‘By Design’: Conservative Platner Accuser Slams NY Times and Dems For Not Taking Her Allegations Seriously

LEFT: Graham Platner (AP Photo/Caleb Jones, File) RIGHT: The New York Times (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Lyndsey Fifield, the ex-girlfriend of Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, slammed The New York Times on Tuesday, accusing the paper of framing her abuse allegations against Platner in a way that let him off the hook with many on the left.

Fifield, along with several other women, spoke to the Times for a report published in early June that detailed the Maine Democrats’ “unsettling” behavior toward women. The Times reported that the women said Platner “could be charming and charismatic, they recalled in interviews, but also demeaning to women and, in at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful.”

Fifield had previously ripped the report as a “set up” and fumed, “Why does it say ‘nobody could corroborate’ when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?

Politico on Monday released a new report alleging that Platner sexually assaulted an ex-girlfriend some five years ago. The allegation includes a harrowing account of Platner forcing himself into the woman’s home and forcing himself on her while intoxicated.

Platner paused his Senate campaign on Monday following the allegations. Many observers and pundits, especially on the right, cried foul that allegations of domestic abuse from Fifield, a conservative, were not taken more seriously.

Fifield weighed in on that discussion herself on X on Tuesday, writing, “I actually understand why Democrat leaders didn’t take our stories seriously when the Times reported them in June but are taking them seriously now.”

“It was by design,” she wrote, adding:

The line most shared from the piece was the claim that the Times “could not corroborate” my story despite talking to two of my friends.

I gave them the contact information for five friends.

They called the two who I clarified would not know about the abuse but would be able to affirm our relationship timeline, events, etc.

They simply did not call the other three.

I also gave them the names of all my former roommates who remembered him stalking our row house (which was about 5 houses down from his) and waiting for me to return. I gave them screenshots of messages between these roommates and I discussing it.

I gave them the names of other men I dated who might have remembered him following us around the hill and showing up on my stoop after we walked home from dates to confront us. I gave them emails to my landlord urgently ending my lease and moving to an apartment across town and diary entries talking about it – all time marked.

I told them that during pre-marital counseling I had spoken to my ex-fiance about the abuse because I had to explain to him why I reacted with such terror any time he lost his temper. They said oh NO we don’t need to bother HIM (or my priest). Besides, I had written about it in my diary in detail, they reassured.

As the weeks dragged on I stopped trying to give them evidence because the amount I had already given them seemed to overwhelm them and I thought it meant they clearly had more than enough to verify my every claim.

My friends might not have known the details of the abuse, but they affirmed that yes, I had told them that he was abusive—long before he ran for Senate.

Besides, they assured, my part in their reporting would be small. I thought my details would only serve to affirm Jenny and the other anonymous woman.

Jenny and I – having never met or spoken – both shared with these reporters terrifyingly similar details of intimate partner violence, coercive control, and cycles of abuse/love bombing. The third unnamed woman in the story did as well.

But tell me again how they “could not corroborate.”

A spokesperson for the Times responded to Fifield’s post in a comment to Mediaite, writing, “The Times’s article on June 4 brought to light a pattern of unsettling behavior by Graham Platner and included many of the details that women shared with us that were on the record and confirmable. The article also provided readers with context about what the women were and were not willing to share at the time. It was a revealing and sensitive piece of reporting that helped Maine voters and others learn more about Platner and his candidacy. Politico advanced this public understanding with even more information that they independently reported.”

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