YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — When the 1983 homecoming queen made her way back to Liberty High School here on Tuesday night, the gym was packed to capacity. Members of the Golden Leopard Marching Band welcomed her with a version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the people who didn’t look the other way when they saw my brother and I struggling,” Amy Acton told the crowd. “People here who helped lift me, and I see you.”
By now, most Ohioans — as well as much of the rest of the country — know what the former state health director and Democratic candidate for governor was talking about.
In what has been the most shocking political ad of this election season, the campaign of her GOP opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, is airing a video in which Acton’s estranged mother calls her a liar and urges people not to vote for her.
With it, voters have learned the grim backstory: how Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her son and daughter in 1978, after Arthur’s husband was indicted on a charge of raping Amy, then 12.
Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty and became a fugitive before he could be tried; his wife skipped town with him, and the couple remained married until his death in 2004.
What was dredged up in the ad, Acton said in an interview with The Washington Post, is a dark chapter of her life that she has yet to fully process.
“I’m still learning. I’m 60 years old. I’m learning, and I’m sure at some point I’ll be learning from everything I’m experiencing now,” Acton said.
But Acton also expressed a conviction that her childhood horror shaped who she has become since then. It gave her the drive to build a life and career, first to become a physician and now potentially Ohio’s first woman governor and first Democrat to win the office in two decades. With less than a week before the election, most polls indicate the race is statistically tied.
“My childhood makes me see things people don’t see, and I notice details. I pick up on stuff, and I have an internal compass and radar that were very helpful and have always been helpful in a crisis,” she said. “I’m very good at solving problems and anticipating things, and I think that’s a strength that came out of a hard thing.”
Acton credited those instincts for the way she helped guide Ohio through the coronavirus pandemic. She became a folk hero as she stood alongside Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and put in place some of the earliest and strictest measures to rein in the virus.
Her calm manner inspired Acton bobblehead dolls; little girls donned white lab coats to dress up like her and conduct their own make-believe briefings; a 2020 New York Times opinion piece’s headline declared her “The Leader We Wish We All Had.”
Then came the backlash over shutdowns of schools, businesses and community events that critics said lasted too long. Armed protesters in military outfits showed up at her house, and she was called a “medical dictator.” Acton resigned from the job after 16 months, in large part because she believed she would be forced to sign reopening orders that she considered unsafe, she said.
But that, too, she contended, has been preparation for what was to come. Ramaswamy and his supporters have spread AI-generated videos portraying Acton as a mentally unbalanced drunk and have questioned whether she has a valid medical license, which she does.
She has refused to debate him, which Ramaswamy has cited as his justification for running the ad.
Acton, meanwhile, has blasted Ramaswamy for his wealth and his use of a private jet to travel the state. She has accused him of making his fortune by peddling a drug for Alzheimer’s that he knew did not work, a claim PolitiFact rated “mostly false.”
But nothing that has happened thus far in the race has been as personal — or ignited the same firestorm as — Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Acton’s mother.
President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and others in their circle have defended the ad. “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt,’” the president wrote in a social media post.
When Acton announced her bid for governor nearly two years ago, she understood what she was getting into: “I did have some sense — inklings — hoping, obviously, for the best.”
She also knew of the potential for the kind of ad that Ramaswamy spent $4 million putting on the air, according to his campaign. Her mother had made similar comments during the coronavirus pandemic in a 2020 interview with the antiabortion organization Operation Rescue.
Word of what Acton had dreaded came late on the evening of Oct. 19. She and her team had been waiting for a new round of polling results when David Pepper, her running mate and the nominee for lieutenant governor, texted her that he had seen the video circulating on social media.
Since the ad began airing, Acton said, many have come up to her to express sympathy and also to share their own stories of abuse. In the aftermath, she is discovering new things about the mother she hasn’t seen in nearly half a century. Various reports have indicated Donna Arthur has been living in her car with multiple cats.
“Someday my brother and I will unpack some of the things that we’re yet learning. It’s very clear that that our mother — who I have not seen since I was 12; my brother was 9 — is not well, and I do hope she gets the things she needs,” Acton told reporters at a campaign stop here. “I think this was exploitive to do that to someone in her condition.”
Over and over, Acton cites her roots in this hardscrabble Mahoning Valley city, which has struggled with economic and population decline since the collapse of its steel industry in the late 1970s. She labels herself a “scrappy kid from Youngstown” and told the crowd at Liberty High, “Youngstown has been my story this entire campaign.”
In her stump speeches and ads, Acton recalls her family being reduced to living in a tent for a while when she was young, but also the kindness of a “couple on the north side of Youngstown who used to pull my brother and I up on their front porch, walking by on the way to Harding Elementary, and feed us breakfast because they knew we were hungry.”
After Acton was taken from her mother and went to live with her father and his second wife, few of her classmates would have guessed her past circumstances. She was homecoming queen, a cheerleader, student body president and baritone player in the band. She won a Community Chest scholarship and worked multiple jobs while attending Youngstown State University and a fast-track program at Northeast Ohio Medical University.
Not for years would Acton begin to contend with the lingering emotional scar tissue. “I didn’t have therapy when I was young. My dad wasn’t a big believer in therapy. But as I got older, once I got in med school, I started to just grow as a human,” she said. Acton got help for herself, she said, and also studied pediatrics, adult psychiatry and pediatric psychiatry during her residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
During that residency, she witnessed the crack epidemic in the Bronx and switched her focus to public health and preventive medicine. Acton moved back to her home state, taught public health at Ohio State University and was working as a grants maker for a foundation when she came to the attention of DeWine. She joined his Cabinet in 2019 as health director to deal with, among other things, the opioid epidemic.
Acton and DeWine remain close. Though he had endorsed Ramaswamy, he has been among Republicans calling for him to take down what DeWine called a “deeply, deeply troubling” ad.
“In regard to telling the truth: My experience with her, working closely with her every single day, was that she certainly told the truth,” DeWine told reporters. “That’s my experience.”
What Ramaswamy’s ad had revealed, she suggested to the crowd at Liberty High, is that the 2026 election is about more than affordability or the Iran war, or any of the other issues that polls say are driving it.
“Kindness is a fierce commitment to justice and seeing the humanity and the God in one another,” Acton said as she concluded her speech to the crowd at Liberty High. “That and human decency are absolutely on the ballot.”
The post Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Amy Acton’s survivor story: ‘I was lucky’ appeared first on Washington Post.
