The man who wants to run Ohio’s child protective services just showed us how he treats abused kids

There are things a decent person does not do, no matter what office is on the line. Vivek Ramaswamy did one of them last week, and he did it on purpose, and when he got caught he said he would do it again, louder, and pay for the privilege.

Amy Acton was twelve years old when the State of Ohio removed her from her mother’s home. Her stepfather was indicted for raping her. Her mother stood by him. After Amy testified, she walked out into the courthouse hallway and went to her mother for a hug and a kiss. Her mother turned away. That was 1978. They have not spoken since.

She has spent the decades since building the kind of life that the rest of us would call a miracle: physician, state health director, the steady voice who talked Ohio through the worst public-health crisis of our lifetimes.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign found that woman — the mother who shunned a twelve-year-old and chose a child rapist over her — put her in front of a camera, and had her call Amy Acton a liar.

The ad surfaced last Monday night with no disclosure and no fingerprints. Only after it was traced back to his operation did Ramaswamy admit it was his. He called it “legitimate.” His spokesperson sneered that the public needed to hear about Acton’s “problems with the truth.” When Governor DeWine — a Republican, the man Ramaswamy hopes to succeed — told him to take it down immediately, Ramaswamy’s answer was to announce a $4 million buy to push it across every screen in Ohio. A week later, it is still running.

Here is the problem with that. The one thing in the ad that can actually be checked turns out to be false.

The Ramaswamy camp’s fallback, once the backlash hit, was to say the ad was never about abuse — it was about Acton “lying about her history.” Specifically, about whether she really lived in a tent as a child. In the ad, Donna Arthur looks into the camera and says her daughter’s tent story is simply not true.

The Mahoning County Clerk of Courts says otherwise. The July 1978 complaint against Cledith Arthur — sworn by Amy’s biological father — lists his address as Terrace Lake Park, Route 7, Rogers, Ohio. The October 1978 arrest warrant in Case No. 78-CR-557 lists the same address. The Youngstown Vindicator printed it in its grand jury roundup that fall. Terrace Lake Park is a campground. When a deputy went looking for Arthur years later, the park manager told him Arthur had not camped there in over two years. The Ohio Capital Journal’s Statehouse reporter has posted the records themselves. NBC4 in Columbus and ABC 6 independently pulled the same file from the clerk’s office and published it. The Associated Press reviewed it too. Anyone with a library card can read it.

Now listen to what Amy Acton said in the very first ad of her campaign, back in July: that she thought it was somewhere off Route 7, that she was twelve, and that they were living in a tent.

Route 7. Age twelve. A tent. The sheriff’s office wrote it down in 1978. The court stamped it. The newspaper printed it. Dr. Acton has been telling the truth about this for years, and her mother — who was there, who lived in that tent too, and who followed the man charged with raping her daughter out of the state rather than stay with her children — calls her a liar on television.

So let us be precise about who is lying. It is not Amy Acton. It is the woman in the ad. And it is the candidate who wrote the check, who had every one of these public records available to him before he committed $4 million to the claim, and who put it on the air anyway. Vivek Ramaswamy is not exposing a lie. He is financing one. That is vile, and there is no other word for it.

Strip away the spin and what remains is this: a grown man, who wants to run this state, took the single most painful fact of a woman’s life — that her own mother turned her back on her and sided with the man who raped her — and weaponized it against her. Not a policy record. Not a vote. Her childhood sexual abuse. He looked at a survivor and saw a way to politically capitalize on her.

These news organizations have covered domestic violence and sexual assault in our counties for years. We have sat in courtrooms with victims whose families turned on them for speaking. We know exactly what it does to a survivor when the person who should have protected them instead calls them a liar in public. Ramaswamy did not stumble into that dynamic. He paid a production crew to film it.

Any Ohioan who has ever reported abuse, or stood beside someone who did, now knows precisely what Vivek Ramaswamy thinks of them. He is telling every survivor in this state: speak up, and I will find the people who hurt you and put them on television.

None of this should surprise anyone who has watched him for more than a news cycle. This is a man with a pattern. On a presidential debate stage in November 2023, with the whole country watching, Vivek Ramaswamy went after Nikki Haley’s daughter — a young woman who was not running for anything, who had not said a word about him, whose only offense was having an app on her phone. Haley told him to leave her daughter out of his mouth and called him scum. The audience booed him. He did not apologize then, and three years later he has not learned a thing.

He reaches for the family. Every time. When he cannot beat a woman on the merits, he goes looking for her daughter, or her mother, or whoever is standing nearest to the wound. Nikki Haley’s daughter was a grown woman and he still could not restrain himself. Amy Acton was twelve — and he went after that child too, through the one person on earth who should have protected her. There is no line he will not cross because, as far as anyone can tell, he does not believe there are lines.

That matters, because consider what the job actually is. The Governor of Ohio appoints the Director of the Department of Job and Family Services. That director sits atop the state’s child protective system — every county children’s services agency, every caseworker who knocks on a door at 2 a.m., every foster placement, every twelve-year-old pulled out of a home because the adults in it failed her. ODJFS exists, in large part, for children exactly like the one Amy Acton was in 1978.

Vivek Ramaswamy is asking Ohio to hand him the governorship so he can make that appointment. The man who, given a documented child rape case and a survivor who testified against her abuser at twelve, chose to put the abuser’s wife on television to call the victim a liar — that man wants to pick who runs child protection in this state. He wants to set the tone for the people who decide whether a child’s account is believed. He has already shown us what his tone is. A child comes forward, and the governor’s office checks whether her family can be used against her.

No caseworker in Ohio would survive a week doing what Ramaswamy did. A children’s services supervisor who sided with the non-protective parent over a credible disclosure, in the face of court records, would be fired and probably reported. Ramaswamy did it with a production crew and a $4 million media budget and called it legitimate. He is not fit to oversee the people who protect Ohio’s children, and he disqualified himself on purpose, for ratings.

There is a certain irony in the calendar. October is National Bullying Prevention Month. Schools across the Scioto Valley and Clermont County have spent the month teaching children what a bully looks like: someone who finds your softest spot and presses on it, who recruits others to join in, who doubles down when a grown-up tells him to stop. Our kids could have saved the Ramaswamy campaign the production budget. They would have recognized the type on sight. Somewhere in Ohio a fifth-grader is wearing an orange ribbon this month and showing more character than the Republican nominee for governor.

And somewhere in Ohio a grown woman — who was that fifth-grader once, who carried something no child should carry and never told a soul — watched that ad last week and decided, again, to stay silent. Because now she knows what happens to women who come forward. They get called liars on television. That is the real cost of what Vivek Ramaswamy did. He will never see the bill — and if Ohio has any sense left, he will never see the inside of the Governor’s office either.

Frankly, we did not expect much better. This is a candidate who thought Ohio was a stepping stone — a man who could not be bothered to drive from Columbus to Zanesville without a private jet, who has never hidden that the Governor’s Residence was a waiting room for the White House. The elephant was supposed to carry him all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue. We suspect that after last week, the women of Delaware, Warren, Clermont and Butler counties — the suburban voters who decide Ohio elections — will have other plans for it. A great many of them have daughters. A great many of them are survivors themselves. They saw the ad. They will remember it on November 3.

He wanted an October surprise. He got one. Surprise, Vivek: you’re going to lose.

And Amy Acton? She said she had hoped he wouldn’t sink this low, “but of course he did.” Then she went back to work. That is the whole contrast in one sentence. One candidate spent last week deciding how much money to put behind a survivor’s abuser. The other spent it the way she has spent her entire career — showing up, telling the truth, and refusing to be broken by people who should have known better.

Dr. Acton has the steadiness, the record, and the plain decency this office demands. She earned Ohio’s trust once, in the hardest moment this state has faced in a generation. With six days until the polls close, she has our endorsement without reservation.

To our Republican readers who simply cannot mark a ballot for a Democrat: we understand. We would only ask that you not mark it for this. Take the morning on Election Day. Drive out to Paint Creek, Tar Hollow, Lake Hope, or Scioto Trail — or, closer to Cincinnati, East Fork or Stonelick. Walk the ridgelines. Southern Ohio is beautiful in early November, and it will be there long after Vivek Ramaswamy has moved on to his next ambition. Your conscience will thank you.

Scioto Valley Guardian and Clermont Guardian stand with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. We stand against anyone who would use their pain as a campaign prop. We stand against Vivek Ramaswamy, and we stand with Amy Acton for Governor.

Editorials represent the institutional opinion of Scioto Valley Guardian and Clermont Guardian, NewsPatrol, Inc. news organizations.