Graham Platner, the 41-year-old Marine veteran and Democratic Senate hopeful in Maine, is staring down a cascade of personal scandals just days before the June 9 primary, with multiple former girlfriends now on the record alleging disturbing comments about rape and violence, physical manhandling, and a pattern of contempt toward women.
Three of Platner's ex-girlfriends recounted their experiences dating him to the New York Times. The most detailed account came from Lyndsey Fifield, a 40-year-old Republican campaign worker from Virginia who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. Her allegations, reported by the New York Post, paint a picture of a man whose private conduct sits in sharp contrast to the progressive champion endorsed by Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Platner announced his campaign to unseat Sen. Susan Collins last August. Since then, the revelations have arrived in waves, old Reddit posts, a sexting scandal, and now the ex-girlfriend accounts, each one landing closer to the primary and each one harder for Democratic leaders to explain away.
Fifield described Platner as someone who was "cavalierly contemptuous of women's emotions, of our 'weakness.'" She said his behavior "reminded me of just how much he hated women."
The specific allegations are bracing. Fifield claimed Platner twisted her arm during an argument, shoved her into a bedroom, and refused to let her leave until she was "calm." She said he frequently manhandled her around the shoulders, sometimes hard enough to leave marks, and once pulled her out of a cab by her wrist.
Fifield was careful to draw lines around what she experienced. She said Platner "never hit me, he never punched me." Of the arm-twisting incident, she said:
"It hurt. It didn't cause an injury, it didn't break my arm."
But the comments she attributed to Platner go beyond physical conduct. Fifield told the New York Times that Platner repeatedly made statements about raping intruders and killing people who might threaten him:
"He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them. He was like, 'I would rape them to show them that I'm dominant.'"
Those are the words of a man who, as of this week, was still insisting to Democratic leaders that there were no more skeletons in his closet.
Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine Democrat who dated Platner in 2019 and again in 2021, offered a different but compatible account. Racicot said that when she saw Platner's old online comments, posts he had made on Reddit for years that surfaced within months of his campaign launch, 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. I was like, that makes sense. This person does not respect women."
Not every ex-girlfriend agreed. Carol Lemp, 36, who dated Platner in 2013, described a very different man. She said she never felt threatened and called him a "gentle giant."
"He was a great boyfriend. He was super kind, very nice, fun."
Lemp's account does not erase the others. But it does complicate the picture, and it is the kind of contradictory detail that voters will have to weigh for themselves with the primary five days away.
Then there is the tattoo. Platner got a Totenkopf, a skull image adopted by Hitler's Schutzstaffel, or SS, tattooed on his chest while on leave with the Marines in 2007. The SS carried out the bulk of Nazi violence in the Holocaust.
In October, Platner claimed he thought the tattoo was merely a "terrifying skull and crossbones." But Fifield directly contradicted that defense. She said Platner would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo and that the men who got it together chose it deliberately.
"They literally, deliberately, selected it because it was relevant to their military unit. They were like a death unit, they were killers."
Platner denied lying about knowing the tattoo's meaning during a Thursday night interview on MSNBC's "All In with Chris Hayes." He also denied abusing any of his exes.
The ex-girlfriend allegations did not arrive in a vacuum. They landed on top of a sexting scandal that broke last weekend, when the Wall Street Journal exposed Platner for allegedly sexting multiple women on the hookup app Kik, while married. Platner and his wife, Amy Gertner, married in November 2023.
Within days of the Journal report, Gertner posted on social media acknowledging marital struggles but standing by her husband. She had previously flagged Platner's behavior to his own campaign last year, a detail that raises its own questions about what the campaign knew and when.
Fifield backed her claims with 2016 diary entries and text messages from after her breakup with Platner. One entry reads simply: "DO NOT CALL GRAHAM." Another describes him as "the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life."
Those are private words, written years before Platner entered politics, by a woman who anticipated the skepticism her account would invite.
"I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat, it has nothing to do with that. If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing."
Platner has not denied that he was, in his own words, "a far from perfect boyfriend." His public statement leaned heavily on his military service and its aftermath:
"I've been open about what was a very dark period of my life where I struggled with undiagnosed PTSD, too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend. I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better. Any characterization beyond that is false, and I believe, politically motivated."
He added: "I'm not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I've done since, and the movement we are building in Maine."
PTSD is real, and combat veterans deserve compassion for the invisible wounds they carry home from places like Afghanistan. But Platner's framing asks voters to accept a very large ask: that comments about raping intruders, physical manhandling of a girlfriend, and years of misogynistic online posts were all symptoms of an undiagnosed condition, and that the man running for the United States Senate has left all of it behind.
The timeline makes that harder to accept. Fifield's allegations cover 2013 to 2015. Racicot dated him in 2019 and 2021 and recognized the same pattern. The Reddit posts spanned years. The Kik sexting happened while he was married. At what point does "a dark period" become a pattern?
The political dimension here is impossible to ignore. Warren, Sanders, and Schumer all put their names behind Platner. The progressive establishment saw a Marine veteran who could flip a Republican Senate seat in Maine, and they lined up behind him.
Now those endorsements hang around their necks. This is a party that has built much of its brand on believing women, on zero tolerance for misconduct, on the idea that character disqualifies candidates. When the accused is a Republican, that standard is enforced with ferocity. When the accused is their own recruit in a marquee Senate race, the standard gets flexible.
No charges have been filed. No lawsuits are pending. No official investigation has been reported. These are allegations, and Platner disputes them. Voters in Maine's Democratic primary will render their own verdict on June 9.
But the facts already in public view, the tattoo, the Reddit posts, the sexting, the ex-girlfriend accounts, the diary entries, and Platner's own admission that he was a deeply flawed partner, form a record that Democratic leaders either failed to vet or chose to overlook.
The question for Warren, Sanders, and Schumer is not whether they believe women. It is whether they believe women only when it is politically convenient.