This Was Only Going to End One Way

I didn't need to know specifically that a sexual assault allegation would be why Graham Platner never sets foot in the U.S. Senate. Something was always going to derail him.

This afternoon, Politico ran a story in which Jenny Racicot, an ex-girlfriend of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, said that he had sexually assaulted her. Racicot had previously been quoted in last month’s New York Times story about Platner’s aggression towards ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield as saying “this person does not respect women,” but “declined to elaborate” about an incident in 2021 when “he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over,” cutting off contact shortly thereafter.

In interviews with Politico’s Jessica Piper and Adam Wren, Racicot elaborated further: Platner had come over drunk, forced himself on her despite her telling him to stop, and came inside her despite telling him she wasn’t on birth control. The following morning, she asked him if he remembered what he had done and he said he didn’t. She cut off all contact with him afterwards, only reconnecting to let him know that she wasn’t pregnant after getting her period. Racicot provided emails and messages between her therapist and her friends backing up her story.

In a video this afternoon posted on X, Platner called Racicot’s claims “categorically false,” while adding that “Regardless of the inaccuracies of the reporting…. we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward”—but of course, no candidate who has ever won an election has used that phrase before. This is the beginning of the end of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign.

When I was in undergrad, my Russian literature professor, Gary Saul Morson, used an anecdote from a friend to illustrate a point he wanted to make about Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—that an environment with infinite possibilities for lethal damage will inevitably breed a deadly outcome. In Karamazov, it’s the fact that Fyodor Pavlovich, the father of the three (four) brothers, is so horrible to everybody in town that he’s fostered an environment where the fact that everybody wants him dead means that someone is eventually going to kill him. That sheer psychic energy is too great to overcome.

Morson illustrated this with an anecdote from a friend whose son went to summer camp with an expensive camera. Before he left, the friend said “don’t bring this camera. You will not return with it.” The son told him not to worry because was going to put it in a locker at the end of the day so nobody could steal it. Once again, he said “don’t bring it. You’re not coming home with it.” While he was at camp, a flash flood destroyed everything in the lockers, including the camera. When the son came home, he said to his dad he was still wrong in his original assumption because he was only thinking about theft and not a natural disaster. “I didn’t know there’d be a flash flood,” he replied. “But I do know that when you put a delicate piece of equipment in an environment you can’t control, something is going to happen.”

Graham Platner was always a fragile object. As an unvetted, untested candidate who had never run for office, he constantly had to sidestep around the gaping holes in the persona his consultants created for him. He played the role of a working-class oyster farmer, but he grew up wealthy and his main client for his oyster farm was his mother. He said “Susan Collins sent me to war” but he voted for Collins multiple times. Nonetheless, he played the role so well on camera and had so much money behind him that he made a splash, even appearing on the cover of Time Magazine for a story that will age about as well as the one they did on John Fetterman.

Many people saw through Platner’s facade right away. Some people realized it was fake when the picture of his Nazi tattoo and the Reddit posts dropped last October. Some who had endorsed him, such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, went quiet after stories emerged from exes insisted he had mistreated them. That didn’t matter: The political influencers and podcasters who boosted his campaign, most notably the Pod Save America Bros, rushed to his defense whenever scandals dropped, giving him airtime so he could tell people he had changed—never mind that he never provided receipts to prove he had changed. In an ecosystem that thrives on eyeballs, the performance of contrition can substitute for contrition itself.

It’s easy to say that the influencers and journalists who insisted that Platner’s baggage didn’t matter to Mainers and that he was the guy he pretend to be in his town halls were lying to us and to themselves. But if Platner actually was who he said he was, he never would have needed Pod Save America, Chris Hayes, Maine AFL-CIO communications director Andy O’Brien, or The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper to run interference for him. The persona created for him may have looked great on paper, but it was never going to withstand an environment in which his already-apparent liabilities made him a moving target for Republicans, who promised an “all-out assault” on him. This threat, which came after months of Platner scandals—and not even the worst ones—should have caused some self-reflection from his backers, but the far left has become so obsessed with beating more moderate candidates in safe districts that they completely ignore the reality of how destructive the GOP attack machine is.

And make no mistake, regardless of whether Platner remains on the ticket, this is not the last story you will hear about him mistreating women. It was never going to stop at Lyndsey Fifield, and it’s not going to stop at Jenny Racicot either. As the stories come out, those who defended him will likely delete tweets or lock their accounts (as Andy O’Brien, who has spent months harassing Platner critics, did today) and try to pretend it never happened. They don’t deserve to wipe their hands of this disaster.

Platner was never going to defeat Susan Collins given these liabilities, but I didn’t need to know that he would just lose the election to her to know that he will never set foot in the United States Senate any more than my teacher’s friend needed to know the camera would be destroyed by a flood and not a theft. All I needed to know is that in a hostile environment where a lot of people are already against you and a lot of threatening elements can capsize you, something is going to happen.