Embattled Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner took another hit when The New York Times reported on disturbing allegations from his ex-girlfriends that add to the troubling picture of the Democrats’ new golden boy.
The Bernie Sanders-backed oyster farmer is looking to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November, but he first has to survive Tuesday’s primary and has been battered by an onslaught of reports about his dark behavior in the past.
In a Thursday bombshell, the paper published accounts from the candidate’s former squeezes about Platner’s “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior, rough treatment of them, and called into question the Democrat Senate hopeful’s claim that he didn’t know that the tattoo on his chest was of a “death’s head” used by the Nazis.
One of the women, a 40-year-old conservative from Virginia named Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, recalled her former boyfriend as being “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness,'” telling the paper that his recently revealed online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”
Three women who dated Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, told The New York Times they found his actions intimidating and disturbing, describing volatile relationships. https://t.co/ClaeKxVUEs
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 4, 2026
She also recalled that Platner affectionately referred to the controversial skin ink as “my Totenkopf.”
Fifield described how her onetime boyfriend had been rough with her physically during the relationship while drinking, “leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid.”
According to The Times, “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” and that during an argument, Platner “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,” said Fifield, who added, “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.” She said that Platner “never hit me, he never punched me.”
The candidate “strongly disputes” the claims of being physical, while the paper admits that it “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations.”
Fifield also said that Platner’s “displays of weaponry and discussions of violence sometimes left her uneasy,” including keeping an AR-15 “lying around” his apartment and sharpening an ax while he was watching TV.
She said that her ex had a “warrior ethos” and fantasized about killing people whom he “deemed a threat,” also telling her that “rape was about power,” something she said had “stuck with her through the years,” according to The Times.
“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” Fifield recalled, and that it wouldn’t 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 told the paper.
Another former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, who dated Platner between 2019 and 2021, said that she “was not shocked” over texts in which he made demeaning comments about women, recalling that he once showed up at her home drunk when she asked him not to come over, and his behavior was “reckless” and “unsettling.”
The paper interviewed six women for its reporting, with Fifield’s allegations being the most troubling. The Times reported that in a June 2016 diary entry, she referred to him as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.”
“I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat — it has nothing to do with that,” she said. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”
Others weren’t as harsh in their recollections.
One woman who dated Platner in 2013 called him a “gentle” giant who never made her feel unsafe.
“He was a great boyfriend,” 36-year-old Caroline Lemp told the paper. “He was super kind, very nice, fun.”
According to The Times, Platner’s campaign “strongly denied that he knew what the tattoo stood for,” and in a statement to the paper, the candidate said that in the past he had “too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend” during what he said was a “very dark period of my life.”
“I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better,” Platner 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.”
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