Ramaswamy pushed Acton attack ad despite warnings from his own campaign, reporters say

Vivek Ramaswamy pushed for the attack advertisement featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother over the objections of his own campaign advisers, according to two political commentators who reported speaking with Republican campaign sources.

Axios White House correspondent Marc Caputo reported Friday that Ramaswamy personally wanted the advertisement despite opposition within his campaign. Staff members tried to use voter testing to demonstrate that the attack would be unpopular, Caputo said, but the video leaked from that testing process and provoked widespread condemnation.

“From what we understand at Axios, Ramaswamy was the one who wanted the ad and his campaign didn’t,” Caputo said during an October 23 appearance on MS NOW.

Caputo’s account followed similar reporting two days earlier from conservative political commentator Ryan Girdusky, who said he contacted Ohio political consultants after the advertisement surfaced and learned that Ramaswamy had pursued it despite warnings from others.

“Vivek was the one who wanted the ad. Apparently, a lot of people said, don’t do this,” Girdusky said during an October 21 appearance on WABC’s The Greg Kelly Show.

The reports place responsibility for the controversial advertisement on Ramaswamy himself, rather than campaign professionals acting without his direction. His campaign subsequently announced a $4 million statewide advertising effort, embracing an attack that prominent Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, urged him to withdraw.

Campaign tested attack using questions about Acton’s childhood sexual abuse

The reported internal objections are accompanied by documented details of the advertisement’s pre-release testing that directly contradict Ramaswamy’s effort to portray the commercial as unrelated to Acton’s childhood sexual abuse.

On October 21, National Journal reported obtaining a survey distributed through market-research company Dynata that tested the advertisement before it became public.

Before showing respondents the commercial, the survey asked whether they believed Acton had been sexually abused as a child and whether she had lived in a tent. Participants then watched the minute-long advertisement twice before answering questions about whether it was persuasive, influenced their vote or was excessively sensational.

The testing explicitly examined Acton’s childhood sexual abuse before presenting voters with a commercial that omitted the criminal case against her stepfather, the circumstances that separated Acton from her mother and the decades of estrangement that followed.

Yet two days later, Ramaswamy insisted the advertisement had nothing to do with that abuse.

“Our ad had nothing, nothing to do with childhood abuse, sexual abuse,” Ramaswamy told News 5 Cleveland during a Friday campaign appearance in Strongsville.

The survey had expressly asked voters about the very abuse Ramaswamy was publicly insisting had nothing to do with his advertisement.

That history was hardly obscure. Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested in July 1978 and indicted that September on a charge of raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter. He pleaded not guilty but failed to appear for court proceedings and remained a fugitive for years. Acton and her younger brother were removed from their mother’s custody, while Donna Arthur remained married to Cledith Arthur until his death in 2004.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, Donna Arthur acknowledged in a 2020 interview that she supported her husband during the proceedings and left Ohio with him. Acton has said she has not seen her mother since 1978.

The advertisement nevertheless presented Arthur as an authority on her daughter’s childhood, without disclosing why she had lost custody of her children or why Acton had been estranged from her for nearly five decades.

Despite reported objections, Ramaswamy committed millions to the attack

Ramaswamy’s campaign publicly claimed the advertisement performed well during testing among voters considered persuadable, an explanation it provided to both Axios and Ohio’s Statehouse News Bureau after confirming Tuesday that it had produced the commercial.

The campaign has not released the underlying polling results to substantiate that claim.

Caputo’s reporting describes campaign staff attempting to demonstrate that the attack would be unpopular. The hostile public reaction to the leaked advertisement does not establish the numerical results of the campaign’s voter testing.

Despite the reported objections, Ramaswamy embraced the advertisement, and his campaign announced a $4 million statewide effort to promote it.

Campaign manager Jonathan Ewing defended the decision, telling Axios that the advertisement could end Acton’s candidacy. Ramaswamy himself continued defending the commercial even as Republicans publicly condemned it, including DeWine, who called for its immediate withdrawal.

President Donald Trump took the opposite position. During a Thursday rally in Iowa, Trump said he had spoken with Ramaswamy about the controversy and advised him to continue running the advertisement. Vice President JD Vance also defended the attack and criticized Republicans objecting to it.

Campaign removes disputed claims after new court records emerge

On Saturday, October 24, Ramaswamy’s campaign began running a revised, 30-second version of the advertisement that removed two of its most disputed allegations.

The shorter commercial eliminates Donna Arthur’s assertion that Acton lied about living in a tent as a child. It also removes Arthur’s suggestion that her daughter needed personal help, according to The Washington Post.

The revisions followed the public release of additional court records corroborating details of Acton’s childhood account.

On Thursday, the Mahoning County Clerk of Courts released redacted records from the 1978 criminal proceedings against Cledith Arthur. The records, examined by The Washington Post, listed his address as Terrace Lake Park on Ohio Route 7. A subsequent sheriff’s note documented that he had camped there.

That is the same area where Acton recalled living in a tent as a child, an experience she described publicly in a 2019 Youngstown Vindicator interview, years before entering the governor’s race.

After spending days defending the original advertisement, Ramaswamy’s campaign cut both the disputed tent allegation and Arthur’s suggestion that Acton needed help. The campaign has not publicly explained its reasons for making those changes.

The edits came as Ramaswamy continued insisting that the advertisement concerned Acton’s honesty rather than her childhood sexual abuse, even though the pre-release testing survey explicitly addressed that history.

Ramaswamy’s own advisers reportedly warned against the attack. Its pre-release testing examined Acton’s childhood sexual abuse. The candidate nevertheless backed the advertisement, committed millions to promoting it and defended its claims before his campaign removed two of the most disputed allegations.