They Knew and Endorsed Him Anyway
The Democratic Party flip-flops on Platner endorsement after yet another predictable allegation of sexual assault drops
For months, we’ve been telling Angry Democrat readers who Graham Platner actually is. Not the working-class oyster farmer on the yard signs. A candidate two Democratic Socialist organizers found at his home in Sullivan, packaged by the strategist who built Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, and sold to a national donor base as an everyman (Washington Examiner). I did not report that to help Susan Collins. I reported it because voters deserve to know who is asking for their trust before November, not after.
On July 6, another woman accused Platner of sexual assault, and the campaign has told supporters he needed time to “reflect on the best path forward” (CNN; NBC News). He denies the allegation. He calls it “troubling, serious, and false,” and that denial belongs next to every sentence that follows. Nobody who has watched this campaign should be surprised. The party built this candidate, and the party endorsed him already knowing what the issues were.
Its Always Another Story
In June, The New York Times published three women from past relationships who described his behavior as unsettling, demeaning, and in one case physically threatening (Washington Post timeline). The Wall Street Journal reported he traded sexually explicit messages with multiple women near the start of his marriage, and his own campaign confirmed it. In 2013, on Reddit, he told people worried about sexual assault to “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to” (The Maine Monitor). Those are his words, not an accuser’s.
Platner also has a Totenkopf tattoo, the death’s head the SS wore guarding Hitler’s camps, inked on his chest. He says he never knew what it meant. The record cuts against him. In Reddit threads from 2019 and 2020 he discussed the Totenkopf and SS lightning bolts by name, and his own political director said a man who prides himself on military history could not plausibly have stayed ignorant for eighteen years (CNN KFile). Now, Jenny Racicot says he forced her to have sex with him in 2021, an account a later boyfriend says she shared at the time and that her emails with her therapist corroborate (NPR). He denies that too.
I am not the jury on the 2021 allegation. I will not call a denied accusation a conviction, and I will not wave off a corroborated one because the target is inconvenient. The argument does not need a verdict. It’s hard to believe that three women in the Times, and his own campaign’s confirmations, and his own posts, all add up to nothing.
They Knew
The party’s problem is not that this surfaced. The party’s problem is when.
