Vivek Ramaswamy is a cheater, a scam artist, and a liar, and it is getting harder for him to hide it. Every time his campaign reaches for something new, it turns out to be another lie or another old scheme catching up with him. Ohio voters have started to notice. That is the only real explanation for what his campaign has done these past several months — because a candidate this far ahead in cash does not usually behave like a man with nothing left to lose.
Start with the ad. Ramaswamy’s campaign put Cincinnati Republican activist Linda Caudill on television, looking into the camera, blaming Dr. Amy Acton for her own mother’s death. “A few weeks after that is when Amy Acton shut down the state,” Caudill says in the spot. “My mother didn’t understand it. It traumatized her. She didn’t know why her family couldn’t come visit her. Two months later, she died. Amy Acton is to blame for this.”
It is a gutting thing to say about anyone. It is also, according to public records TiffinOhio.net and the Columbus Dispatch both confirmed, false. Caudill’s mother lived and died in Kentucky — not Ohio. She died six weeks after Acton had already resigned as health director, and roughly two months after Gov. Mike DeWine lifted the stay-at-home order Ramaswamy’s ad blames on Acton in the first place. DeWine himself, the man who actually signed those orders, has said repeatedly that the pandemic decisions were his alone. Read the full breakdown here: Fact check: Ramaswamy ad blames Acton for death of woman who lived and died in Kentucky, not Ohio.
Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein didn’t mince words about it. “It’s a lie; it’s a complete fabrication,” he said. “I think it speaks volumes to the type of person that Vivek Ramaswamy is and the type of governor he will be, that he’s going to lie, cheat, and steal his way to the governor’s office.”
I don’t say this lightly: he’s right. Dorothy Farrell’s obituary is a public record. Her Kentucky address, her Kentucky funeral, her Kentucky grave — all of it was one search away from anyone building this ad. Ramaswamy’s campaign ran it anyway. More on who Caudill actually is — a decade-long GOP operative, not a random grieving Ohioan — is here: Who is Linda Caudill? The Republican insider Ramaswamy chose to blame Amy Acton for her mother’s death.
Then there is what he said about Amy Acton herself. In April, Ramaswamy posted a video to X claiming Acton has no real vision for Ohio “other than to complain about what someone else did to her.” Acton has spoken publicly, as a doctor and as a mother, about surviving sexual abuse as a child. Ramaswamy turned that into a punchline about a political opponent who won’t stop whining.
Acton campaign manager Phil Stein called it what it was: “We were shocked and disgusted to see Ramaswamy’s allies shame Amy for being sexually abused as a child.” Months later, when Ramaswamy’s own super PAC, V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, ran a second round of the same material, Stein said Ramaswamy was “once again spreading lies about Dr. Acton and shaming her for being a survivor of childhood sexual assault, all to distract from” his own record. Full story: Ramaswamy keeps accused allies, super PAC attacks abuse survivor.
A woman disclosed that she was sexually abused as a child and got help. Ramaswamy mocked her for it. That is what “other than to complain about what someone else did to her” means, coming from a man running against a survivor of childhood sexual abuse for governor of Ohio. There is no version of Ohio politics where that is an acceptable line to cross.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Before Ramaswamy was running attack ads about dead women and mocking abuse survivors, he was running Axovant Sciences, the biotech company he built around an Alzheimer’s drug GlaxoSmithKline had already given up on. He rode that company to a $1.4 billion IPO, sold roughly $40 million of his own stock while he was still publicly hyping the drug’s prospects, and walked away with what Democratic-aligned researchers estimate was $260 million by the time it was over. The drug failed. The stock cratered more than 70% in a single day and never recovered; the company was eventually wound down. Ordinary investors who bought into the hype were left holding shares worth next to nothing. Ramaswamy was not one of them — he’d structured his own stake through the parent company, Roivant, to insulate himself from exactly that outcome.
Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld reviewed the whole arc and told Fortune the fortune was built on “basically a version of pump and dump.” A 2023 Newsweek opinion column went further and called it fraud outright. To be exact: no regulator has ever charged Ramaswamy with a crime over Axovant, and he has never been convicted of one. But you don’t need a courtroom to recognize a scam artist when you’ve watched him work twice: once on Wall Street, and now on Ohio. Background here: Ramaswamy’s biotech failures and pandemic profiteering record.
Put it together and you don’t get three unrelated controversies. You get a pattern. A man who made hundreds of millions telling investors a failed drug still had promise is now telling Ohio voters a woman who left office in July 2020 is responsible for a death that happened in Kentucky two months after the order he blames her for was already lifted. A man who built a fortune on other people’s losses is now mocking a childhood abuse survivor for talking about what happened to her. I have covered a lot of shameless candidates. I have never covered one this shameless.
And it is getting worse, not better, as November gets closer. The Cook Political Report moved Ohio’s governor’s race from Lean Republican to Toss Up on July 10. The dead-woman ad and the second round of abuse-survivor material both ran after that shift, not before it. That timing reeks of desperation. This is a campaign that has decided the only path left runs through a grieving daughter’s grief and a survivor’s trauma.
More and more Ohioans appear to be seeing through it. Keep watching — and keep asking Ramaswamy’s campaign, on the record, why it runs ads that aren’t true.
