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Photograph by Sofia Aldinio / Bloomberg / Getty
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Ian Crouch
Newsletter editor
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Jasper Craven interviewed Graham Platner twice for his piece, published today. The first was in June, after the Times spoke to some of Platner’s former partners, one of whom alleged that he had been physically rough with her. (He denies this.) The second time was a little more than a week ago, after another former partner, Jenny Racicot, had accused him of rape in an interview with Politico (an allegation he also denies), and supported the claim with Facebook messages she sent years before Platner was a public figure. By Craven’s second interview with Platner, he had dropped out of the Maine Senate race, leaving a string of questions behind about the political decisions that fuelled his rise, and about the extent to which his controversies were connected to his military service and his struggles with P.T.S.D. and depression. “In a country stubbornly attached to myths about the military’s positive transformative power, Platner presented a stark counterfactual,” Craven writes. “Still, how much of his behavior should be read through the lens of what combat did to him, and how much of it is simply who he is, independent of war?”
Last week, speaking with Craven, Platner—whose popularity was based, in part, on his willingness to be vulnerable about his past mistakes—continued to deny the allegations made by Racicot: “I don’t know how one is supposed to be vulnerable about things that aren’t real.” He said that he had initially been reluctant to suspend his campaign, after the publication of the Politico story, in part because he believed he had successfully convinced voters of his personal transformation. “I mean, Jesus Christ,” he said, “we had polling where I was still competitive.” For the story, Craven also talked to Platner’s wife, his mother, and men who served in the military with the former candidate. Other veterans whom Craven spoke with argued that Platner’s alleged behavior is plainly disqualifying, regardless of his experience during war. Paula Coughlin, a Navy veteran who acted as a whistle-blower during the 1991 Tailhook scandal, in which officers sexually assaulted or harassed eighty-three women and seven men, said, “There is absolutely no way I would tolerate that bullshit out of anybody.”
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