With only a few days until the primary election and voting already underway, the top Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, is answering if he should remain in the race after numerous concerns over his past have come to light.
Platner has maintained frontrunner status to unseat longtime Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins. It's an election Democrats almost need to win if they want to take control of the Senate come November. But after The New York Times published a story where previous romantic partners called Platner's behavior "toxic" and described him as someone who "does not respect women," some wonder if his candidacy is kaput.
Platner doesn't think so, though.
"The whole point of these stories is to make sure we're not talking about healthcare, it's to make sure we're not talking about raising taxes on the rich, it's to make sure we're not talking about getting money out of politics," he told Maine Public in an interview on Friday.
He also said no one from the National Democratic Party has told him to drop out of the race.
The New York Times article hasn't been the only thorn in the campaign's side though. When the combat veteran turned oyster farmer announced he was running for Senate, Platner's tattoo of a Nazi-symbol came to light. Platner has said many times that he didn't know the skull and crossbones resembled a Nazi SS sign and that he was drunk with his fellow Marines when he got the tattoo in 2007. Platner's old and since deleted Reddit comments that were racist and others made blaming sexual assault vicitms also came to light.
Then, the Wall Street Journal reported Platner, who is married, exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women early into the campaign in 2025. His wife, Amy Gertner, has since defended her husband and their marriage.
The New York Times story followed. In that story, one of Platner's ex-partners, Lyndsey Fifield, who has worked for conservative causes and on Republican campaigns, described instances and recounted a time when Platner locked her in a room and said she would remain there until she was "calm." Platner told Maine Public' that the allegations were "just not true." He also discredited the status of his relationship with Fifield, stating they never dated and she was "someone I had a casual relationship with." Instead of seeing the article as damaging to his campaign, he took it as a sign they're doing something right.
"To read in the New York Times, like someone gossiping about Amy and I's marriage, that's painful, but at the exact same time, it's almost a sign that we're on the right path," Platner said. "I mean, people would not expend this amount of money and resources and energy trying to rip through every single part of our lives if they didn't feel threatened."In a social media post made on X the day after The New York Times story published, Fifield said Washington's culture towards victims of abuse hasn't changed and that she came forward because she wants to set an example for her daughters.
"I'm so done. This just cannot keep happening. I will not one day send my daughters to go work in a congressional office if this culture is not radically transformed," she wrote. "People need to know they can and should speak up when they're abused or when they see abuse—and know there will be no point scoring about what party affiliation they have."
The campaign of Sen. Susan Collins did not immediately respond to Maine Public's request for comment.
Platner has been upfront about his mental health struggles. After his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Platner said he lived with undiagnosed and untreated PTSD and depression. As a result, he admits that he drank too much and that it was, as he told Maine Public, "the darkest time of my life." Platner said his mental health improved once he started getting help from the VA and participating in therapy in early 2017.
Platner told Maine Public that he expected his past to be dug up, but that he didn't believe it would be to the extent that it has become.
"When Amy and I decided we were going to do this, we knew that our lives are going to get ripped apart. We knew that people were going to lie," he said.
But he added that he knew the "whole political pundit class" and the "political establishment" was going to fight the campaign "tooth and nail" because they are building "something substantial."
Platner is confident that voters will see past his controversy if he continues to meet Mainers where they're at.
"I very firmly believe that if I go out and continue to engage with people and continue to talk about the reality that Mainers are living in, the struggles of regular everyday people – that's why we're going to win this thing," he said.
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