The long, sad American story of Donna L. Hollopeter Arthur, the eightysomething mother of Dr. Amy Acton, the physician and Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, may never be fully told.
Arthur achieved notoriety earlier this week when she joined up with MAGA billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, her daughter’s opponent in the gubernatorial race. Starring in a $4 million attack ad, Arthur called her daughter a liar and expressed contempt for the child she abused, rejected, and abandoned 48 years ago.
Maybe the Ramaswamy campaign hoped that Donna Arthur, who spoke to the camera from a cozy kitchen, would seem like a salt-of-the-earth type. Perhaps viewers would believe she’d been left behind by a heartless, upwardly mobile daughter.
They did not, because the history is clear. On July 14, 1978, in Austintown, Ohio, Donna Arthur appeared in court alongside her 43-year-old husband, Cledith Arthur, who had been arrested and charged with raping Amy, his stepdaughter, then 12. After the arrest, Amy was removed from her mother’s custody. Her mother then fled the state with Cledith.
“In the courthouse after they were charged, I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away,” Acton told the The Vindicator in 2019. “That was the last time I ever saw her.”
On Wednesday, as blowback against Ramaswamy’s exploitative and cruel ad reached fever pitch, the Acton campaign made public an official chronicle of Arthur’s “long history of fraud, abuse, and legal jeopardy.”
Arthur has indeed been charged repeatedly over the years with financial fraud and animal abuse, as well as innumerable lesser charges, including driving while texting and violating laws meant to protect wildlife.
In 1995, Arthur pleaded guilty to passing bad checks and misleading someone into giving her money. In 1996, she was found guilty on fresh charges of the same crimes and sentenced to two years in prison. It’s not clear if she served any time.
More recently, in 2021, according to court documents, Arthur, who was then living in her car, was found “keeping several cats and/or newborn kittens in a locked and filthy vehicle.” The car was 120 degrees inside, and one of the days-old kittens had died of heat exhaustion. A second died shortly after, while being cared for in a sanctuary.
During her 2021 hearing for the animal abuse charges, Arthur accused a police officer of trying to ruin her reputation. “In light of other credible evidence and testimony to the contrary,” say court documents from the case, “the court found [Arthur] to be not credible.”
According to public records, Donna Arthur was born around 1944 to Hazel and Lambert Hollopeter in Pennsylvania.
In the 2019 Vindicator interview, Acton says her mother was an artist of about 20 when she met a young man, Gerald Stearns, at a theater party at Youngstown State University. After getting pregnant, Acton says, Donna felt forced into early marriage with Stearns in 1965, and gave birth to Amy shortly thereafter. When Amy was three, her parents, who also had a baby son named Philip by then, divorced. Things got dangerous for Amy and Philip. “I spent so much time being scared as a kid,” Acton said.
In the Ramaswamy ad, Arthur says she worked at something called the “Children and Family Service Association,” but her employment history has proven elusive. Acton says her mother had a range of boyfriends, and the family lived in some 18 places during Amy’s first 12 years. Many of these places were unsafe, including an unfurnished basement with a sump pump on Youngtown’s North Side and, in the winter, a tent on a campground outside the city.
At one point, Donna moved with the kids to California, then drove partway back East, only to put eight-year-old Amy and five-year-old Philip alone on a bus from Nebraska back to Ohio. In 1975, Donna married Cledith Arthur, who Acton says had already been accused of molesting children. Arthur sexually abused Acton for years until his arrest in 1978.
Acton has regularly said that her mother is unwell. Indeed, women who stay with partners who abuse their children are often suffering domestic abuse too. When Donna left her kids in Ohio to leave with Cledith Arthur, she may have felt coerced. Or maybe motherhood had simply become too much.
After their mother left, Amy and her brother went to live with their father. Both began to thrive. After earning an M.D. and a public health M.A., Amy married Eric Acton, a middle school teacher and track coach, in 2010. They have six children in a blended family. Acton rose to national prominence when she led Ohio’s early response to Covid-19. She won a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2021.
By contrast, Arthur, whose husband, Cledith, died in 2004, has spent the last several decades showing up in American courthouses, sometimes for financial misconduct, sometimes for traffic violations, sometimes for bankruptcy proceedings.
Donna Arthur bears a remarkable resemblance to another troubled daughter of Ohio: Beverly Carol Aikins, the mother of JD Vance. As Vance documented in his memoir, Aikins had her first child at 19, divorced when her son was three, developed an opiate addiction, lost custody of her kids, and married five times.
Under other circumstances, Vance, a former Ohio senator, could have decided that he might actually work together with Acton—who has a bipartisan record of working closely with GOP Governor Mike DeWine on the state’s pandemic response—to improve the lives of Ohio women like their mothers. About 18 percent of Ohio women live in poverty, and 35 percent of female-headed households with children live below the poverty line.
Instead, Vance is stumping hard for Ramaswamy, who famously called Medicaid and Medicare a “mistake,” and supports work requirements that would threaten food assistance for nearly 1.4 Ohioans. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance said, referring to the Ramaswamy campaign spot. “Stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race.”
As of this writing, prediction markets give Acton an 83 percent chance of being Ohio’s next governor.