On Tuesday evening, after a whirlwind day in Washington, Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, rushed home.
Rumors were spreading from Portland to the Potomac about Mr. Platner’s messy personal life, after news reports that he had sent sexual messages to women while married. Democratic senators were pressing him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were swarming, staking out his hometown.
Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.
In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that, describing Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.
But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.
Mr. 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.
Mr. Platner, 41, a combat veteran, has spoken openly about grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and drinking that he said resulted from his time in the military. As revelations about him have surfaced — including his dismissive remarks online about rape and derogatory comments about women, as well as a tattoo he had that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol — he has said his past behavior does not reflect who he is today. Mainers, he has urged, should not judge him for “the worst thing I said on the internet on my worst day 14 years ago.”
The critical accounts provided by three of the women interviewed by The Times, who were each in romantic relationships with him for years, give a fuller picture of Mr. Platner’s life. They shed light on an earlier era, when he has acknowledged intense struggles, but also raise questions about his more recent years in Maine, which his campaign has presented as a period of healing and personal redemption.
The disclosures last week that Mr. Platner, now married, was exchanging sexual messages with women as recently as last year have complicated that narrative and unnerved Democrats, who see the Maine seat as key to their efforts to regain control of the Senate.
Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”
Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
Some of the women also raised questions about his trustworthiness. Mr. Platner’s insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield said. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.”
His campaign strongly denied that he knew what the tattoo stood for. And in a statement to The Times, Mr. Platner said he had “too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend” during what he described as a “very dark period of my life.”
“I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better,” he said. “Any characterization beyond that is false, and I believe, politically motivated. I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since, and the movement we are building in Maine.”
‘Do Not Call Graham’
This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including six women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner. The Times spoke with friends or acquaintances of several of the women, reviewed contemporaneous text and social media messages and saw some of Ms. Fifield’s diary entries. Mr. Platner declined to be interviewed for this article.
The women who described difficult relationships with Mr. Platner knew him at different points of his life. Ms. Fifield said she dated him starting when they were both in their late 20s in Washington, during a time Mr. Platner has described as challenging. Ms. Racicot knew him in Maine when they were in their mid-30s and he was living in Sullivan, Maine, and working on his oyster farm.
The third woman, a Democrat from Maine who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had a long-distance relationship with Mr. Platner on and off for years, as recently as 2016.
The three described him in similar terms. Spending time with him could be exhilarating, they said. But they also recounted patterns of heavy drinking and womanizing. Asked to sum up how he treated her, the third woman said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”
When Ms. Fifield first met Mr. Platner in 2013, he was a student at George Washington University, and she was working on veterans’ issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and beginning to make a name for herself as a conservative activist online. Their roughly two-year, on-again, off-again relationship, as Ms. Fifield described it, was heady and passionate.
“Lyndsey, I love you in a way I can’t even describe,” he texted her in 2016, according to a message reviewed by The Times. “You are literally everything to me.”
She said she recognized that Mr. Platner was struggling with the aftermath of his military service and thought she could help him. Ms. Fifield, who was navigating family challenges at the time, recalls that period as emotionally rocky for her, too.
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.”
Mr. Platner “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, his campaign said. The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations.
Ms. Fifield also recalled that Mr. Platner’s displays of weaponry and discussions of violence sometimes left her uneasy.
She said he kept an AR-15 lying around his apartment on Capitol Hill, and would sharpen an ax — a relic from his time working on the Appalachian Trail before he enlisted in the Marines — while watching television.
He had what she described as a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.
It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.
“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be 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.
Asked about those remarks, a Platner campaign official did not dispute them. A friend who knew Mr. Platner and Ms. Fifield during that period said the comments sounded out of character.
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.
The Times reviewed texts between Ms. Fifield and Mr. Platner, along with Google Chat exchanges, texts and Facebook messages between Ms. Fifield and her friends during and after the relationship. The Times also reviewed some of Ms. Fifield’s diary entries from after the relationship had ended, and spoke with two of her friends who confirmed that the pair had an emotionally volatile relationship but could not corroborate the physical altercations or the most controversial comments she described.
Ms. Fifield said she did not expect her friends to offer that corroboration because she did not tell anyone at the time, saying she had been embarrassed.
The impact of the relationship on Ms. Fifield’s life lingered for years, she said. She referred to him in a diary entry in June 2016 as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” Those close to her encouraged her to move on: “DO NOT CALL GRAHAM,” a friend messaged her that year.
Ms. Fifield, who is affiliated with Independent Women, a conservative group, insisted that her political beliefs had nothing to do with her choice to come forward. She worked briefly on Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and before that for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Ms. Fifield said she had not been paid by any campaign or political entity since Ms. Haley’s campaign.
Mr. Platner’s campaign said in a statement, “Let’s be very clear: This is a lifelong G.O.P. operative who’s dedicated her career to electing Republicans.”
Ms. Fifield said she had no connection to the campaign of Senator Susan Collins, Mr. Platner’s likely Republican opponent. She acknowledged that Independent Women had been supportive of Ms. Collins but said she had not been active with the organization recently.
“I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat — it has nothing to do with that,” Ms. Fifield said. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”
Carrie Lukas, the president of Independent Women, said Ms. Fifield had never been an employee and was last paid by the organization in 2022. The total amount she was paid, Ms. Lukas said, was roughly $15,000 over 2021 and 2022.
Mr. Platner’s campaign arranged interviews for The Times with three other women who dated him over a period of seven years and all support his candidacy. They described a very different kind of relationship.
Caroline Lemp, who dated Mr. Platner for several months in 2013, described him as a “gentle giant.” She said he never made her feel unsafe or showed any signs that he was struggling with the physical or mental effects of his military service.
“He was a great boyfriend,” said Ms. Lemp, 36, who now lives in St. Louis. “He was super kind, very nice, fun.”
The others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Platner was never physically threatening. One, a nurse from Belfast, Maine, who dated him for a couple months after he returned home to Maine, described him as responsible, intelligent and supportive. Another, who dated him in Washington between roughly 2011 and 2013, said she witnessed some “potentially problematic behavior,” referring to his heavy drinking. But she “felt really safe with him,” she said.
‘My Totenkopf’
Last fall, a few months after announcing his campaign for Senate, Mr. Platner said that he had learned from news media inquiries that the tattoo on his chest was widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, and he moved to cover it.
Mr. Platner said that he hadn’t known what the image was, other than “a terrifying looking skull and crossbones ” on the wall of a tattoo parlor in Split, Croatia, where he and other Marines in his unit had it done in 2007.
“It was not until I started hearing from reporters and D.C. insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol,” Mr. Platner told Politico in a statement in October. “I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that — and to insinuate that I did is disgusting.”
Ms. Fifield called that a lie.
Mr. Platner, she said, knew when they were dating years ago that the tattoo was a Nazi symbol, and that he called it “my Totenkopf.”
“I would never have known what that was,” she said. “He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo.”
Ms. Fifield said he told her that he and other members of his unit selected the tattoo because “they were like a death unit, they were killers,” and saw a parallel between their unit and the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or S.S., unit, that used the skull-and-crossbones image.
“They literally, deliberately, selected it because it was relevant to their military unit,” she said.
Mr. Platner “strongly disputes” Ms. Fifield’s account of what he knew about the tattoo and what he told her, his campaign said.
His campaign noted that he had not hidden his tattoo since receiving it, taking off his shirt in photos, at the beach and at the gym.
“I’ve lived my entire life like a regular person with a skull and crossbones on their chest,” he said on a liberal podcast in October, after showing video of him dancing shirtless at his brother’s wedding. “At no point in this entire experience of my life did anybody ever once say, ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi.’”
In a private chat group last summer, months before Mr. Platner acknowledged the tattoo himself, Ms. Fifield told friends that her ex-boyfriend-turned-Senate candidate “has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.”
“It’s a Totenkopf,” she told them on Aug. 20, according to a screenshot she shared with The Times. “An actual one.”
“I will personally go campaign for Collins,” she wrote. Two of her friends reacted with a crying laughing emoji. The comment was a joke, Ms. Fifield told The Times.
Records show no evidence of any relationship between Ms. Fifield and the Collins campaign.
A Complex Narrative
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Platner has presented his life as a story of recovery and personal growth.
He has described himself as “self-medicating and drinking heavily” and “becoming very emotionally distant” during his time in the military, which ended in 2012, he says, and the years immediately afterward. A relationship with a girlfriend while he was serving in the Marines “totally fell apart because I was just a wreck of a human being,” he said in an interview with The Times last month.
Then, in 2016, he returned to his small hometown, Sullivan, Maine. With therapy from the Department of Veterans Affairs, he got treatment for PTSD, anxiety and depression and began to build a new life. In 2018, he took over an oyster farm from a family friend.
Still, he stayed active on Reddit, offering a glimpse into his unvarnished thinking in more than 1,400 messages between 2016 and 2021, when he says he stopped posting.
Many of his online messages indicated that Mr. Platner was still processing his experiences in the military. Others focused on oyster farming and the joys of life in Maine. By 2021, he wrote, he no longer believed in “any of the patriotic nonsense” that made him want to enlist, and had become “a firm believer that the best thing a person can do is help their neighbors and live a loving life.”
“I’m a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days,” he wrote. “Still got the guns though, I don’t trust the fascists to act politely.” He has since said he abhors political violence.
But his relationships with women have remained complicated.
In November 2023, Mr. Platner married Amy Gertner, a former teacher from near his hometown.
One year later, an anonymous Facebook user went on a private page called “Are we dating the same guy” and shared an image of Mr. Platner, smiling broadly and sporting a T-shirt with line drawings of oysters.
“Ghosted me in the past,” read the message, dated Nov. 4, 2024. “Then popped up on a different dating app. I’m concerned he may have a significant other out there.”
The comments drew replies from at least six women, several of whom noted that he was married, according to screenshots posted by The Maine Wire, a conservative media outlet. Ms. Racicot, who was one of the women who commented on the chain, confirmed that the post was real, as did a second woman who commented on it.
Asked about the post in a follow-up interview this spring, 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.”
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.”
Last week, The Wall Street Journal and The Times detailed Ms. Gertner’s efforts to warn his campaign staff about some potentially explosive information in the early days of his candidacy. Her husband, she said, had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.
Mr. Platner sought to discredit aspects of the reports, but acknowledged that “Amy and I went through something hard — because of me.” And Ms. Gertner, who had become a more visible presence in his campaign in recent weeks, posted a direct-to-camera video defending her husband and her marriage. “No marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage,” she said. “I want my marriage, and I want to be married to Graham.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Platner was asked by Democratic senators in Washington in private meetings if there was anything else controversial in his background. He assured them there was nothing, but he predicted his adversaries would lie about him, according to a person familiar with the private discussions.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Platner has consistently worked to reassure voters who have been rattled by what they have read about his messy personal history. He has said that he had not lived a “very complicated” life.
“I have a lot of ex-girlfriends,” he told voters at a town hall in late April. “They’re all still my friends.”
Reporting and research was contributed by Reid J. Epstein, Kitty Bennett, Kirsten Noyes and Aric Toler.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.
The post Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior appeared first on New York Times.
