President Donald Trump on Friday lost his temper with yet another journalist as he said he did not care about Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s history of being raped by her late stepfather and continued to voice support for a widely condemned ad targeting Acton — by using a clip of her estranged mother calling her a “liar.”
Speaking as he departed the White House for a rally in Florida and a weekend at his Palm Beach home, Trump upbraided a female reporter for NBC News who pressed him about his continued support for GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to run the television spot, which shows Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, accusing her daughter of being “a liar” and warning the people of Ohio not to vote for her.
“You're a horrible little reporter, aren't you,” Trump said after the journalist informed him of her employer’s identity.
Acton, 60, has said she was raped by her stepfather when she was 12 years old and has not spoken to Arthur since 1978 after the latter refused to believe her and instead sided with her husband, whom she stayed with, even after he was charged, until his death in 2004.
But Trump angrily refused to engage with journalists who attempted to ask him about the backstory behind Acton’s lack of a relationship with Arthur, at one point telling the reporter, “you don’t know anything” when he was informed that Acton’s stepfather had been indicted for raping her.
“You don't know that. You don't know anything ... Her mother went on television and said that the daughter who's running for governor of Ohio is a liar and a bad person, and that's all I know,” he said.
He also said other Republican politicians who have denounced Ramaswamy’s use of the ad “don’t know the facts” and repeated his description of the television spot as a mother attacking her own daughter without acknowledging the full circumstances behind the situation.
When he was pressed further about Acton’s stepfather’s indictment for rape, he replied: “I don't know anything about stepfathers from many many years ago.”
“I know that recently a mother got on television and said that her daughter should not be governor of Ohio,” he said, repeating a standard line he has been using the past few days to ignore the underlying backstory tied to Acton.
Acton hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since that day in court in 1978. A statement from Acton’s campaign called the “platforming” of her “estranged and abusive mother” a “despicable low” on the part of Ramaswamy.
On the campaign trail and as the director of the Ohio Department of Health, she has often discussed what he has described as a troubled childhood, including surviving homelessness and sexual abuse from her stepfather.
In 2019, she told the Ohio newspaper The Vindicator that she was sexually abused between the ages of 9 and 12, when, in 1978, her stepfather was charged with rape and indicted by a grand jury. He pleaded not guilty.
Arthur, Acton’s mother, has denied that her husband sexually abused Acton but acknowledged in a separate 2020 interview that she supported her husband during the proceedings, borrowed money to hire an attorney — and then left town with him after his indictment.
Alex Woodward contributed reporting from New York
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