A $4 million ad puts a survivor’s estranged mother on camera to call her a liar. The tactic has a name, and survivors have seen it before.
On the evening of Monday, October 19, a one-minute video began circulating online. In it, a woman named Donna Arthur looks into the camera and says of her own daughter: “She is a liar. She lies about her past.“
Donna Arthur’s daughter is Dr. Amy Acton, the physician who led Ohio’s Department of Health through the first months of the pandemic and is now the Democratic candidate for governor.
The next day, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy confirmed the ad was his, and his campaign told Axios it would spend $4 million airing it statewide. His campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, called it “a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton.”
Acton has spoken publicly for years about her childhood abuse. “This was a series of abuse and neglect that went on from the time I was three years old till 12,” she told WOSU this week.
The mother in the ad is the parent who, by Acton’s account and her brother’s, chose to stand by the man who abused her.
What the record shows
Court records released by Acton’s campaign show that in 1978, her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her when she was 12. He pleaded not guilty, posted bond and left Ohio.
According to the Ohio Capital Journal, he remained a fugitive until his death in 2004. Acton and her younger brother were removed from their mother’s custody, who moved to Pennsylvania to live with Cledith.
Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator in 2019 that the last time she saw her mother was at the courthouse. When she leaned in to kiss her mother goodbye, “she just turned her cheek away.”
Her brother, Philip Stearns, said in a statement this week: “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it.” Their mother, he said, “stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”
Records from Acton’s campaign show the family lived in a tent, and a 2019 Vindicator column described a winter spent at a campground outside Youngstown. But in candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad, Donna Arthur claims her daughter’s account of living in a tent is untrue. Asked about the ad, Ramaswamy spokesperson Connie Luck said, “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother,” and called Acton “a serial fabulist.”
A pattern with a name
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd named this sequence decades ago: DARVO, for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The accused side denies, goes after the credibility of the person who spoke up, and recasts itself as the injured party. The stepfather in this story is dead, so the role has passed to the parent who stood by him, and the ad casts the daughter as the problem. “Amy has a serious problem,” Arthur says in it.
In a 2023 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Freyd and Sarah Harsey had 230 college students read accounts of a sexual assault. Readers who saw the accused respond with DARVO rated the victim as less believable and more abusive, and rated the perpetrator as less abusive.
“They start to doubt the person who brought up the accusation, who is very often the true victim,” Freyd told the APA’s Monitor on Psychology last year.
The same research holds a practical finding. “When educated in advance about DARVO, bystanders are not as swayed by it,” Freyd said. Knowing the name of the move takes away much of its force.
What a parent’s belief is worth
Researchers who study child sexual abuse keep arriving at the same finding about the parent who did not commit the abuse, most often the mother. In the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, psychologists Lindsay Malloy and Thomas Lyon wrote that “nonoffending parental support is among the best predictors of children’s adjustment following abuse.”
Children whose parents believe and protect them tend to recover better. Children whose parents side with the abuser carry a second injury on top of the first.
Dr. Jamie Huysman, founder of STAR Network, has spent more than 20 years in trauma work and government affairs.
He called Acton’s childhood “the worst severe complex trauma a kid could go through, plus a mother who never believed.”
Acton has been clear about which parent did what. “My birth mother did nothing to protect me,” she wrote on Facebook this week.
“Using a survivor’s own mother to campaign against them is a new low… we can’t allow this to become the norm,” he added.
Why survivors get told they’re complaining
In April, Ramaswamy said in a video posted to X that Acton offered Ohio no vision “other than complain about what someone else did to her.” Acton answered that one this week too. “I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is something I’m just complaining about,” she told Spectrum News.
Most survivors of child sexual abuse wait a long time to say anything at all. CHILD USA, a think tank that studies the issue, reports that more than 70 percent of victims do not disclose within five years, and roughly one in five never tell anyone. Fear of not being believed is one of the most common reasons. An adult survivor who speaks publicly, and keeps speaking for years, is doing what most survivors find hardest. Calling that “complaining” tells survivors what kind of reception to expect from the system.
Some of the sharpest criticism has come from Republicans. “Exploiting someone’s childhood trauma is wrong,” said Lydia Mihalik, a member of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s cabinet. Conservative commentator Jason Rantz said on CNN, “It is so unbelievably disgusting to put this kind of ad out.”
If this week is landing hard
Political ads repeat. This one is paid for to run across Ohio for the rest of the campaign, and clips of it will travel well beyond the state. If a parent disbelieved you, or you watched a family close ranks around the person who hurt you, seeing that scene replayed as a campaign message can stir up a great deal.
You can mute it or skip the comment sections. Choosing when you engage with something like this is allowed, and it is a skill. Your story does not need your family’s signature to be true.
If you are a STAR reading this, you don’t have to carry it alone. TAR Anon meetings are free, anonymous, and open worldwide.
