The hollow ‘accusation’ campaign targeting Graham Platner Whatever happened to evidence?

Graham Platner’s campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine can come across as pretty rote — mostly just reheated Bernie Sanders mantras. It’s hardly surprising that many in the Maine Democratic electorate would be receptive to such messaging. What’s slightly more notable is that Platner, a previously unknown Marine veteran and oyster farmer, is the vehicle for that message in a race that could decide control of the Senate in this year’s midterms. He easily warded off a listless challenge from the incumbent Democratic governor, Janet Mills; the mostly uncontested Dem primary is now days away. 

And so, right on cue, here come the “accusations.”

What are these “accusations”? Good question. “Accusations” would seem to overstate the case, because it’s exceedingly unclear what Platner is even being accused of doing. But since the non-accusatory accusations have been dramatically unveiled by the The New York Times, all keen political watchers must now hold their breath and brace for the fallout. 

The Times’s Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer boast that they “spent months” doggedly reporting on the “complicated history of Platner’s relationships with women.” OK, then — after months of this intrepid investigative journalism, what did the journalists come up with? Reputedly that Platner’s relationship with various ex-girlfriends has at times been “emotionally wrenching.” The dynamic of these relationships, dating back to his 20s, is said to have been “volatile” and even “toxic.” And his behavior? “Unsettling.” 

These are the fruits of a New York Times enterprise project to canvass Platner’s ex-girlfriends, already a creepy enough initiative in its own right — and the worst they could uncover is that a handful of ex-girlfriends use vaguely unflattering adjectives to describe their subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner, stemming from consensual adult romantic activity a decade or more ago. 

One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that Platner grabbed her roughly and, in one instance, “yanked her out of a cab” in the course of “altercations.” Fifield happens to be a long-time Republican operative, having served in multiple GOP political action committees and currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank. Her affiliations are alluded to by the Times, which notes that the paper “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account.”

If this is what we’re really doing now, why doesn’t somebody go and canvass the ex-boyfriends of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer? They evidently deem it newsworthy that former love interests of Platner claim to have endured “emotionally wrenching” relationship travails. Given the prominent perches Glueck and Lerer enjoy at the New York Times, certainly they rank high enough on the all-important “power dynamic” pyramid that the public would be similarly entitled to know if anything “emotionally wrenching” or “volatile” might have occurred in their own private lives when they were in their 20s. 

Robust reportorial resources should thus be devoted to explore this harrowing possibility, with any resulting material reframed and reinterpreted many years after the fact to comport with whatever news-cycle imperatives might arise on a given week. New York Times readers have every right to evaluate whether their own unreported romantic histories might be exerting undue influence on their 2026 midterm election coverage. 

God forbid either journalist be alleged by some disgruntled ex to have exhibited behavior that could be retroactively characterized as “toxic.” And if Glueck or Lerer wishes to dispute that characterization, perhaps for a lack of context or any other mitigating factors they may wish to cite, they’re plain out of luck, because everyone knows it’s a lose-lose situation to be rehashing dirty relationship laundry in the pages of The New York Times. The more you talk, the worse you look, regardless of what the truth happens to be.

If by any chance either female journalist has ever had an “off-and-on long-distance relationship” with old boyfriends who may have less than flattering memories of the experience, this is now to be considered straightforwardly reportable information, given the new Platner standard they’ve opted to set forth. Any relevant anecdotes would need to be fleshed out with ambiguously motivated remembrances of the journalists’ past emotional traits, since this the kind of psychobabble that litters the Platner exposé. (For reference, Katie graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 and Lisa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, so those are some decent leads to start with for any shoeleather reporters out there looking to better inform the public about contemporary power dynamics in America.)

Fifield, the flagship “accuser” in this Times story, doesn’t appear to be accusing Platner of anything in particular (though she has since taken to the X app, formerly Twitter, wielding the A word, “abuse”). Lacking anything more tangible to report, the Times is reduced to relaying this Fifield’s assessment that Platner is “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions” — whatever the hell that means — which Fifield has extrapolated based on having sporadically dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. 

Seeing his recently discovered archive of Reddit posts, she claims, has “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” Left unexplained is why she apparently dated someone who “hated women” for two years. Or why, after the relationship apparently broke off by 2016, friends sent texts encouraging her to “move on,” implying that she was disinclined to “move on.” Nor do the Times sleuths probe whether her apparent knowledge that Platner was simultaneously seeing other women during their relationship might have been a key factor in generating her negative feelings toward him. Or what she precisely meant in a post-breakup diary entry, purportedly shown to the reporters, in which she wrote that Platner was “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” 

How did Platner destroy her life, exactly? What is the definition of “toxic” in this context? (That word can seem to be quite malleable.) What kind of alleged “abuse” is she talking about here — emotional, physical, or something else? And by any chance, are there additional sentences or paragraphs surrounding the curiously truncated excerpt that might shed additional light on her psychological state at the time, or further elucidate what Platner is even accused of doing wrong, which again remains exceedingly unclear, despite months of intensive investigation by a team of seasoned reporters? 

According to one of her friends in the DC-conservative-blackslapping network, the podcaster and opinion columnist Bethany Mandel, Fifield had already spent the past “many months” on a political mission to inflict maximum political damage against Platner — first by calling attention to his purported “Nazi Tattoo,” which had apparently never alarmed her enough to cease dating him. Then, when that proved insufficient to sink Platner, Fifield went in for the kill with a standard slate of “accusations” pertaining to nebulous intimate-partner improprieties. 

Though, again, to even call these “accusations” wouldn’t be exactly accurate; Platner is accused by no woman in the Times story of doing anything self-evidently illicit. Instead, the article assembles an impressionistic collage of what the Times theorizes is a pattern of “unsettling” behavior. Surely, a stronger adjective would’ve been used for the headline, should any reportorial finding have supported it. Perhaps most bizarre is that Glueck and Lerer, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel at this point, deem it journalistically crucial to grant anonymity to yet another ex-girlfriend, whom they “asked to sum up how he treated her” This source said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.” What does this mean? Sounds quite rueful and poetic, sure, but whatever “accusation” it’s supposed to correspond with is shrouded in mystery.

Speaking of the supposed “Nazi tattoo” that is now said to be a singularly defining mark of Platner’s allegedly foul character, it seems rather doubtful that a great many of his fellow Marines circa 2007 — when Platner says he got the tattoo while on leave in Croatia — would have been steeped enough in esoteric pagan iconography to identify the symbol as intrinsically linked with National Socialism. Because to the naked eye, it could easily just appear like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that a certain type of military guy in his early 20s would probably think looks cool. Perhaps going forward, all US service personnel should be required to consult the Anti-Defamation League’s “hate-symbols” database before they ink themselves with anything improper. Better yet, they can fax their proposed tat design to Susan Collins for pre-approval.

Earlier this week, a crew of doofuses affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee thought it would be hilarious to gallivant shirtless around Washington, DC, wearing nothing but a white bath towel. This was done to heckle Platner for the supposedly incriminating mirror selfie of his that recently surfaced, in which, yes, the Democratic candidate is pictured shirtless and with a towel around his waist. If that was the extent of the GOP stooges’ stunt, it might’ve been loutish and lame, but forgettably harmless. In the current political climate, however, they of course had to ratchet things up to the most rabid extreme, and wave signage proclaiming Platner a “pedo” — based on absolutely nothing other than that he had apparently maintained a personal account on an app called Kik, which is thought to be inherently disreputable, given the purported connotations of what the app is typically used for. 

It’s of course possible that Platner has done disreputable things on this app — his wife did report to his campaign operatives that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with at least six women earlier in their marriage — but that’s preposterously far removed from Platner doing anything that could be remotely labeled “pedophilic,” besides some vague supposition that the app is populated with minors who circumvent age-verification protocols. There is zero evidence of Platner engaging in any conduct that could conceivably make him a “pedophile.” If the only criteria for earning such a sick designation these days is using a social-media app on which minors might be present, there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t also apply to X, on which much of the recent hectoring of Platner has taken place. 

More broadly, it seems to have been collectively decided that in 2026, flippantly declaring one’s political foes to be pedos, or pedo-adjacent, or pedo-complicit, is just standard procedure, with any evidentiary requirement a relic of the past. In addition, certain Republicans have clearly been laboring with pent-up frustration at how Democrats gamely operationalized the Jeffrey Epstein saga against President Trump, who now also gets routinely taunted as a pedophile, despite a similar dearth of credible evidence. 

As such, vengeful has-beens like Ari Fleisher have proposed an inventive new angle of attack for their all-hands-on-deck offensive to preserve a slim Republican Senate majority: “Platner is Epstein without the island,” the former George W. Bush press secretary proclaimed. Why? Because, again, a selfie has emerged of Platner wearing a bath towel, and the selfie appeared on an app that Fleisher and others claim is “targeted to teens,” though they cite no empirical basis for this inference — much less any basis for assuming that Platner himself has “targeted” anything untoward at any teen. 

But it doesn’t matter anymore. American political conflict is now a rolling cacophony of everyone and their mother calling each other a pedophile. Republicans, cruising for a midterm bruising, should at least be thankful that Platner’s improbable ascent has enabled them to savor a moment of temporary catharsis, as they pretend to be enthusiastic about re-electing Susan Collins to a sixth dreary term.

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