‘Beneath the gutter’: Governor race gets ugly as long-estranged mom turns up in attack ad

Ohio’s gubernatorial race took a nasty turn as an ad surfaced featuring the long-estranged mother of Democrat Amy Acton accusing her of lying about her background.

The video, which began circulating on social media two weeks before the Nov. 3 election, features Donna Arthur urging Ohioans not to elect Acton, a physician tapped by GOP Gov. Mike DeWine to lead the Ohio Department of Health in 2019. Arthur says she decided to speak out after seeing her daughter lying about her opponent, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.

“It’s not easy for a mother to say this,” Arthur says in the ad, “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. People can change, but first they have to tell the truth, and my daughter still isn’t doing that.”

"Don't vote for people who lie," Arthur added. "Don't let her become your governor. If you think she'll make your life better, you're fooling yourself. It will only get worse."

Newsweek reported that it could not verify who produced or paid for the video. Ohio political writer D.J. Byrnes, who posts as The Rooster, has accused Ramaswamy of enlisting Arthur and said Ramaswamy did not respond to his email seeking comment.

A 2019 column by Youngstown Vindicator editor Todd Franko, written a few months before Acton led Ohio’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, details the upbringing she has referenced extensively in her own ads.

Acton’s parents met at a Youngstown State University theater party and divorced when she was 3. Her mother kept the children, and in Acton’s first 12 years, the family moved through about 18 homes on the city’s North Side, including a bare basement. At one point, after the family moved to California, her mother put Acton and her younger brother, then 8 and 5, on a bus alone from Nebraska back to Ohio.

Acton said she was abused by a man with past molestation accusations, whom her mother married when Acton was between 9 and 12. Criminal charges were filed while the family was living in a tent at a campground outside Youngstown, and her mother and stepfather later skipped town while out on bond. Acton said the last time she saw her mother was at the courthouse, where she went to kiss her and her mother turned her cheek away.

Acton then moved in with her father in nearby Liberty, where she became homecoming queen in the class of 1984. She said a hospital visit as a child sparked her interest in medicine.

The ad drew swift condemnation.

"I’ll be blunt: If I wanted to prove that Dr. Acton had been lying about spending some of her childhood living in a tent, I would not have summoned her mother, who, at this point in time, certainly looks like a woman who had her daughter living in a tent during her childhood," wrote Ohio political blogger D.J. Byrnes, who posts as The Rooster.

"This ad is beneath the gutter, even for the notorious sewer that is Ohio politics," Byrnes added. "But it shows Ramaswamy knows he’s losing, and that the millions of dollars he’s invested in his political career will be for naught if he implodes against a Democrat that Republicans thought would be little more than a speed bump en route to his coronation."