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Vice President JD Vance stood at a podium in Cincinnati on Wednesday and told his own party to stop complaining about a television ad that calls a survivor of childhood rape a liar.
“Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance told reporters. He said he was “a little bit disgusted” by Republicans “whining” about it.
Later that day, at a rally with Vivek Ramaswamy, he praised the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
Look closely at the ad Vance chose to defend.
It features Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of Dr. Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. Arthur looks into the camera and says her daughter “has a serious problem.” She calls Acton “a liar” who “lies about her past,” and she tells Ohioans her daughter “needs help.”
The spot surfaced Monday night.
Ramaswamy admitted on Tuesday that his campaign made it, and his team is now spending $4 million to put it on screens across the state.
Here is what the ad leaves out. Mahoning County court records obtained by WEWS show that Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing her when she was 12 years old. Acton has said the abuse went on for years.
Her mother lost custody of both children.
The stepfather posted bond, fled, and lived as a fugitive until his death in 2004 — and Donna Arthur, by her own account in a 2020 interview, stood by her husband in court and left town with him.
So the woman Ramaswamy cast as a truth-teller is the parent who sided with the man charged with raping her little girl. Acton has said she has not seen her mother since that day at the courthouse. On Tuesday, she told Spectrum News what the ad leaves out.
“I was removed from at the age of 12 for severe abuse and neglect and sexual abuse,” she said. “This is a lifelong pattern with my opponent. He is trying to lie.”
She is right about the pattern. In April, Ramaswamy described Acton as a “frequent flyer in children’s services” and said she was just “complaining about something done to me” in her childhood, as she recounted to WEWS. A man willing to mock a girl who passed through children’s services was always going to end up here.
Acton’s younger brother, Philip Stearns, lived through the same house. He called the ad “a despicable low” and put the plainest fact on the record. “Our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” he wrote. Then he recorded his own ad.
“I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” Stearns says. “She continued to receive that abuse because she knew she had to protect me.”
That is the story of Amy Acton. A child shielded her little brother from a predator, survived a winter in a tent outside Youngstown, became a physician, and led Ohio through the first terrifying months of a pandemic. She has told that story publicly since at least 2019, years before she ran for anything.
This ad has backfired, and the revolt is coming from the right. Sen. Jon Husted, who is on the Ohio ballot with Ramaswamy this fall, told the Associated Press,
“I would not have run that ad.” Lydia Mihalik, a member of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s cabinet, wrote that exploiting “someone’s childhood trauma is wrong.”
Nikki Haley called Ramaswamy “a bad guy.” Casey Putsch, who ran against him in the Republican primary, called the spot “pretty damn low” and said he would vote for Acton.
Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, one of the most respected conservative pro-life Catholic voices in the country, answered the vice president’s remarks on Wednesday. “You are talking about childhood sexual abuse being used against a candidate,” she wrote. “Stop while you’re behind, please.”
Vance did not stop.
I want to speak to that as a Catholic, because Vance asks us to judge him as one. This is a man who wrote a book about his conversion, credits Dominican friars with guiding him into the Church, and tells crowds that his faith shapes his politics.
No institution on earth has paid a heavier price for disbelieving children than the Catholic Church. For decades, bishops protected abusers and treated the children who came forward as liars and threats to the institution’s reputation.
The Church is still atoning for it.
Last month at Lourdes, Pope Leo XIV called the Church to repent for that sin, and he embraced survivors who had waited a lifetime to be believed.
The vice president of the United States, a Catholic, just looked at a survivor of child sexual abuse and blessed the ad calling her a liar. By his own account, he did it because winning Ohio matters more to him than whether the ad was appropriate.
That is an embarrassment to his faith, and it should embarrass every Catholic who has ever defended him as a man of conviction.
It also tells you something about the movement he now leads. MAGA wraps itself in crosses and Bible verses, but when the choice comes down to a wounded woman or 13 more days of political advantage, it chooses power every time. Call it what it is: a godless movement.
None of this is new for Vance. In February 2025, Pope Francis wrote to America’s bishops to correct his theology on immigration, and that same month the future Pope Leo XIV shared a column with a blunt headline: “JD Vance is wrong.”
Two popes rebuked him in a single year, and since then he has warned Leo to be careful when he talks about theology. Wednesday showed why both men spoke up.
Amy Acton deserves to be believed. In 13 days, Ohio voters will get the chance to tell the vice president that a child’s suffering was never his to use.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Amy Acton and her brother Phil, and with every survivor of abuse who has been told that the truth of their own childhood is a lie.
The Church learned, at a terrible cost, that believing survivors is the beginning of justice. We will not let politicians who claim our faith unlearn that lesson for a few points in a governor’s race.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that protects the vulnerable instead of exploiting them, and for a politics that tells the truth about the powerful.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against cruelty dressed up as courage — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I mean, it’s what they do, right? They protect pedophiles.
Ten years ago, Hillary Clinton famously used the term "basket of deplorables" to describe Trump's hardcore base: the racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. But ten years ago, she didn't know the half of it, and like the rest of us, she probably had never even heard of JD Vance. By now she knows, as we all do, that the word "deplorable" doesn't work to describe Ramaswamy and Vance and the rest of them: not so much deplorable as despicable.