No wonder politicians like J.D. Vance are defending it.
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Earlier this week, a shocking campaign video was released by Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign. In it, a white-haired woman looks dejectedly at the camera. “Amy has a serious problem,” the woman says. “She is a liar—she lies about her past.”
“Amy” with the serious problem is Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, and the woman is Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother. Amy does seem to have a serious problem, but it’s not her lying. It’s her repugnant mother and the sadistic misogynists of the Republican Party who are willing to encourage an abusive woman to continue mistreating her now-adult daughter to win an election.
It is disturbing to see a mother not only fail to support her daughter but so actively work against her—and to undermine her character to boot. But the story quickly gets darker. Acton’s mother, it turns out, lost custody of Acton and her brother when Acton was only 12. The reason? The then-adolescent Acton said her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, sexually abused her—and lest you are tempted down any kind of “he said, she said,” this was after his own daughter had also said he molested her. In the face of criminal charges, he jumped bond and fled the state. Acton’s mother went with him. The last time Acton saw her mother in person was in a courtroom. Acton testified to Arthur’s abuse in front of a grand jury. Acton’s mother defended him and accused her own daughter of lying.
Video from Slate
Much of the rest of the family has a different view of what happened then, and now: Her brother called the ad a “despicable low,” noting that “after [the stepfather] was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”
In light of this context, the ad has backfired, to put it mildly. The optics of a mother who not only failed to defend her daughter from abuse, and not only sided with the abuser, but spent the next four decades calling her daughter a liar and trying to ruin her life—well, it’s hard to come up with a more nauseating maternal figure.
But the context here is even broader than a dysfunctional, sadistic parent and a Republican campaign team cruel and cynical enough to wield her against the child she betrayed. Because this is not the first time Donna Arthur has tried to stymie Acton’s political career by painting her as an unstable liar for the crime of being raped as a child and abandoned by her own mother.
Back in 2020, when Acton was the director of the Ohio Department of Health, she became the target of a smear campaign led partly by the anti-abortion movement and fueled by conservatives angry about Acton’s efforts to hinder the spread of COVID-19. Operation Rescue, a fanatical anti-abortion group tied to violent attacks on abortion clinics and providers, interviewed Acton’s mother and told the same story we’re hearing now: that Acton was a liar unfit for her position. And Operation Rescue’s version of the story is particularly telling. It is, firstly, written by Cheryl Sullenger, one of the organization’s longtime leaders and a woman who spent time in prison on a felony conviction for an attempted abortion clinic bombing; she was also in touch with the man who murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his church. (Her phone number was found written on a Post-it note in his car, and she admitted to apprising him of Tiller’s court schedule.) Years later, Sullenger remained in good standing at Operation Rescue (perhaps not surprising for a group often accused of fomenting domestic terrorism) and penned the “special investigative report” that used Acton’s mother as a cudgel against her daughter. Sullenger wrote: “When Amy was 12, she accused Donna’s husband, Bud of raping her. Apparently, Bud had a daughter from a previous marriage that had earlier made similar unfounded claims. It is possible that this and suggestions made by her father gave Amy the idea for making that particular accusation.” This is quite a leap: Two young girls accused the same male father figure of sexual abuse, and they’re both lying? Operation Rescue head Troy Newman (who was deported from Australia for being a “threat to good order” and potentially inciting the kind of anti-abortion violence routinely seen in the U.S.) said in 2020 that given her mother’s claims, Acton “may be a very troubled woman.” His organization called on her to resign—and after a harassment campaign that included people angry about COVID restrictions showing up to her home with guns, she eventually did, citing the threats and overwhelming political pressures that made it impossible to do her job.
Now Acton’s abusive mother’s claims are again being used to try to derail her. And again, the abusive mom has help from depraved misogynists who seem willing to do just about anything to get their way. Ramaswamy has already had a ghoulish reaction to comments Acton made before this ad about surviving child sexual abuse. He tried to turn it on her, saying that voters should back someone who has “a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.” In response to the backlash against the ad, the Ramaswamy campaign issued a statement saying, “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.” The campaign is dedicating $4 million to spread the ad far and wide. And Ramaswamy is not alone. Vice President J.D. Vance said he was “disgusted”—not by the disgusting ad, but by the Republicans who criticized it and who should instead “stop whining.” The ad, he said, “calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
The layers of misogyny here go deep. Acton’s physical sovereignty and her right to decide what happens to her body were taken away from her by a predator; then, her childhood victimization was wielded against her as an adult in an effort to keep all women and girls—including rape survivors—from their own rights to physical sovereignty and to decide what happens to their bodies; then, her honesty and resilience were used to paint her as crazy, a whiner, or both. It should not be lost on voters that the Republican Party seeks to ban abortion broadly, with no exceptions even for little girls who are sexually abused. In Ohio specifically, Republicans initially succeeded in criminalizing nearly all abortions; that ban fell only after Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment protecting the right to choose.
As I read Acton’s story, I thought of another Ohio child who endured similar abuse: the 9-year-old girl who was raped, impregnated, and denied a legal abortion because of the kinds of “pro-life” laws pushed by Operation Rescue, the Republican Party, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Not long after her 10th birthday, her family took her to Indiana for the procedure; the doctor who performed it then became a target of anti-abortion activists and lawmakers and nearly saw her career ruined.
There are many more girls out there like that unnamed 10-year-old, and like Acton. That a stepfather would sexually abuse his stepdaughter and then see his wife—the child’s mother—protect him over her is a series of events so vile it defies adequately damning-enough description. It’s harder still to imagine how multiple members of a political campaign looked at those facts and thought: This would make a good attack ad against a child rape victim.
It starts to make a little more sense, though, if you’ve been a close follower of the anti-abortion movement. Like abusive parents, abortion opponents treat girls not as people whose bodies have boundaries but as vessels for someone else’s impulses—for their desire to abuse and subjugate, for their view that a woman’s (or girl’s) body is not her own, and instead should always be used in the service of reproduction, even against her will.
Ramaswamy, the anti-abortion movement that pulled a similar stunt well before his candidacy, and many anti-abortion Republicans like him are apparently willing to use a woman’s past victimization against her, giving one of her abusers a national platform to continue an attempt to humiliate, subjugate, and violate her. And they’re willing to do the same to women and girls the nation over, as they push for laws that would tell girls like Acton the same thing abusers do: Your body does not belong to you; you cannot do what you want with it; what happens inside it is not yours to decide.
The truth is that scores of girls like Amy Acton are sexually abused by men they should have been able to trust. Some of them will become pregnant. Many of those girls will want to end their pregnancies. Whether they have the right to do so safely is in the hands of politicians they are too young to vote for. Few moments this election cycle have made the stakes as clear as this hideous ad: As Americans cast their ballots in November, it’s these girls whose futures we’re voting for.