Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for starting your day with me today.
Whoo boy. Where to start with this one?
My husband came home last night just as Chris Hayes was interviewing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner about the latest allegations regarding his past behavior. Within seconds, we were both screeching at the TV.
But let me back up.
Unless you’ve been living off-world for the last six months, you’re probably painfully aware of the allegations against Platner to date, which include, but are not limited to, sporting a Nazi tattoo, repeatedly using racist and sexist language on Reddit, and, most recently, sexting with other women while married. To be honest, I don’t care about the sexting, as long as it was consensual, which it appears that it was. Everything else is between Platner and his wife.
Yesterday, shortly after rumors began to swirl online that something else about Platner was about to drop, the NYT published this story, which… is not great. The headline refers to some of Platner’s past girlfriends describing his past behavior as “unsettling.” But the piece gets so much worse.
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.”
Some of the women also raised questions about his trustworthiness. 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.”
How much he hated women? That’s not good. But (and how this wasn’t the headline I will never know) then the Times drops this bombshell:
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.
“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
So, let me be clear. The behavior described by Fifield is domestic abuse. No one in the media seems to want to call it that, but I’ve gotten orders of protection for women based on lesser allegations than those. It doesn’t matter that she wasn’t injured. It doesn’t matter that Platner didn’t “break” her arm. That’s assault and battery, and it’s a crime, as is trapping someone in a room and refusing to let them out. That’s false imprisonment, otherwise known as “kidnapping.”
If a woman walked into the domestic violence legal clinic where I worked, I would march her down the hall to get an order of protection, then to the prosecutor’s office to give a statement to open a criminal prosecution. End of.
Of course, as with every other allegation against Platner, his defenders were out in force.
I’ll stop there because I’m sure you get the idea.
First, let me say, as a former attorney exclusively for domestic abuse victims, we’ve done a shit job educating Americans about the dynamics of intimate partner violence. I’ve seen abusers bring in their entire neighborhood to “vouch” for them. I’ve seen abusers bring in their pastors and a bunch of elders from their church as evidence of their good character. None of that changed the images I held in my hands of the victim with a broken jaw or two black eyes. So this idea that those who socialize with abusers can spot them is ridiculous and false.
But the bigger issue Platner’s rise raises is how much misogyny exists on the left. Of course, we saw all this when Hillary Clinton ran for President, when Elizabeth Warren called out Bernie Sanders during a debate for saying a woman couldn’t be elected President, and when Kamala Harris took on Trump in 2024. Look at all the damage that’s happened around us in the last 15 months, and keep in mind that it was preferable to many to having a woman in the Oval Office. Hell, giving a second term to a rapist was preferable to electing a woman.
Possibly the worst defense of Platner, though, was the “I’m sick of Democrats losing because we demand that everyone be perfect.” Hey, I am far from perfect (I’m also not running for Senate). But there are a lot of miles between the “perfect candidate” and the candidate who “uses the R-word, has a Nazi tattoo, and has been credibly accused of domestic abuse.” And if we’re willing to excuse sexism and misogyny by candidates on the left, merely because we want to win, what does the Democratic party stand for? And where are women supposed to go to feel that they are equals to their male counterparts? The Green Party?
Before yesterday, it was very clear how many left-wing influencers, or “pod bros,” as I call them, were willing to toss women under the bus if it meant getting rid of Susan Collins. To be fair, that’s a laudable goal. We all want to get rid of Susan Collins.
As Alan Elrod wrote over at Liberal Currents, this is a weird-but-revealing flex, telling the world that you don’t care how a candidate treats women as long as you get what you want.
But it strikes me that there’s something parasocial at play here, a form of idolizing that men engage in with famous men wherein they afford them more dignity than the flesh-and-blood women who love and support them. In fact, offering the women in their lives as hypothetical sex objects for famous men is a way of showing how big a fan they really are.
Women are so used to this kind of rhetoric that we almost don’t notice it anymore. After all, Donald Trump has been elected twice, despite being an adjudicated rapist with dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct under his belt. But whatever he offered his base — white nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, the belief that he somehow had the power to personally transform their finances — it was clearly more important than the credible allegation that he’s a sexual predator.
If the men on the left are going to disregard issues that predominantly affect women, who make up more than half the electorate and are consistently more likely to vote than men, I’m not sure the Democratic Party has much of a future. Whether it’s Platner’s defenders or the targeted harassment by Bernie Bros, there’s a real issue with men who identify as “progressives” being willing to overlook conduct that harms women in order to “win.”
Last night, Chris Hayes had Platner on his show and gave him the opportunity to defend himself. Platner flat-out denied the allegations of physical violence and claimed they were “politically motivated.”
I thought Hayes’ questioning of Platner was somewhat milquetoast and focused on issues that have been relitigated ad nauseum, like the tattoo. He also leaned into the sexting, which is much less of a problem than allegations of violence against women.
The only time Hayes really held Platner’s feet to the fire was over Fifield’s claims that she and Platner texted about the tattoo prior to his candidacy, and he was aware of the meaning behind it. That allegation backs up previous reporting that Platner had to know the tattoo was anti-semitic due to his military service.
The problem with interviews of Platner is that he will admit to going through “dark times” and “being a bad boyfriend” and “self-medicating with alcohol,” but he never gets more specific than that. He’ll say “I did a lot of things I’m not proud of.” Okay, but what are those things? Specifically? Because you don’t get credit for “taking ownership” of things you refuse to name. Part of accountability is calling a spade a spade. And, as Platner decided to run for U.S. Senate right out of the box, voters literally have no choice but to look at his past behavior to determine what kind of person he is. As of right now, he appears to be a walking red flag.
As many pointed out on social media, Platner uses the language of accountability and inclusion to avoid taking ownership for anything specific. He didn’t know it was a Nazi tattoo, and any other allegations are politically motivated lies. So what, exactly, made him a “bad boyfriend?”
At the end of the day, there appears to be an entire army of Democrats out there who will vote for anyone who has done anything short of SAing children, as Trump has been accused of doing. That seems like a terrible standard for the party as a whole, and I know it’s bad news for women. This is why the Nazi tattoo should have been the end of it. As I wrote a few days ago, nothing good for women comes from a guy with a Nazi tattoo.
I have rarely been as depressed as I was after watching women with expertise in the field of sexual assault and intimate partner violence battle online with a bunch of bros (and far too many women) with no understanding of the dynamics of violence against women. It seems that electing Donald Trump for a second time lowered every bar to the floor. There is almost no lower we can go.
And look, we have common ground. We all want to kick Collins out and take back the Senate. We all want to neutralize Donald Trump for the next three years. We all want things like universal healthcare, justice for the people of Gaza, the abolition of ICE, a better social safety net for all Americans, the return of policy guided by science. But how far are we willing to sink to get it? We can not, simultaneously, demand a return to “normalcy” and vehemently defend the candidate with a Nazi tattoo who has been accused of domestic abuse.
Despite the “It’s either him or Susan Collins” rhetoric, Maine has yet to have their primary. There are other candidates out there, including progressive Andrea LaFlamme. And maybe next time, we vet the “progressive” candidate a little better. Because now voters in Maine are being forced into a decision no one should have to make.
I am willing to bet this won’t be the last problematic story we read about Graham Platner.
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The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
This feels appropriate today.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Have a great weekend!
