We didn’t need a rape accusation to know Graham Platner was unfit

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When the story detailing allegations of rape against Graham Platner dropped Monday afternoon, I was about to head out the door to Gloria Steinem’s house, of all places. The timing felt both cruel and kismet: While my fury was eclipsing my excitement to be in conversation with a living legend, I realized who better to understand patriarchy run amok than a foremother of feminism herself?

Since we learned last fall about the Maine Democratic senate candidate’s Nazi insignia tattoo, the personal revelations about the Marine veteran and oyster farmer have only gone downhill from there. But an initial instinct told me not to weigh in. Let the people of Maine decide for themselves, I thought. I watched from New York as the public learned about shitty stuff he’d posted online, his previous work for the private military contractor Blackwater, and the sexually explicit texts he sent to other women while married to his current wife (which were flagged by her to his campaign as a concern.) And when the New York Times published a story just a few days before the June primary detailing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, while I weighed in on social media, I shied away from opportunities to explicitly spell out how dangerous I believed him to be. He went on to win the primary.

It turns out the instinct that kept me from vocalizing my opinion on Platner was the same as the one that prevented Jenny Racicot from coming forward with allegations of a 2021 rape—that is, until this week. “One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot, who had dated Platner a few years back, told Politico. My position is in no way analogous with Racicot’s, but I, too, had a latent feeling that turning on Platner was in some way turning on an opportunity to kick Republican Susan Collins out of the senate, and possibly regain control of the entire chamber.

While Racicot was one of the women in the NYT story, the stomach-churning details of her sexual assault were for whatever reason not reported then. But on Monday, she said it all: “I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me. I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’” She describes Platner letting himself into her home while “almost blackout drunk” and having sex with her against her will. Now that we have a fuller picture of Platner’s malfeasance, there is finally consensus around what has long been clear to many of us: he’s a dangerous man. If only the earlier evidence was enough.

When the NYT story dropped on June 4th describing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, people who I considered political heroes insisted continuing their support. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stuck by Platner, even when there was already more than enough evidence that he was not fit to be the Democratic candidate. Both Warren and Sanders finally pulled their support this week after the rape allegations were published, but it shouldn’t take a woman sharing details about a grotesque intimate experience to knock a man off his pedestal.

Meanwhile, men (and some women) who I nominally considered allies not only defended Platner at the time, but disparaged anyone concerned by the allegations. 

Ryan Grim, a progressive journalist and co-founder of Drop Site News, tried to undermine the allegations because one of the women from the story, Lyndsey Fifield, is a Republican. He then went on the progressive podcast Breaking Points and said the Platner situation was good because it was forcing Democrats to confront bigotry against white men. “The current cultural divorce between progressives and white men is so, like, stark that it is—it's just culturally, morally, ethically wrong,” Grim said. “But also just pragmatically, from a political perspective, you can't build a national party if you assume every white guy or every white guy with a deep voice who is a combat vet or whatever is, like, out to get you.”

Jon Favreau of Pod Save America defended Platner at every turn and mega-streamer Hasan Piker vocally stood by him. The Substack journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote that continuing to defend Platner showed that “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

While Favreau and Piker were both suddenly singing a different tune after the sexual assault allegations against Platner came out, Klippenstein dug in Tuesday with a post to his Substack mocking the apologies made by people like NYT Opinion Columnist Michelle Goldberg and the great author and thinker Naomi Klein, who wrote “I truly fucked up not doing my due diligence on Platner before offering high praise for his communication skills.”

Though Klippenstein admitted sexual assault, “crosses a line that tattoos, sexting and Reddit posts just do not,” he said he refused to apologize for defending Platner until now, writing that commentators “are trying to bully anyone who defended Platner against the earlier scandals into issuing self-abasing public apologies, by implying that anyone who doesn’t is pro-rape.”

Klippenstein implies anyone apologizing for their previous support is too soft to stick to their guns. The past is immaterial to him; there is only the information we have right now. To interrogate the past based on new information makes you pathetic. It doesn’t occur to him that for people who are genuine, an apology is not a performance. And now that there’s a credible claim of rape, it’s smart and good to stop supporting Platner. But if you judge him on anything short of rape, you’re a progressive traitor, or what similarly edgy political commentator Matt Stoller last month disparagingly called “Dem HR lady politics.” 

Sure, I suppose it is feminine-coded to not want a senate candidate who allegedly twisted an ex-girlfriend’s arm and 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.’” I guess it’s pretty girly to hear another ex describe him showing up at her house engaging in behavior she described as “reckless” and “unsettling” and imagining that there’s much more where that came from. Women sure are silly that way.

I could do a line by line analysis of all the ways Klippenstein’s non-apology is unhinged —reducing the allegations made it the June NYT story to “sexting” when it went far beyond that, admitting he’s friends with numerous former Marines with offensive tattoos, claiming his tolerance for Platner was merely an example of “giving people a chance”—but I won’t. His mindset is merely an ugly symptom of a broad set of conditions that allowed Platner’s ascendance. 

As writer Jamelle Bouie put it on Tuesday: “There is a cohort of men who resent the responsibilities and obligations of adulthood — of the fact that you owe things to other people. It is a fundamentally childish impulse that they have reconfigured as the height of masculinity, and i think it informs the parasocial attraction to platner.”

Platner’s implosion is the natural culmination of a campaign motivated by a warped sense of masculinity, one that told voters to give their trust to a candidate who had done nothing to earn it. It has revealed that, for some progressives, the important markers of a candidate who displays “positive masculinity” are primarily aesthetic, with little concern for whether or not the man in question actually lives the values he presents. Platner and his team had so thoroughly convinced journalists, commentators and voters that they had outsmarted the trappings of traditional masculinity, only to come crashing down as a result of it.

Critics and enemies of progressives will use this debacle as a data point showing the left flank can’t be trusted any more than the right. They’ll argue for moderation as the solution when I’d argue moderation, or perhaps adherence to traditional politics as usual, is what got us here. Though Platner’s policy stances have fallen squarely in the progressive camp, the excuses made for his personal shortcomings and failures signaled an old fashioned approach to politics where looking the part and sounding the part are enough to ignore all manner of sin. No, this latest tornado of violent misogyny won’t drive me from the left; if anything it’s made me recommit myself to the goals of progressivism and to continue fighting for liberation for all. And with Platner remaining in the race as of this publishing, there’s much work to be done.

This isn’t an apology as much as it is a statement of regret. I regret not being more vocal about Platner’s many red flags and the way they reflected on progressive values. I regret not saying more about the June allegations when they painted a vivid portrait of a dangerous man. I regret not doing what I always do—talking through my perspective on issues of national importance in an attempt to help others better understand their own feelings. But most of all I regret listening to the inconsequential male voices in my head instead of my own, which was overcome with anger and sadness at being asked to excuse another humiliation for women.

When someone shows you their Nazi tattoo, believe them.