POLITICO (“Exclusive: Woman who dated Graham Platner says he sexually assaulted her“):
A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.
The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.
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Platner denied the allegations.
“These allegations are troubling, serious, and false. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue,” he said in a statement.
Racicot previously described “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner to The New York Times, but says she didn’t go public with the specific assault claim because she didn’t want to be known as a rape victim.
Racicot said she later felt compelled to go public about her experience because the reaction to the Times story was dominated by controversy about another woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who alleged Platner mistreated her and faced attacks because of her ties to the Republican Party. (Contacted by POLITICO, Fifield stood by the allegations she made to the Times and declined to comment further.)
Coming off the heels of several previous accusations, the reactions have been swift.
WaPo (“Top Democrats pull Graham Platner endorsements, call on him to end Maine Senate campaign“):
Some of Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s top backers, Senate Democratic leaders and the state Democratic Party called on him to end his campaign and rescinded endorsements on Monday after he was accused of sexual assault by a woman he previously dated.
Senate Democratic leaders, in a joint statement, said they would not support Platner’s campaign financially if he remains on the ballot.
“The allegations reported today are incredibly disturbing — violence, abuse and sexual assault are absolutely unacceptable,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), who leads the caucus’s campaign committee, said in a statement. “Graham Platner needs to immediately withdraw as the Democratic nominee for Senate and allow Maine Democrats the opportunity to choose a new candidate who can defeat Susan Collins.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) said he is rescinding his endorsement, as well.“The allegations against Graham Platner are troubling and deeply serious,” he wrote on X.
Rep. Ro Khanna also pulled his endorsement. “I’ve been very clear that sexual assault or violence against women is a red line. These allegations are very serious and credible. Graham Platner should drop out from the race. I am withdrawing my endorsement,” said Khanna (D-California), who appeared with the candidate at a rally last month, just days after Platner was accused of mistreating women he dated.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said, “The best path forward is for Graham Platner to step aside as the Democratic nominee and address these serious allegations outside this Senate race.”
The state Democratic Party also called on Platner to leave the race. “We are entrusted with deciding who represents our values and who carries our banner. That responsibility requires judgment, leadership, and a willingness to act when circumstances demand it,” party leaders wrote in a statement.
Indeed, many are just assuming his exit is inevitable.
Reid J. Epstein, NYT (“Who Might Replace Platner if He Drops Out? Here’s What Could Happen.“):
Graham Platner can be replaced as the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine if he withdraws from the race by next Monday, and state law would then give the state Democratic Party until July 27 to name a replacement.
Maine Democrats would be in uncharted terrain if Mr. Platner does exit the contest after a Politico report that he sexually assaulted a woman he had dated. He denied the allegation but said he was taking time to “reflect” on his political path forward.
Maine law does not dictate what process the state Democratic Party would use to replace Mr. Platner should he step aside, according to Kate McBrien, the chief of staff to Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state.
The chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, Charles Dingman, and other Maine Democratic Party leaders posted a statement on social media calling on Mr. Platner to quit the race. Mr. Dingman did not immediately respond to messages on Monday afternoon.
Top Maine Democratic Party officials have discussed possible plans to replace Mr. Platner on the ballot, with options including a pop-up convention on the weekend of July 25 to choose a nominee, or holding a statewide caucus to effectively redo the party’s primary election, according to two people who have talked with the officials and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal party conversations.
Officials have ruled out having the state party’s committee, which includes about 100 members, choose the nominee, the people said.
Fifteen years ago, Matt Yglesias observed that “The Most Important Rule Of Surviving A Political Sex Scandal Is: Don’t Resign!” If Platner holds on another week, he’s on the November ballot. But I suspect he’ll bow to the pressure, lest he simply hand the race to Susan Collins.
Given that Platner seems to be a horrible human being, I have no reason to doubt Racicot’s charges. Still, as always in these cases, I wonder why she waited so long into the race to finally go public. She answers that question in the POLITICO report:
Racicot said she was torn over coming forward in part because she agrees with Platner politically.
“One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” she said. “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”
It would have been helpful if she’d done so while there was still an active primary contest.
NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg conducts a post-mortem. (“Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster“):
Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to, immediately.
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His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.
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The Platner campaign represented an electoral insurgency against the Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations against those who launched it. There is plenty of blame to go around.
Most at fault, of course, is Platner himself. He allegedly victimized Racicot, and then his campaign victimized her again, putting her into a situation where she felt she had to go public. He betrayed his supporters by plunging into a campaign while knowing he had a closet full of skeletons and drawing people who believed in him into a doomed enterprise.
Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.
Also liable for this disaster are the progressive operatives who recruited Platner and were so infatuated with his identity — a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics — that they failed to do their due diligence. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff, didn’t want to spring for a thorough background check, which can take weeks and cost around $20,000. “Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days,” The Journal said.
Moraff, who travels the country trying to recruit left-wing, working-class candidates, reportedly learned about some of Platner’s troubling Reddit posts but decided to charge forward anyway. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” he told The Journal.
He’s correct about the appetite for unconventional candidates, but that is no excuse for such willful sloppiness. Before blithely assuming that voters would forgive a candidate’s flaws, he had a responsibility to try to find out what those flaws were.
This fiasco might seem to vindicate the establishment that Platner railed against, but Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who wanted to stop Platner, is also partly culpable here. Schumer badly misread the Democratic electorate and tried to clear the field for his preferred candidate, Maine’s 78-year-old governor, Janet Mills, leaving a vacuum that Platner filled.
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While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.
One person who tried to alert Democrats was Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald. She quit when the first Platner scandals emerged and has been increasingly outspoken against him. Progressive operatives made her seem like a vindictive person eager to curry favor with Maine’s political establishment. In retrospect, she looks much more like someone who took a profound professional risk to do the right thing. I can’t be the only one who regrets not taking her more seriously.
If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens space up for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape proper vetting.
Voters in both of our parties have been rebelling against “establishment” politicians for a while now. Republicans went all-in with Tea Party and later MAGA candidates earlier, but Democrats are catching up. Polished, experienced candidates are viewed as too unwilling to challenge The System. But Platner is just the latest example that Governor, Senator, or President shouldn’t be entry-level positions.
