‘It Hurt’: Graham Platner’s Exes Accuse Him of Getting Physical and Other ‘Unsettling’ Behavior in Bombshell NY Times Story

X/@PodSaveAmerica

Ex-girlfriends of Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, accused him of demeaning women, calling his controversial tattoo “my Totenkopf,” and even getting physical in a bombshell New York Times report.

The most serious allegations come from Lyndsey Fifield, “a Virginia conservative” who reportedly dated Platner between 2013 and 2015, and disputed his claim that he was unaware of the connection between the tattoo across his chest.

“After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as ‘my Totenkopf,'” reported the Times‘ Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer.

From the story:

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.”

Fifield also recalled that “He [Platener said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” but not in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”

“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she said.

Platner’s campaign said he disputed Fifield’s claims about physical altercations between the pair, but did not dispute his comments about sexual assaulting an intruder.

“Mr. Platner, who had overlapping relationships with other women while he and Ms. Fifield dated, also referred to women as ‘hatchet wounds,’ Ms. Fifield said, a crude term for female anatomy,” noted the Times.

The other woman to go on the record publicly about Platner, Jenny Racicot, said she was not surprised by the past Reddit posts that have plagued his campaign.

“Ms. Racicot, who said she agreed with many of Mr. Platner’s policies, said she had an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Platner and had positive memories. But she was not shocked, she said, when she saw the incendiary comments he had made about women that have surfaced during the campaign. ‘I was like, that makes sense,’ she said. ‘This person does not respect women,'” reported the Glueck and Lerer. “Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior ‘reckless’ and ‘unsettling.'”

Platner’s infidelity to his wife, whom he married in 2023, was reported on by The Wall Street Journal and Times over the weekend. He has previously muddled through scandals pertaining to the Nazi-linked Totenkopf tattoo that was emblazoned across his chest for almost two decades, as well as online comments in which disparaged rural Mainers, suggested that victims of sexual assault bear responsibility for what happened to them, and mocked an American soldier who was awarded a Purple Heart for his bravery was shot during a firefight with the Taliban.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!