By admin 
Earlier this week, after news broke that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner had sexted up to a dozen women behind his wife’s back in recent years, I wrote that the most worrying part of the story for Democrats was that there was no reason to believe it would be the last. The scandal-plagued political newcomer, on whose candidacy Dems have hung their hopes of defeating longtime incumbent Susan Collins and retaking the Senate, has a history of rash judgment and callous behavior that keeps growing in spite of his repeated claims that he has nothing else to hide.
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It only took a few days for the next story to drop. On Thursday afternoon, the New York Times published a piece with accounts from several of Platner’s former girlfriends. While some described the former Marine as a kind and supportive partner, others detailed disturbing conduct.
The article leaves room for debate about whether Platner actually perpetrated the worst offenses, which he denies, and whether those offenses should be disqualifying for a Senate candidate. But at this point in the campaign, with five months still to go before the general election, Platner’s character has been called into question by enough news reports to leave Maine voters in an unenviable spot. They can vote for a guy with a careless, self-destructive streak and a loose relationship to the truth on the promise that he’ll stand up to Donald Trump and champion the working class. Or, they can stick with Collins, who has a lengthy record of letting down Mainers and letting Trump do what he pleases.
The worst allegations in the Times piece come from Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner when they were both living in D.C. from 2013 to 2015. Fifield said that Platner would regularly grab her by the shoulders, sometimes with enough force to leave marks. On one occasion, Platner allegedly pulled her out of a taxi by her wrist while she tried to stay in the car after they’d had a fight. And Fifield said that one night, the Times reported, “he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’ ”
Fifield also said that, contrary to his claim that he didn’t know his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until he was criticized for it during his campaign, he referred to the image by name to her while they dated, calling it “my Totenkopf.”
According to Platner, Fifield is lying on all counts. “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated,” the candidate said on All In With Chris Hayes on Thursday night.
Fifield does have a long history of Republican advocacy. Her résumé includes a stint on Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and at the Heritage Foundation, and she has written blog posts promoting conservative viewpoints for the right-wing group Independent Women. But there are good reasons to believe her allegations. In a 2016 diary entry reviewed by the Times, long before Platner ever considered entering politics, Fifield called him “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth.” Months before it came out in the press that his skull-and-crossbones ink was a Nazi symbol, Fifield was texting her friends that her ex had a Nazi tattoo. CNN has also reported that Platner posted on a Reddit thread discussing the Totenkopf in 2019, and in 2020, defended Nazi tattoos as “culture markers” rather than white supremacist symbols in certain Marine units.
Stories that rest on personal anecdotes always leave space for doubt, which could make the Times piece more of a Rorschach test for one’s existing politics than an election-shifting revelation. Fans of nontraditional candidates who’ve beaten attacks from the political establishment—like Platner and, among others, Donald Trump—can interpret pieces of negative reporting as nothing more than attempts by the entrenched powers that be to quash a rising revolutionary. In comments on the Times article, some Platner supporters declared that his sketchy past, including the Fifield allegations, makes him seem more like a man of the people. For others, the bar for proper conduct by a politician may have been lowered in recent years. “So Graham Platner’s sexting has Republicans clutching their pearls but Mr. ‘grab them by the p***y’ is just Trump being Trump?” wrote one Mainer in a letter to the Portland Herald.
Though no additional ex-girlfriends besides Fifield alleged physical abuse to the Times, two others did say that Platner was disrespectful of women. Platner doesn’t deny this. “The fact that I was a bad boyfriend a decade ago, that’s something I’ve talked about openly at length for quite some time in multiple places,” he told Hayes on Thursday.
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This is a bit of a disingenuous response; many stories of Platner’s troubling behavior come from less than “a decade ago.” One ex, Democrat Jenny Racicot, told the Times that Platner displayed a pattern of misogyny, excessive drinking, and womanizing as recently as five years ago. Racicot, who has no political reason to lie, said she cut off contact with him when he showed up at her house drunk in 2021 after she’d told him to stay away. It wasn’t until sometime after Platner married his wife in 2023 that he began his secret extramarital sexting with up to a dozen women. If Platner has been consistent on anything over the past several years, it has been treating the women around him with dishonesty and disrespect.
Yet he continues to portray his life as a tale of growth and redemption. “I firmly believe that if you believe in a transformational politics, you’ve got to believe in the ability for people to transform,” he said to Hayes on Thursday. “My journey is one of transformation.”
Voters may wonder where the evidence for that transformation lies. A guy who belittles survivors of rape on Reddit, spends a decade being a “bad boyfriend” by his own admission (and doing much worse by others’), then goes on to sext other women behind his wife’s back has not made dramatic life changes. If he has traveled an arc of self-improvement, it has still landed him in a pretty rotten place.
Platner and his supporters want voters to believe that his long history of deceit, destructive behavior, and poor decision-making is irrelevant to his qualifications for public office. Some analysts have even spun it as a point in his favor. After the sexting story broke but before the most recent Platner allegations came out, left-leaning Substacker Ken Klippenstein wrote that Maine voters are sick of “clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council” and have never stepped out of line. Platner’s missteps “sound a lot like other former Marines I know. So when Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office,” Klippenstein wrote.
But most ordinary people have not gotten a tattoo of a Nazi symbol, written sexist and homophobic Reddit posts, and sexted up to a dozen women who aren’t their wives. It also seems fair to demand more of a Senate candidate than of the most reckless bro on the block. If Mainers want a more rough-and-tumble, libidinous senator than Collins, there are ways a guy could be imperfect, sexual, and relatable that don’t involve a decade-plus stretch of mistreating romantic partners right up until the opportunity strikes for a Senate run. Just as Platner has consistently lied to the women closest to him, he has lied to the public: This spring, he told a supporter that he had nothing left to hide after his Reddit posts were unearthed. He gave Democratic leaders the same assurance. He even misled his own campaign: During an internal vetting, his wife was the one who came forward to tell his aides about his extramarital sexting habit. After all that, it’s hard to believe he’s telling the truth when he denies alleged behavior that neatly tracks with the rest of the emerging picture of his character.
The question is now whether Mainers believe that someone who has been openly contemptuous of women—and possibly worse—in the very recent past can be a reliable leader of the majority-woman Democratic Party, the only major party concerned with defending women’s rights from a movement in power hellbent on destroying them. The infuriating thing about this political moment is that, on this front and every other one that matters, Platner is still the correct pick over Collins, who played a pivotal role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has repeatedly empowered Trump to do his worst. Maine voters will be stuck deciding between a candidate with a pattern of mistreating women in his personal life and one who set back women’s rights by half a century in her political one.
The fact that Platner’s popularity remained steady through the first few embarrassing revelations of the campaign—even while a plenty viable competitor, the sitting Democratic governor, remained in the race—suggests that Maine voters are dying for a big shake-up. They’re sick of aging Democrats with polished demeanors and well-worn politics, and Platner is anything but. This election will be a test of how badly they want to send a fresh-faced Trump antagonist to Washington. Is it enough to merit the risk of an untested outsider with more than a few red flags, a talent for attracting bad press, and enough jagged edges to crack a lobster shell? With five months to go before the general election, there’s plenty of time for Platner to soothe any misgivings and re-up his promise to fight for the Maine working class. There’s also plenty of time for more damaging stories to drown out that message.
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