Rumors have swirled all week that the New York Times had a story ready to drop that would make Graham Platner’s situation even worse than before. Senate Democrats must have gotten wind of it on Tuesday, as the Wall Street Journal reported that several of them began asking the presumptive Senate nominee from Maine some very pointed and specific questions about his past relationships with women. Other media outlets reported that Platner left DC earlier than expected after these questions arose, with the campaign claiming it had something to do with Platner’s father.
That turned out to be a lie. The NYT finally dropped the story this afternoon, with the added information as to what Platner did on his return. For the last two days, Platner and his team have tried calling women he has dated and with whom he has worked to provide character witness testimony on his behalf, to head off a #MeToo moment:
Rumors were spreading from Portland to the Potomac about Mr. Platner’s messy personal life, after news reports that he had sent sexual messages to women while married. Democratic senators were pressing him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were swarming, staking out his hometown.
Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.
Apparently, that strategy did produce a handful of women willing to tell the NYT that Platner was a “fun and caring partner.” Three other women have very, very different recollections of their time with Platner, although readers have to get to the tenth paragraph to access their testimonies, seven paragraphs below the excerpt above:
Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”
Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
This turned out to be a very difficult read for me, as I know Lyndsey from years back. We saw each other on the conference circuit, and one time hung out together in New Orleans with several other friends. Lyndsey has always been a friend, if not a close one, and someone whose word I would trust implicitly. She has a great spirit and is also a serious person of substance, not to be taken lightly in any circumstance. With that in mind, I tend to lend great weight to Lyndsey’s testimony, especially given the circumstances.
Lyndsey told the NYT that Platner got violent with her on multiple occasions, although with the caveat that Platner never outright hit her:
Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”
But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, 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.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
Perhaps Platner didn’t outright hit Lyndsey, but those are assaults and batteries, and arguably false imprisonment. All of this behavior is abusive.
Also, Lyndsey contradicted Platner’s claim about his Nazi tattoo:
Mr. Platner’s insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield said. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.” …
“I would never have known what that was,” she said. “He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo.”
The only people who bought Platner’s excuse that he didn’t know the meaning of the symbol were Democrats and the Protection Racket Media.
Lyndsey’s account gets the most detailed in this NYT story, because she allowed the reporters access to her text and her diaries, where she contemporaneously recorded much of what happened with Platner. Platner’s campaign is already trying to cast her as a “lifelong G.O.P. operative who’s dedicated her career to electing Republicans,” but the texts and diaries lend evidence to her claims about Platner. And – again on a personal note – the Lyndsey Fifield I knew is not interested in those kinds of dirty-trick politics. It must have taken a lot for her to even come forward. (This is purely a personal judgment on my part, so YMMV. It has been a few years since I’ve been in contact with Lyndsey.)
Plus, it’s not just “GOP operative[s]” coming forward. The other woman who went on the record for this story is a Maine Democrat, who recognized his lack of respect for women in the testimony of others. Racicot didn’t supply as many details about her experiences with Platner, but did tell this to the NYT:
But she was not shocked, she said, when she saw the incendiary comments he had made about women that have surfaced during the campaign. “I was like, that makes sense,” she said. “This person does not respect women.”
Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling.”
The timing here is interesting and revealing. That happened six years after Lyndsey cut off contact with Platner, and was just five years ago from now. It was just two years ago that Platner was on dating apps while married to his current wife. Racicot first came forward to talk about that when The Maine Wire first uncovered the comment chain:
“Ghosted me in the past,” read the message, dated Nov. 4, 2024. “Then popped up on a different dating app. I’m concerned he may have a significant other out there.”
The comments drew replies from at least six women, several of whom noted that he was married, according to screenshots posted by The Maine Wire, a conservative media outlet. Ms. Racicot, who was one of the women who commented on the chain, confirmed that the post was real, as did a second woman who commented on it.
This isn’t a man who was struggling with adjustment for a few years more than a decade ago. This is a man who treats women with contempt as part of his natural character.
Now that this is out, all of the Democrats who kept telling us to contextualize Platner’s Nazi fixation have some explaining to do. Why did Democrat socialist leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and Chuck Schumer rush to endorse Herr Totenkopf in the first place? Why didn’t anyone perform a little due diligence before throwing Janet Mills under the bus in the Senate primary? Stay tuned, because the yada-yadaing of the Platner endorsements will be epic.
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