On Tuesday, Graham Platner was in Washington, D.C. for a private meeting with Democratic senators, during which he assured them nothing else damaging lurked in his past. He predicted his opponents would lie about him. Less than 24 hours later, the New York Times dropped a bombshell that made his reassurances look either deeply delusional or flat-out dishonest.
Make no mistake about it, Graham Platner’s Senate campaign was already on life support. It won’t be long before the party pulls the plug.
The paper spoke with more than two dozen people for their exposé, including six former romantic partners who recalled his “unsettling” behavior. The paper reviewed texts, social media messages, and diary entries. What they found was a long, documented pattern of heavy drinking, serial infidelity, emotional abuse, and physical intimidation stretching across more than a decade.
ICYMI: Is the Fix Already In? Something Smells With California’s Ballot Counting.
Three women who dated Platner at different points in his life described their relationships as volatile, toxic, and even physically threatening. All three identified the same recurring patterns: heavy drinking and womanizing, and the pattern was consistent across different periods, with different women in different cities.
Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative Virginia woman who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, described him as a man deeply contemptuous of women who often used crude slurs, maintained overlapping relationships, and, of course, posted inflammatory content online.
According to Fifield, he could become physically rough, particularly when drinking, regularly grabbing her shoulders hard enough to leave marks, once yanking her from a cab by the wrist, and on another occasion twisting her arm behind her back and shoving her into a bedroom, holding the door shut until she was “calm.”
“It hurt,” Fifield said. “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
Platner’s campaign strongly disputes any claims of physical intimidation. But two of Fifield’s friends confirmed they knew the relationship was emotionally volatile, and a June 2016 diary entry Fifield wrote called Platner “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” That same year, a friend sent her a message in all caps: “DO NOT CALL GRAHAM.”
Fifield said Platner kept an AR-15 in his Capitol Hill apartment and regularly sharpened an ax while watching television. She said he possessed what he called a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize aloud about killing people he considered threats. She also recalled the way he talked about rape.
“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” Fifield said, recalling that he clarified it would be “not in a sexual way, not in a gay way.” She said he told her, “I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”
Yeah, that’s not normal. And get this, a Platner campaign official did not dispute those remarks when asked directly.
As for his infamous Nazi tattoo, Platner has claimed that he was unaware what its origins were and that he covered it up once informed, calling any suggestion otherwise “disgusting.” But Fifield says he told her he knew it was a Nazi symbol and that he and fellow Marines chose it deliberately because “they were like a death unit.” In fact, months before Platner addressed the tattoo publicly, she told friends in a private chat that her ex was a Senate candidate with “a Nazi tattoo on his chest.”
That undercuts any claim she was merely reacting to media coverage.
While the Platner campaign dismisses her accusations as those of a Republican operative, two other women who dated Platner and spoke to the paper are Democrats and were just as unflattering with their portrayals of the man Platner is.
ICYMI: Is This a Sign That a Supreme Court Vacancy Is Coming Soon?
Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine Democrat who dated Platner casually between 2019 and 2021, said when she saw the online comments that surfaced, she recognized something familiar: “When I saw the old comments that he made online I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
She also said that in 2021, Platner arrived at her home drunk after she had explicitly told him not to come. She cut off contact after that, describing his behavior as “reckless” and “unsettling.”
A third woman, a Maine Democrat speaking anonymously, had an on-and-off long-distance relationship with Platner as recently as 2016 and said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”
And yet, at an April town hall, Platner told voters, “I have a lot of ex-girlfriends. They’re all still my friends.” The women quoted in the New York Times suggest otherwise.
“Every day brings another deeply disturbing revelation about Graham Platner. If he’s willing to do this to his own girlfriend, imagine what he’s willing to do in a position of political power,” RNC spokeswoman Delanie Bomar said in a statement. “Maine voters deserve to know why Democrats are willing to excuse this deranged behavior. If Chuck Schumer and national Democrats don’t distance themselves from Platner, they’ll be forced to answer for his behavior every day from now until Election Day.”
Democrats wanted to flip Maine so badly. The question is whether they’ll realize that Platner is not the candidate to do that before it’s too late. They should have known when we first learned of the Nazi tattoo that the guy was bad news.
