Photograph by Shon Curtis
It was Sunday afternoon, September 28, 2025, when District One Congressional candidate Rosemary Oglesby-Henry stood outside her Westwood home with a locksmith. Her longtime friend Kevin Farmer, a fellow Black Republican she’d been helping with his own city council campaign, was inside. She had loaned her truck to Farmer, but he said he lost the keys. They argued. Concerned she’d be late to church, Oglesby-Henry decided to change the locks and get going.
Just three weeks earlier, 46-year-old Oglesby-Henry had announced she’d be running in the May 2026 Republican primary for the seat held by Democrat Greg Landsman. On her campaign website, Oglesby-Henry writes, “I am living proof that while the journey may be hard, everything can be OK because real change happens when courage meets compassion, and compassion is followed by execution.” Black, Christian, and conservative, she had already garnered significant support. Momentum was building. Donors were interested. She began scheduling public appearances and interviews. The truck, the argument with Farmer, it all seemed like little more than a distraction.
But as the locksmith worked on the truck, the 39-year-old Farmer grew agitated, pacing, shaking his foot, raising his tone. Oglesby-Henry recognized the signs of mental distress. She found herself standing on the threshold of her own front door, with Farmer still inside her home, cell phone in hand. The last thing she remembers him saying is: I am about to make your life living hell. Then he called the police, claiming Oglesby-Henry had threatened him with a gun.
Never mind that there was no gun anywhere on the premises or in Oglesby-Henry’s possession—a fact later established by police, who searched her home for over an hour and found no weapons. Never mind that, even if there had been a gun, Oglesby-Henry had a concealed carry permit. Never mind that she owned the property and had every right to defend herself against a mentally unstable man in her own home.
“It didn’t matter what evidence I showed them,” Oglesby-Henry says today of the police. Based on nothing more than Farmer’s word, she would end up handcuffed and jailed for three days. Media would broadcast her mugshot throughout the region. And Farmer would be left squatting undisturbed in her house for days.
Oglesby-Henry would spend a month and a half fighting to clear her name until finally, with little fanfare, Cincinnati prosecutors would drop the charges against her in early November and send Farmer to jail for breaking into her home a second time. By then, Oglesby-Henry’s campaign staff and donors had jumped ship, and even some of her friends distanced themselves from her.
And yet she remained undeterred. She has continued to run, mounting a formidable grassroots comeback campaign, speaking at GOP and other events throughout Greater Cincinnati. “What was meant to break me will not succeed,” she said in a statement shortly after her release. “This only strengthens my resolve to fight for justice, for safety, and for every woman and family who has ever been targeted unfairly.” What happened that September day is still a source of confusion. Oglesby-Henry is left to deal with the fallout personally and politically. How could this happen? There are no clear answers.
Photograph by Shon Curtis
As voters head to the polls to vote in Ohio’s May primaries, they’ll see a slew of names on the Republican slate, all vying for the right to run for Greg Landsman’s District One congressional seat: an Air Force veteran and CIA operative who went to Elder but seems not to have lived in Cincinnati since high school; a Catholic Madeira-based dentist raised in Warren County; a Christian Hamilton native and former Turning Point USA staffer; and Rosemary Oglesby-Henry, a nonprofit founder and certified minister who has lived in Cincinnati her whole life and is known to many simply as “Ms. Rosemary.”
I have known Oglesby-Henry for years, having written about the nonprofit she founded, Rosemary’s Babies, for this publication and others, and hosted her on my podcast twice. She is unique among public figures in her ability to walk the razor’s edge of a deep political divide, given her nonprofit neatly skirts the pro-life/pro-choice issue by simply helping single parents ages 13–19 navigate life and high school. The program teaches life skills and goal-setting, providing one-on-one mentoring and peer support sessions that explore relationship, parenting, and communication skills. She has helped more than 3,000 young mothers stop the generational cycles that threaten to keep them impoverished, unemployed, and undereducated. But most who know her had no idea she was a Republican until now. As former Rosemary’s Babies advisory board member Mark Osborne puts it, “being a CEO of a nonprofit, she can’t take a public political stance.”
As her nonprofit grew, Oglesby-Henry earned a master’s degree in organizational leadership and received awards from the Business Courier, the Ohio Senate, the NAACP, and the Holocaust & Humanity Center. She eventually grew her nonprofit so much that she needed a new space to house all the teens she serves each day. She set her sights on a large abandoned home in North Avondale, raised enough money to renovate it, and spent years fighting the North Avondale Community Council, finally emerging triumphant when Holloway House opened in March 2025. Along the way, she learned there is no legislation in Ohio regulating residential parent facilities.
The journey was not without its trials—she is currently involved in a legal dispute with a contractor—but she says it made her realize that no matter how hard she advocated for teen parents, there were legal barriers preventing them from accessing services they needed. Since they are often still minors when they have their first child, they cannot sign leases or otherwise move forward without some form of guidance or assistance. “While we uphold accountability and good stewardship,” she says on her campaign website, communities who want lift up their most vulnerable, including teen parents, “must also partner with nonprofits, faith-based organizations, and local businesses to fill gaps, provide wraparound support, and offer jobs and wages that are competitive, not merely equitable.” This, she says, will allow Ohio families of all sorts to not just “survive” but “thrive.”
Instead of lobbying someone else to help overcome those barriers, Oglesby- Henry decided she was best positioned to speak for her constituents by running for political office—not for a seat on a neighborhood or city council, but for the U.S. Congress.
“People need to know Rose is for getting things done,” says her father, Daryl Figgs. “She wants to see people more together than anything else. She wants the teenaged girls to have an education. She’s into that so deeply.”
A campaign kickoff party at The Barn in Mariemont drew attention. Big money backers began considering funding her run. On my podcast, recorded just days before her arrest, she spoke about what it was like to be a conservative Black woman running in this politically raw era, discussing the insults and threats that had already been hurled her way just weeks into her campaign. But she also noted defiantly that those attacks only made her more determined to run for office, to serve and to be a voice for many of what she calls “the forgotten people of Ohio.”
Then, just as she began ramping up her campaign, a friend with a history of mental health issues made a decision that temporarily stopped her dead in her tracks.
When my second podcast interview with Oglesby-Henry ran, just days after her arrest, I found Farmer’s LinkedIn page, which describes him as an “influencer,” an “antagonist,” a “Jerk” and a “PR and Marketing Expert.” The page also states that he was president of an organization called Made You Look Promotions LLC, with skillsets including “influencing public opinion on product, campaigns, and opinions.”
In a later phone interview, where he struck an entirely apologetic tone, Farmer claimed that he has worked for multiple campaigns of politicians from both parties. He also claims he had been hired in the past “by opposition to stir up conflict and throw bricks.”
Farmer’s behavior wasn’t the only disturbing thing that happened that day. The two female officers who initially responded to Farmer’s call seemed inclined to file a complaint and move on, says Oglesby- Henry. After all, she’d shown them her mortgage documents and her daughter showed them Farmer’s driver’s license, his lease, and his registration for city council, all of which show him living at an Avondale address. That all changed when the responding officers called in a second group of officers and a sergeant who were “mostly men,” says Oglesby-Henry.
She recalls that second group of officers disregarding blatant signs Farmer was in a state of mental decline. “Kevin’s eyes were bloodshot, he had a dry mouth, his foot was shaking, he was pacing and had raised tones,” she says. “You can see that in the videos.”
Longtime employee and friend Michael Rice, who was there, says, “The sergeant showed up and—he didn’t even assess the situation—he looked around, and he said, ‘Somebody’s going to jail.’ ”
The situation looked salvageable after the police had swept Oglesby-Henry’s home for an hour or more and found no weapon. Then the sergeant asked her if she would leave. Although her children—both adults—protested, noting it was her home, she says she wanted the whole thing to be over and agreed. She asked if the police would go back inside the house and get her purse, understanding that her mere presence could be a trigger for Farmer. She says the officers told her they would protect her if she went inside and got it herself. When she did, Farmer began complaining that she hadn’t yet been arrested (he corroborates this account). Then, without warning, she says, the police “slammed” her against a table and arrested her for aggravated menacing. Friends, family, and neighbors watched in disbelief as she was brought outside the home in handcuffs. (The Cincinnati Police Department has not replied to multiple requests for comment.)
For three days, Oglesby-Henry languished in a Cincinnati jail cell with a young woman accused of murder and another on a $500,000 bond for fighting. Meanwhile, Farmer lived undisturbed in her home. When Oglesby-Henry finally emerged from jail, everyone in her inner circle expected her to give up the congressional run. Potential donors had already jumped ship. Much of the team working on her campaign left as well, as did several personal friends, says former board member Osborne. “But we didn’t know the story from Rosemary,” he says. “All we saw was what was in the media.” And the media, Oglesby-Henry told Osborne, “has painted me to be a monster.”
To nearly everyone’s surprise, after taking 48 hours to pray and ingest all that had happened, Oglesby-Henry chose not to back out. Urged forward by her parents (“I told her nobody can stop you—you’ll always win if the Lord is the foundation of whatever you do,” says Figgs), her children, and hundreds of teen parents who re minded her that “you fight for us and you wouldn’t want us to quit,” says Rosemary, she chose instead to forge forward.
“I decided to stand on truth,” she says. “The only thing you can truly do is walk into it, use that story and experience to be as transparent as possible. It shows I’m human, an everyday person. But my job and purpose [are still] service to others.”
She announced her decision via a press release with the subject line I WILL NOT BE SILENCED.
Shortly after Oglesby-Henry’s release, Pastor Damon Lynch, whose son, Damon Lynch IV, eventually announced his own candidacy for the same Congressional seat (he is running as a Democrat), somehow convinced Farmer to check himself into The Christ Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Days later, on October 14, public records show Farmer was held under a temporary order of detention for the purposes of “forced medication.” (Oglesby-Henry says documents she read described him as being in a bipolar manic state.)
She filed a protective order against Farmer, but the Cincinnati legal system did not budge. “They refused to drop the charges even after this man was hospitalized for being a danger to himself and to the public,” she says.
On Halloween, shortly after he was released, Farmer broke into Oglesby-Henry’s garage. When Oglesby-Henry, who was not home, received the alert from her monitoring system, she called the police; this time, they arrested Farmer for burglary and put him in jail.
On November 9, 45 days after her arrest, the charges against Oglesby-Henry were quietly dropped due to lack of evidence. In a press release, Oglesby-Henry said the whole incident left her “humbled and questioning why a system designed to protect victims has failed to protect me.”
Farmer and Oglesby-Henry have known each other for a long time. In a November 3, 2025, statement, Oglesby-Henry says: “At the time of this incident, our relationship was of a professional nature and friendship.”
In an interview for this piece, she says, “I have been helping [Kevin] behind the scenes for years,” noting especially his difficult upbringing in the “broken” foster care system. “He wasn’t raised,” she says. “He grew up and then was ejected [at 18] into the world with no guidance.” She takes issue with people who question why she would befriend someone who is mentally unstable, noting: “I work in a field of service, and that service is not just for sane people or those that are not troubled.”
But what she and others close to her find most disturbing is how easily people overlooked the rights violations in her case. “How do you keep somebody in jail?” asks Figgs. “Ain’t no guns, ain’t no nothing. She was in her house—he don’t live there. You can’t lock a person up, especially a political person, just because. They just hung her out to dry.”
Though no one in the Republican Party has publicly commented about her arrest or campaign, Oglesby-Henry says she has been asked by other Republicans to run for County Commissioner or State Representative instead of Congress on her first try. She says Democrats expressed dismay initially at her party affiliation and suggested she “start lower” as well.
Farmer, meantime, is out of jail and apologetic. “I shouldn’t have called the police,” he says. “I literally weaponized law enforcement to hurt a friend. I broke God’s commandment; I bore false witness against my neighbor.” But he also claims the altercation between him and Oglesby-Henry was used to snuff out both of their political aspirations.
“There’s a lot of people who got upset [by] what we were doing as Republicans,” he says. “There are forces inside these parties that have an influence on things when it comes down to trying to get somebody out of their way.”
Rice, her colleague at Rosemary’s Babies, says, “I still don’t fully understand how this actually happened.”
Ohio Press Network Editor-in-Chief Jack Windsor, who interviewed Oglesby-Henry about this incident and has spent years covering Ohio’s political scene, sees both Farmer and Oglesby-Henry as pawns in a political game. “I believe Rosemary was hung out to dry by powers in Cincinnati because she’s a Black Republican and conservative. [They know] most people only read headlines and don’t go into the weeds, so if they catch you in a situation that’s compromising, that’s all they need. It’s easy to point to the story and say: ‘Is this who you want representing you in Congress?’”
If the incident was “used by people who are left leaning,” Windsor says, that’s not the only group at fault. “I think people on the right failed to understand the egregiousness of her situation and stand up for her as a party that is supposed to stand on principles and stand for honesty and integrity.” At the end of the day, he adds, Farmer and Oglesby-Henry “are both probably hurting, damaged, and examples of how hard it is to get involved in Ohio politics.”
It’s not difficult to see Windsor’s points. Oglesby-Henry’s platform could easily appeal to constituents of both parties. “She wants an equal playing field, especially when you deserve it,” says Rice. “She preaches you shouldn’t stay on government assistance forever. She doesn’t teach our young girls and men to sit in subsidized housing; she says stay in it for a year and while you’re there, save money. If they sit her in a room and do a debate [with the other candidates], she will eat everyone up.”
Even Farmer says he is voting for Oglesby-Henry in the primary—when asked, he says, “Of course.”
In an interview for this piece, she elaborated on her policy, noting that if the Big Beautiful Bill works as intended, her constituents-to-be can use government programming to transition their skills and become independent. “All people are asking is that you don’t move the line,” she says. “And when they’re ready to come off the system there’s housing, jobs, tools, and resources for them to stay afloat so they don’t make one dollar too much and end up on that benefits cliff.” She also asks Democrats to consider crossing party lines on election day. “Judge the person standing in front of you,” she says, “not the party as a whole.”
Oglesby-Henry is a formidable force, says Osborne. “She has already served this group of neglected teen parents who don’t have a support system from the government or nonprofits. She outgrew her first space. She moved into her other place on Reading Road and then she outgrew that space and now has opened Holloway House. What could she do in office if she has already done this much? The truth will come out.”
When asked whether people are giving her the benefit of the doubt now that the charges against her have been dismissed, Oglesby-Henry says, simply, “The apology is never as grand as the assault. If I could throw Google out the window, I would.” Just as the memory of the September incident with Farmer had begun to fade, it made headlines again in February when the court dismissed the case against Farmer. (Oglesby-Henry couldn’t show up to court due to a scheduling conflict with arbitration over the construction of Holloway House.)
Undeterred by things she cannot control, she has continued her campaign, speaking recently at the Warren County Republican Club, where she discussed solutions to District One’s problems given her own lived experience, including making the American dream attainable for a broader audience (abandoning property taxes while pursuing “educational excellence”), and her reliance on prayer and God for keeping priorities straight.
She also discussed how, as a former teen mom, she made sure her son became the first young man in her family to graduate from high school by homeschooling him. She explained how she teaches other teen parents that, “when the Democratic Party gives you what you want, you will stay exactly where you are; you have to resiliently move forward and say no at times, even when it hurts.”
Afterwards, one precinct chair was so moved by her speech, she spontaneously stood up and urged the Warren County Republicans to endorse Oglesby-Henry in the primary. (They chose to endorse Steven Erbeck, a Warren County native, instead.)
“I came from the mud and I’ve been in every room,” Oglesby-Henry says, “and I am still the same Ms. Rosemary who believes policies and people and government can provide resources and tools so everybody can rise up to meet their full potential.”
On May 5, Republican Congressional District One voters will decide whether or not they agree.
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