Left-wing Maine Senate candidate received a loan from his father, not a ‘Department of Veterans Affairs low-interest mortgage,’ as the New Yorker reported
The New Yorker on Friday corrected a report on Maine’s left-wing Senate candidate, Graham Platner, that falsely stated he purchased his home in Maine with “the aid of a Department of Veterans Affairs low-interest mortgage.” In fact, Platner received a $200,000 loan from his Ivy League-educated father, a prominent attorney and Democratic donor, to purchase the home, as the Washington Free Beacon first reported.
The New Yorker‘s September 25, 2025 profile of Platner—written by contributor Lisa Wood Shapiro and headlined, “Can a Maine Oyster Farmer Defeat a Five-Term Republican Senator”—originally stated, “With the aid of a Department of Affairs low-interest mortgage, Platner bought a house down the street from where he grew up.” That is consistent with Platner’s false characterization of events: “I bought my house in 2017,” he said in September. “If I hadn’t bought then, if I hadn’t had the support of the VA, my wife would now be priced out of the town I grew up in, like the millions of Americans being exiled from their towns and cities.”
But Platner, who casts himself as a “working class Mainer,” bought the house with aid not from the VA but from his father, who doled out a “payment of two hundred thousand dollars ($200,000)” to finance the house that Platner lives in today, mortgage records reported by the Free Beacon show.
The New Yorker updated the piece on Friday afternoon, four days after the Free Beacon first contacted the outlet about the error and three days after a New Yorker spokeswoman said the outlet was “looking into” the claim. The piece now reads: “Platner bought a house down the street from where he grew up, reportedly with the help of a loan from his father.” The publication was apparently unable to examine the publicly available documentation to confirm it. A note affixed to the bottom of the piece reads, “An earlier version of this article misstated the way in which Graham Platner funded the purchase of his home.” It does not detail the way in which the article misstated the purchase.
The New Yorker has long been hailed for its rigorous fact-checking operation. “It’s a principle of the magazine that the quality of its prose is inseparable from its veracity,” the Guardian wrote in March 2025. “The factchecking process is famously exacting, with no less than 28 staff employed to pick over every minute detail, however trivial.” In a piece headlined “The Rise and Fall of Facts,” the Columbia Journalism Review declared, “no publication has been more consistently identified with its rigorous fact-checking.”
The New Yorker even published a history of what it described as its “vaunted fact-checking department” in August 2025. “New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word,” staff writer Zach Helfand, a former New Yorker fact checker, wrote. “It’s difficult to check facts, or to talk about fact checking, without coming off as a know-it-all, a fussbudget, or a snob. But knowing things is hard. Checking is a practice. It’s not omniscience.”
While the exact terms of Platner’s home loan are unknown—private lenders like Platner’s father are not subject to the same disclosure requirements as banks—it remains active, according to the New York Times, which reported that Platner “is using a portion of his V.A. benefits to repay his father, his campaign said, a sum of about $950 a month.”
Wood Shapiro’s piece omits other aspects of Platner’s life that contradict his “rugged and likable working-class” image. She describes Platner as a “precocious reader” who “devoured books on military history, especially the American Civil War” in his childhood. It does not note that Platner attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut, the Hotchkiss school, that costs upwards of $75,000 a year, was expelled after a semester, and graduated from another private high school in Maine.
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