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Earlier this week, a shocking campaign video was released by Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign. In it, a white-haired woman looks dejectedly at the camera. “Amy has a serious problem,” the woman says. “She is a liar—she lies about her past.”

“Amy” with the serious problem is Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, and the woman is Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother. Amy does seem to have a serious problem, but it’s not her lying. It’s her repugnant mother and the sadistic misogynists of the Republican Party who are willing to encourage an abusive woman to continue mistreating her now-adult daughter to win an election.

It is disturbing to see a mother not only fail to support her daughter but so actively work against her—and to undermine her character to boot. But the story quickly gets darker. Acton’s mother, it turns out, lost custody of Acton and her brother when Acton was only 12. The reason? The then-adolescent Acton said her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, sexually abused her—and lest you are tempted down any kind of “he said, she said,” this was after his own daughter had also said he molested her. In the face of criminal charges, he jumped bond and fled the state. Acton’s mother went with him. The last time Acton saw her mother in person was in a courtroom. Acton testified to Arthur’s abuse in front of a grand jury. Acton’s mother defended him and accused her own daughter of lying.

Much of the rest of the family has a different view of what happened then, and now: Her brother called the ad a “despicable low,” noting that “after [the stepfather] was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.”

In light of this context, the ad has backfired, to put it mildly. The optics of a mother who not only failed to defend her daughter from abuse, and not only sided with the abuser, but spent the next four decades calling her daughter a liar and trying to ruin her life—well, it’s hard to come up with a more nauseating maternal figure.

But the context here is even broader than a dysfunctional, sadistic parent and a Republican campaign team cruel and cynical enough to wield her against the child she betrayed. Because this is not the first time........

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