Olivia Rodrigo made her backing for Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton unmistakable by presenting the politician with flowers during her latest concerts.
Acton shared a video on her Instagram of Rodrigo rushing up to the politician to present her with pink flowers while her adoring fans recorded the meeting. The day prior she also appeared onstage in a t-shirt that read ‘Amy Acton for Governor.’
The pop star staged the gesture while performing at Columbus’ Schottenstein Center on Thursday and Friday, giving Acton’s campaign a high-profile boost.
Acton, 60, is locked in a tight contest with Vivek Ramaswamy, the 41-year-old Republican who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2024.
Set to the studio recording of Rodrigo’s Stupid Song, footage shows the 23-year-old singer in a sleeveless pink tutu hurrying along a guarded walkway toward Acton, who was waiting beside a barrier.
Rodrigo, who recently criticized President Donald Trump for featuring her music in what she called a “grotesque” ICE video, beamed as she handed Acton a matching bouquet of pink flowers. The pair then leaned in for a hug.
Olivia Rodrigo publicly demonstrated her support for Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton by presenting her with flowers during a recent concert.
Acton posted Instagram footage showing Rodrigo rushing over with pink flowers as enthusiastic fans filmed the encounter. The singer made the gesture during her Thursday and Friday performances at Columbus’ Schottenstein Center to support Acton’s campaign.
The previous day, Rodrigo also appeared onstage wearing a T-shirt that read “Amy Acton for Governor.”
The video then shifted to the arena’s enormous jumbotron, where fans could see Rodrigo and Acton embracing.
As Rodrigo ran back toward the stage, Acton faced the camera with a gentle smile and lifted the bouquet for the crowd to see.
“So grateful to @oliviarodrigo for her support! Thank you for using your voice to inspire a new generation. It’s time to build a brighter future in Ohio,” Acton wrote in the caption.
The appearance followed Rodrigo’s public condemnation of the Trump administration for using one of her songs in an official video.
After the Department of Homeland Security used her song All-American B**ch in a video praising immigration enforcement raids, Rodrigo responded in the comments: “don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.”
She later told NPR: “It was just so awful to see a song that I wrote about being trapped in a misogynistic box that we put women in … being put to these grotesque, cruel scenes of ICE raids.”
Rodrigo has repeatedly spoken out in support of Democratic candidates and progressive policies.
In August, before performing at the all-women Daisy Chain Fields festival, the singer also criticized Trump over his signing of legislation defending Planned Parenthood.
Acton’s Ohio governor race has grown increasingly contentious, particularly after Ramaswamy’s campaign released a controversial advertisement featuring Acton’s mother accusing her daughter of being a lifelong liar.
Instead of damaging Acton, however, the attack sparked a backlash and pulled Ramaswamy’s struggling campaign deeper into controversy. The fallout revived scrutiny of Acton’s long-standing estrangement from her 82-year-old mother, Donna Arthur.
In footage set to the studio version of Rodrigo’s Stupid Song, the singer can be seen in a sleeveless pink tutu racing down a guarded walkway to meet Acton at the barrier.
Rodrigo smiled broadly as she handed Acton a bouquet of matching pink flowers before the two shared a hug, a moment later displayed on the venue’s jumbotron.
‘So grateful to @oliviarodrigo for her support! Thank you for using your voice to inspire a new generation. It’s time to build a brighter future in Ohio,’ Acton captioned the post
Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her in 1978, when she was just 12, but her mother denied her allegations and accused her of being a liar at the time.
Four years earlier, Arthur had been charged with incest over allegations involving his daughter Christine, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Christine died in 2024 at 66.
After Arthur first appeared in court, Acton’s mother abandoned her and fled Ohio for Pennsylvania with Arthur after he was indicted.
Arthur was apparently never located by police after that, and he died in 2004.
He had pleaded not guilty but fled Ohio and never stood trial, according to court records.
Ramaswamy’s embattled ad took another blow when the Daily Mail revealed last week that Acton’s long-lost stepsister has come forward to state that she believes Acton’s account of her turbulent childhood, saying the candidate’s claims about sexual abuse by her stepfather and the family living in a tent are true.c
The 62-year-old Youngstown, Ohio, family member, who asked that her name be withheld, is the biological daughter of Cledith ‘Bud’ Arthur, who married Acton’s mother, Donna, in 1975.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail from the porch of her modest home in this old steel town and sometimes breaking down in sobs, the woman said that, prior to marrying Donna, Cledith Arthur raped her late sister, Christine, when she was about the same age as Amy.
‘Yes, he raped her, and it was more than once,’ the woman said.
The controversial ad debuted around October 20, in the final days of the tightly-contested November 3 election as Ramaswamy seeks to defeat Acton, a physician and former Ohio health director.
The minute-long video features Donna Arthur, now 82, telling Ohio voters that her daughter cannot be trusted. (Arthur previously gave a lengthy interview to the pro-life organization Operation Rescue in 2020, in which she said that Acton’s claim that she moved 18 times in the first 12 years of her life was not true and that Amy lied. She also indicated that Amy’s allegation that Cledith raped her, as well as Christine Arthur’s similar claim, were ‘unfounded.’)
In 2021 she met with President Joe Biden while visiting the White House
Acton has been in a brutal race for Ohio governor against Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, 41. His campaign has floundered in the wake of a controversial ad in which he enlisted Acton’s enstranged mother to call her a liar; Acton seen on September 17 in Marietta, Ohio
The ad backfired after details of Acton’s estrangement from her mother surfaced. Acton accused her stepfather of incest in 1978 when she was 12, and her mother fled Ohio with her father to evade trial, abandoning her daughter – whom she called a liar – in the process
‘It’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem,’ Arthur says in the video.
‘She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life.’
Arthur urges voters not to elect her daughter, whom she has not seen since 1978.
While he was not mentioned in the ad, Ramaswamy acknowledged that his campaign produced it and committed $4 million to promoting it, despite criticism from members of his own party.
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President Donald Trump, meanwhile, defended the Republican candidate’s decision to continue running the commercial.
Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, also condemned the advertisement, saying their mother, Arthur, had remained married to the man accused of abusing Acton even after the children were removed from the household.
‘I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,’ Stearns said in a response video released by Acton’s campaign.
Acton has repeatedly recounted her turbulent childhood in Youngstown, describing periods when her family lived in a tent and moved between unstable homes.
Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy joins other Republicans at a rally at the annual Circleville Pumpkin Show last Friday in Circleville, Ohio
She has said the last time she saw her mother was in a Youngstown courthouse when she was 12.
‘I went to give her a kiss on the cheek and she turned away,’ Acton recalled in a recent interview.
The Ramaswamy campaign cut the ad to 30 seconds on Monday, removing Donna Arthur’s specific claim that Acton lied about her past, including the tent story.
Arthur has spent years living a marginal existence far removed from the campaign trail.
The Daily Mail traced her to the Boalsburg area of central Pennsylvania, where she has lived in her silver Honda Civic, often with several cats.
For approximately two and a half years, beginning in late 2023, Arthur parked her vehicle in the upper parking lot of Calvary Church, a sprawling religious property set among 120 acres of rolling hills near Tussey Mountain.
Pastor Dan Nold said Arthur arrived with approximately four cats and slept in the front seat of her car, even during freezing Pennsylvania winters.
‘We really tried to help her,’ Nold told the Daily Mail, speaking alongside two church staff members inside the church.
‘We offered to let her stay inside during cold nights but she said no. We did every bit of outreach we could. We tried to locate family members. But she wasn’t interested in help.’
Nold said he had a number of conversations with Arthur and said she was ‘lucid’ but he felt she had a ‘hoarding issue’ with cats.
The situation grew increasingly difficult, Nold said, as Arthur’s un-neutered felines reproduced until there were approximately 30 animals living inside her vehicle or roaming the church grounds.
Eventually, the church asked her to go but she refused.
‘She wasn’t cooperative when we asked her to leave,’ Nold said.
‘We finally had to go down to the police and fill out forms to have them evict her. They had to come in a squad car and escort her out. It was very difficult to get her out and we felt badly about doing so but the situation with all the cats was just getting out of control.’
Arthur’s difficulties involving animals stretched back several years.
In 2021, while she was living in her car and working at Ollie’s Bargain Outlet in Boalsburg, authorities intervened after cats and newborn kittens were left inside her locked vehicle in extreme heat, according to court records.
Retired Humane Society police officer Harold Walstrom, who handled the case, told the Daily Mail that temperatures inside the vehicle approached 120 degrees when he went to Arthur’s car to rescue the cats.
‘It was a pretty bad situation,’ he recalled. ‘I’ll never forget it.’
Two kittens died, one before rescuers arrived and another afterward from heat exhaustion, Walstrom said.
Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dr Amy Acton at a campaign rally with former President Barack Obama in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 24
‘Donna was very stubborn and very hard to deal with,’ Walstrom added.
‘She was also totally against getting her cats spayed. She wouldn’t listen to anyone.’
Arthur was convicted of animal neglect and sentenced to a fine and non-reporting probation, but the Pennsylvania Superior Court vacated the conviction in August 2023 after finding that her request for court-appointed counsel had been improperly denied.
The court sent the case back for further proceedings. The appellate ruling did not resolve the underlying allegations.
In a text exchange with the Daily Mail, Arthur lashed out at the church and animal rescue organizations.
She described Nold as a ‘thoroughly corrupted lead pastor’ and accused rescue workers of stealing her cats and falsely accusing her of crimes.
But Arthur, who is reportedly now living in her car in a state forest near Boalsburg, offered no response when the Daily Mail sent her screenshots of two separate newspaper articles documenting allegations of sexual abuse against her late husband – one involving his biological daughter Christine, the other Acton.
On Saturday, Acton appeared at a Cleveland campaign rally with former President Barack Obama. Asked afterward about Trump and Vice President JD Vance defending the advertisement, she urged them to examine the evidence.
‘I do hope they would look at the facts,’ Acton told ABC News.
The Daily Mail has reached out to both Ramaswamy and his campaign spokeswoman Connie Luck.
Back in Youngstown, Christine Arthur’s sister views the controversy through a different lens.
She recalled how Christine went on to graduate from Girard High School, worked with children with special needs in Las Vegas and later earned a bachelor’s degree. She died in Youngstown in December 2024, leaving behind a daughter and a family that remembers her warmth and humor.
For those who knew what happened decades ago, the political ad has reopened wounds that never entirely healed.
‘It was awful for our family,’ Christine’s sister said. ‘We wish we could just forget about it and now all this has come up and re-opened old wounds.’