Another embarrassment for Democrats ahead of the November midterm elections in the U.S.: Days after the party managed to block a candidate in Texas who called for creating a “detention facility for American Zionists,” a new affair has emerged in Maine involving Graham Platner, a sharp critic of Israel who is shaping up to be the Democratic nominee in one of the most important Senate races.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday night that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told his campaign staff last year, days after he launched his Senate bid, that she had discovered he had sent explicit sexual messages to other women during their marriage, including while they were undergoing fertility treatments. Gertner contacted his advisers before a large rally he held with Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the leading figures of the party’s progressive and radical left wing, because she feared the information could be used for political blackmail. She found the messages on her husband’s phone and said they involved 12 women. Platner’s team later said the number was actually six women, and that the contacts ended before the campaign began.
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Graham Platner is working to unseat 5-time Senator Susan Collins
(Photo: Graeme Sloan / Getty Images North America / AFP)
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Mirror selfie in which his tattoo of a skull and crossbones symbol associated with the Nazi Totenkopf was hidden
Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer from Maine, is a former Marine and soldier with the Maryland Army National Guard with no political experience, but within months he became one of the most talked-about figures on the American left. In November, he will run for Maine’s Senate seat against veteran Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has served five terms. Democrats view the race as one of the key contests that could allow them to regain control of the Senate. Platner’s main rival in the Democratic primary, Janet Mills, withdrew from the race in late April, effectively making him the party’s front-runner.
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Plattner with progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, who expressed his support for him
(Photo: Joe Raedle/ Getty Images North America/AFP)
Platner’s background story seems tailor-made for the current Democratic era: a former combat soldier with a gravelly voice, an anti-establishment figure who supports Sanders and talks about class war, billionaires, a rotten political system and health care for all. But a series of problematic statements has recently accumulated around him.
'Israel is massacring children' and women who 'accidentally have sex'
It was recently revealed in the U.S. that Platner once had an active account on the messaging app Kik, whose users are about 60% young people ages 13 to 24 and which has been linked to scandals involving online exploitation of minors. His profile featured a mirror selfie in which he was shirtless, with only a towel around his waist. Several of his tattoos were clearly visible, but his most infamous tattoo — a skull and crossbones symbol associated with the Totenkopf, the Nazi SS concentration camp guard unit — was hidden.
In the past, when the tattoo on his chest drew negative coverage in the U.S. media, Platner explained that he got it in 2007 while he was a soldier on leave in Croatia with Marine friends and did not know its meaning at the time. He later covered it with another tattoo. However, it was revealed that in a 2019 Reddit thread he explicitly discussed the meaning of the symbol and even defended another man who had tattooed an SS symbol on his body.
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Platner said that when he discovered the meaning of the tattoo he covered it up
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP )
Platner has previously called himself a “proud communist” and claimed that “all cops are bastards.” On women’s issues, he also carries a long list of controversial remarks. In another Reddit post, he once described how, while working at a well-known bar in Washington, one lawmaker would get drunk there and boast about the women he had sex with outside marriage. Platner wrote that he had “a pretty flexible moral compass when it comes to those things.”
In 2012, Platner boasted about having sex with prostitutes from Latin America, and in a separate post recommended that soldiers spend their leave with prostitutes in Thailand “instead of going home to a nagging wife.” In another post, he shared intimate details about satisfying himself in portable toilets during his military service. In 2013, he wrote that women afraid of rape should avoid getting drunk to the point where they “accidentally have sex.” In another post, he mocked sexual assaults in the U.S. military.
After the posts were exposed, Platner apologized and said he was horrified when he reread them. “I did not recognize myself in them or the person I am today,” he said. He also explained that he had been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and binge drinking after four combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I was just a human wreck,” he said.
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Platner says he was 'a human wreck' after four combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan
(Photo: Amanda Sabga/Reuters)
Platner has also made a series of anti-Israel remarks. He is known as a supporter of ending U.S. military aid to Israel, has described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide,” and during public election debates said that if elected he would work “to bring into positions of power people who do not believe that mass slaughter of children is acceptable behavior from an ally.”
In 2014, in a discussion about a video of a Hamas attack in which IDF soldiers were killed near Nahal Oz, Platner wrote that from a military perspective it was “a successful and well-executed small-unit raid.” Responding to a user who mentioned the execution of the soldiers, he wrote: “From a professional standpoint, this was a successful and very beautiful raid against a stronger opponent. I like that.” He later wrote that he was willing “to give credit where credit is due, no matter who they are fighting for.”
Passover seder as damage control
Many in the party’s moderate wing sought to distance themselves from Platner after his remarks were exposed. Democratic Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, for example, said the Nazi tattoo and the explanations he gave for it “personally disqualify” the candidate. By contrast, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, the party’s most senior Jewish official, has already said he will support Platner in the race against Collins because Maine could determine control of the entire Senate. Platner himself has tried to appease the Jewish community and even hosted a Passover seder attended by 50 community members. The event was held in cooperation with the head of the local branch of the left-wing Zionist lobby J Street, which is assisting his campaign.
Following the revelations about his past, Platner’s campaign manager resigned along with other senior staffers. Nevertheless, and despite a broad counter-campaign funded by Republican organizations circulating his old posts, Platner has consolidated his status as the Democrats’ leading candidate in Maine. His opponent, David Costello, trails far behind in both polls and fundraising and does not pose a real threat. The Democratic primary in the state will be held June 9, but in practice it has already been decided. The latest polls ahead of the final race against Republican Collins show Platner leading the incumbent senator by 9 points and enjoying a 20-point advantage among women.
Either way, the new affair complicates the image Platner has tried to build of himself as someone who has changed, apologized for his past and is asking to be judged by the present. In April, at a campaign event in Maine, he was asked whether there was anything else that might come out about him. He replied that Republicans would surely “make things up,” but promised everything had already been revealed. “There is no big, dark secret in my past,” he told the crowd. “I lived my life.”
'Betrayed' wife’s response: 'No marriage is perfect'
After Platner’s sexual messages were exposed in the media over the weekend, his wife stood by him Saturday and presented the affair as “a private story being exploited politically.”
“I shared very personal details about my marriage with someone I considered a friend. I trusted her with the most private chapter of our lives, and today I am deeply hurt by the betrayal and invasion of privacy,” she wrote in a statement.
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Platner is known as a supporter of ending U.S. military aid to Israel, has described Israel’s actions in Gaza as 'genocide'
(Photo: Amanda Sabga/Reuters)
In a video she released, she said she and her husband are receiving couples counseling and individual therapy, and that “no marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage. I want my marriage, and I want to be married to Graham.
The couple have previously shared that they are undergoing complex fertility treatments in hopes of starting a family, and Gertner stressed that the pressures have only strengthened them.
“I know the man I married and the husband he has been for me on the best and worst days of my life. That has not changed, and it will not change,” she said.