourge of transgender girls playing sports, but being concerned that a pompous twit (who might be even more charmless than Vance) is weaponizing a candidate’s repeated rape as a child against her is whining?
As we mercifully inch closer to Election Day and Republicans losing the majority in the House and Senate appears to be a real possibility, we’re seeing the gutter attacks ratchet up, especially against Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon, a Black woman, and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim, along with American Muslims broadly.
Those should be condemned, forcefully, by politicians and voters of all parties, and they haven’t been. But Ramaswamy’s entry for most contemptible political ad this century seemingly is as unifying as the growing hatred of data centers given the bipartisan criticism of it. (Except, of course, from Vance.)
One day, I hope, there will be a Better Time. The path to getting us there includes making sure Vivek Ramaswamy is forced to wear this ad like a scarlet letter for the rest of his days.
Shalise Manza Young is an award-winning writer focused on the intersections of race, gender, politics, and sports. She is the director of track and field at Phillips Andover Academy. She and her family, including Contrarian Pet of the Week Coco, live in Boston. You can find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
I am in total agreement with you, Shalise. These people have psychopathic tendencies in the MAGA cult. If they aren’t celebrating ICE cruelty then they’re doing something else that’s just as worse.