Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, confirmed on Thursday that his campaign is no longer airing an attack ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

The ad prompted a wave of revulsion since Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her daughter in 1978, when her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her daughter between the ages of 10 and 12.

Asked by a reporter in Vandalia, Ohio if his campaign had stopped running the ad, Ramaswamy said: “It ran to completion and we put up four other ads.”

“But what I will say is that for all of the discussion around 30-second ads, I would love, even for this final close, for this campaign to really be about policy,” Ramaswamy added, before criticizing his opponent for not debating him.

Ramaswamy’s campaign had announced last week that it would spend $4m to broadcast the ad, despite criticism from Democrats and Republicans after court records showed that Acton’s mother, who called her daughter “a liar”, had fled the state with her husband when her daughter accused him of rape.

In an interview with the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in 2020, when Acton was leading Ohio’s response to the Covid pandemic, Acton’s mother said that she was aware that, before she married him, Cledith Arthur had previously been accused of raping his own daughter.

Ramaswamy’s reference to “30-second ads” referred to the length of the ad after his campaign edited the original 60-second version, to remove the allegation from Acton’s mother that her daughter had lied about the family having lived in a tent with Arthur when she was a child.

Court records from the time indicated that Cledith Arthur had, indeed, lived in a tent at the time of his arrest on rape charges.

Donald Trump repeatedly defended the ad, including at a rally with Ramaswamy on Wednesday, while refusing to acknowledge that the serious child rape allegation was relevant to the credibility of Acton’s mother.

Reporting from NBC News and Zeteo suggests that Acton’s mother has suffered from mental health challenges and was found living in her car with dozens of cats, which troubled some people involved in producing the ad for Ramaswamy’s campaign.

“How far will Vivek Ramaswamy go?” Acton’s campaign asked in a new ad on the controversy released earlier on Thursday. “To become governor, he’ll smear his opponent for being raped by her stepfather when she was just 10 years old – exploiting the sexual abuse of a child and spending millions lying to you about it,” the ad warns Ohio voters.

Acton also addressed Ramaswamy’s attack ad at an event on Thursday. “You’ve probably all heard by now, if you didn’t know, a little bit about my childhood,” she told supporters. “My brother and I experienced a lot of things, a lot of abuse and a lot of neglect. We were frequent flyers in children’s services, ended up living in a tent in the middle of winter.”

“My opponent has now chosen to exploit my childhood intentionally,” she continued. “He’s doing it in a desperate attempt to save his struggling campaign. But I’ll tell you, Mr Ramaswamy, it’s not going to work.”