Vivek Ramaswamy’s New Attack Ad Should Be a National Scandal

There are vile and amoral political actors who will stop at nothing to promote their venal interests—and then there’s Ohio GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. The biotech billionaire mounted a vanity 2024 presidential run to brand himself as a Gen Z mini-Trump and went on to codirect the nihilist DOGE assault on governance until Elon Musk’s more capacious ego muscled him aside. After both these self-branding efforts flatlined, Ramaswamy decided to emulate the career path of Vice President JD Vance, leveraging his sketchy venture-capitalist fortune into a run for statewide office in his native Ohio.

Ramaswamy has been in a tight and ugly contest with former state health commissioner Amy Acton that, against all odds, became exponentially more repulsive this week with the release of a digital ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother. At the age of 12, Acton and her younger brother had been removed from their mother’s home in 1978 after her stepfather, Cletis Arthur, was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter. Their biological father, Gerald Stearns, was granted custody of Acton and her brother; her mother, Donna, and her accused rapist then skipped out on bond. Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator that her last contact with her mom came in the courtroom where the custody case was held: “I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away. That was the last time I ever saw her.”

Gleefully mining the trauma of an abused 12-year-old, Ramaswamy’s campaign cut an ad in which Donna Arthur proclaims, after 48 years of estrangement founded on her allegiance to her daughter’s abuser, that

I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.

When the ad surfaced as part of an online poll, it met with a proper wave of outrage and disbelief. A MAGA movement that’s long dismissed and excused sexual assault, up to and including President Donald Trump’s special pleading for the defendants in the Cornell gang-rape case, was now attacking the credibility of a 12-year-old rape victim. It’s a textbook illustration of the abusers’ defense tactic known as DARVO—deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.

Only this sleazy instance of the practice was doubling as a political attack ad. Acton’s campaign responded with a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, pointing out the obvious: “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. After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” Acton’s campaign then released an ad in which her brother explained, “I experienced a lot of abuse, but Amy got the worst of it…. Shame on Vivek. It’s the contempt he has for Amy. It’s the contempt he has for Ohio. He’s not fit to lead.” Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley and conservative pundit Meghan McCain echoed the same sentiment, and a host of other political figures have denounced the gutter attack.

But Ramaswamy, being Ramaswamy, is unfazed—indeed, after his campaign initially wouldn’t avow responsibility for the spot, it announced that it was spending $4 million to broadcast it during the homestretch of the race. (Ramaswamy’s campaign has so far spent more than $100 million, more than tripling outlays from Acton’s team.) His press flack, Connie Luck, continued playing up the smear, with a disingenuous disclaimer professing that “we don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020,” and then parroting the mother’s attack: “We know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”

Ramaswamy has duplicated the same sleazy rhetorical two-step, telling USA Today that Acton’s mother “has spoken out for years,” adding that “Amy Acton has been repeatedly and serially dishonest during this campaign and for much of her record in public service.” (The charge of unhinged mendacity coming from Ramaswamy is, shall we say, a rich one, given that his campaign had unleashed an earlier attack ad featuring the testimony of an Ohio resident blaming Acton’s handling of the Covid crisis for her mother’s death—only for it later to emerge that the woman had actually lived, and died, in Kentucky.)

The fallout from the ad seems likely to backfire on Ramaswamy, who clearly possesses even worse political instincts than his Buckeye State mentor, the gilded hillbilly-whisperer Vance. (Indeed, in an Ohio campaign stop, the vice president reprised the anemic bad-faith defenses Ramaswamy and his flack offered for the spot, complaining in his trademark online-bro register of rudderless grievance that “the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and call Amy Acton a liar.”) Acton had already opened a seven-point lead in the race, according to the latest Marist poll, and it’s hard to see how Ramaswamy’s desperate smear job will bring independents, suburban women, and anyone still maintaining a shred of common human decency into the GOP camp. Any honest assessment of Ramaswamy’s prospects in the race’s final week and half should begin and end with the 2012 saga of Todd Aiken, the Missouri GOP Senate candidate brought down by his demented comments on how “legitimate rape” rarely produces pregnancies—and therefore its victims should be denied access to abortion.

But to judge by the media coverage thus far, there’s a good chance that the Ramaswamy rape ad will escape Midwest containment, and come to symbolize the depravity and corruption of today’s Republican Party in the minds of many voters. There is a striking precedent for such a development—the impact of Florida GOP Representative Mark Foley’s resignation from Congress just prior to the 2006 midterms. Foley, the longtime director of the House page program, had long been rumored to have abused that post for sexually predatory ends. After a series of damning messages proving out those charges in unmistakable intimate detail surfaced, Foley resigned from Congress on September 29.

The scandal crystallized many impressions of rampant GOP corruption then percolating through the mediasphere, from the crass cynicism and greed dramatized in the downfall of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff to the epic mismanagement of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. The Democrats had indeed sought to make Republican corruption a central issue in that midterm cycle—but until the Foley scandal broke, their pitch came across as too procedural and removed from the daily lives of most Americans to land effectively; it hinged mostly on Abramoff’s convoluted deals to represent Native American casino interests, and pay-to-play accords in the gilded precincts of the Beltway. But here was the Republican congressional leadership plainly covering up the actions of a sexual predator targeting idealistic young men under his direction. (The reasons for then–Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s dilatory handling of the Foley affair would later become painfully clear when he was also exposed as a serial sexual predator, who had exploited the high-school students in his charge when he was a high-school teacher and wrestling coach.)

It’s striking how many parallels this midterm cycle shares with 2006, from a Republican Party at a loss to distance itself from its president’s unpopular war in the Middle East, his mishandling of the economy, and his breathtaking record of corruption. But Ramaswamy’s blunder, like the earlier Foley debacle for the GOP, may well reinforce the party’s justly earned reputation as an enabler of sexual predation and an enthusiastic defender of the manifold abuses of women normalized by the online manosphere. Especially after the uprising over the horrific gang-rape at Cornell, which has led to the predictable doxing and defamation efforts from the online right, the bid to discredit a rape victim who was 12 years old when her predator was arrested looks pathological in the minds of fair-minded observers. It’s now up to Democratic leaders to make sure no one in the country is allowed to forget Vivek Ramaswamy’s moral depravity—or his ambition to be the Trump figure for the next generation of right-wing misogynists—between now and November 3.