Ramaswamy's campaign is spending $4 million on an ad featuring Amy Acton's estranged mother calling her a liar, as Vance tells Republicans to stop complaining and win.
Republican Vivek Ramaswamy confirmed Tuesday that his campaign produced the spot now circulating in the Ohio governor’s race, after it spread on social media Monday night without the required payer disclosure.
CBS News reported that the ad features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, telling viewers her daughter is a liar who misleads people about her past. Acton’s campaign and her brother condemned the move. Ramaswamy defended it. Vice President JD Vance told fellow Republicans to stop fretting over the ad and focus on winning.
Acton, the Democrat in the race and former Ohio public health commissioner under GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, has led in recent polling. The contest is now in its final stretch.
In the ad, Donna Arthur does not hedge.
Attribution before the clip is clear in the reporting: the mother speaks on camera about her daughter.
"It’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy was a serious problem. She is a liar; she lies about her past."
Ramaswamy’s spokesperson, Connie Luck, framed the release as a character issue voters should weigh before handing anyone the governor’s office.
"We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but 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 told reporters the spot came from his campaign. He argued that the people closest to Acton have already delivered their verdict.
"Every person who appears to know her the best... have told voters not to vote for her but to vote for me instead."
The New York Post reported that Ramaswamy also tied the ad to Acton’s refusal to debate and to what he called her pattern of dodging substantive fights about Ohio’s future. He said he would rather run on issues that affect voters, and charged that Acton has been hiding from those issues.
Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, hit back hard. He said Ramaswamy had turned childhood sexual abuse into a campaign line.
"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."
Stearns added that their birth mother remained married to the man he called Amy’s rapist until that man died.
Court records described in the coverage show that in 1978, stepfather Cledith Arthur was charged with raping Acton when she was between 10 and 12 years old. He pleaded not guilty. After release on bond, he and Donna Arthur left Ohio without facing the charges, according to the account. Warrants for his arrest issued at least twice in the following years. The couple later lived in Pennsylvania. Cledith Arthur died in 2004.
Stearns said he and Acton were removed from the Arthurs’ custody after the arrest and went to live with their father. Acton’s campaign provided those court records and said the courthouse encounter remains the last time she saw her mother.
Acton herself described that final moment years earlier to the Youngstown Vindicator.
"In the courthouse after they were charged, I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away."
She added that it was the last time she ever saw her.
Acton has long talked about early poverty and homelessness. Records her campaign shared show the family lived in a tent for a year. The Ramaswamy side is using the mother’s on-camera attack to cast those accounts as part of a broader honesty problem.
By Wednesday, the fight had pulled in the vice president. JD Vance, who once represented Ohio in the Senate, declined to referee the ad’s taste.
"Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern."
Vance said he was “a little bit disgusted” by fellow Republicans who, in his words, were “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.”
He kept the point blunt.
"Politics is a tough business. And my message to my fellow elected Republicans is, if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days."
The state Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment on the ad.
Just the News reported that Ramaswamy’s team is committing $4 million to promote the ad even amid bipartisan pushback, and that Acton held a roughly 3.7% edge with about two weeks left until Election Day. The initial social media version lacked the mandatory disclosure of who paid for and authorized it. Ramaswamy later erased any doubt about ownership.
That sequence matters. An unsigned attack floated first. The candidate then claimed it. The budget followed. Voters now know exactly who wants the mother’s words in heavy rotation.
Acton has faced other personal scrutiny in the public record. Police were called to her home in 2019 during what was characterized as a domestic dispute. Separately, her own mother first spoke against her in 2020, according to the Ramaswamy spokesperson. None of that settles the governor’s race by itself. It does explain why a campaign would bet millions that credibility is still a live issue.
Ramaswamy is running as the candidate willing to use hard edges. Acton’s camp calls the ad a low blow that weaponizes a child’s abuse and a broken family. Both sides are now on the record. Ohio will decide which frame holds.
In a free election, voters get to hear from the people who knew a candidate longest, and then they get to judge the messenger and the message for themselves.
