‘After the story went up I began to ask … wait, where are the stories from the other women?’ Platner’s ex says
An ex-girlfriend of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (D.) accused the New York Times of omitting sexual assault accusations against Platner from a bombshell story on his troubled relationships with women.
Lyndsey Fifield, who accused Platner of physically abusing her during their relationship, said the Times first reached out to her in April after other women spoke to the paper about their own “toxic” relationships with Platner. Fifield, who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, said the Times connected her “to two of the other victims so we wouldn’t feel so alone” and “insisted to each of them that I trusted the NYT journalists and that we were doing the right thing despite their (sadly very accurate) sense that something was wrong.” The Times ultimately published its story on Thursday evening—and Fifield said it omitted damaging accusations from the other women.
“After the story went up I began to ask [the reporters] … wait, where are the stories from the other women?” she wrote in a Friday morning X thread. “Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus?”
“The editors said it was too much, they explained,” Fifield continued. “It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign.”
A Times spokeswoman defended the report but did not specifically address Fifield’s claims.
“We published accounts provided by several women who were in romantic relationships with Graham Platner,” said spokeswoman Nicole Taylor. “Our story accurately presents each of these accounts as told to our reporters and according to our standards. We stand by our reporting of the accounts from Ms. Fifield and the other women, who provided a revealing look at the behavior of a major candidate for the U.S. Senate.”
The Times piece came shortly after Platner met with leading Senate Democrats in Washington amid fallout from other reports on sexually explicit texts he sent at least six women soon after he married his wife. The sexting scandal led lawmakers to ask Platner whether additional unsavory information about him—including “allegations of sexual assault”—would emerge, the Wall Street Journal reported. Platner “denied any credible allegations of assault were forthcoming.”
Though the Times piece did not include such allegations, it did detail several jarring incidents between Fifield and Platner, whom she met in Washington, D.C., while he was attending George Washington University and tending bar at Tune Inn, a popular Beltway watering hole.
Fifield said Platner, who has admitted to drinking heavily in the past, frequently grabbed her by the shoulders during arguments, sometimes leaving marks. According to Fifield, Platner twisted her arm behind her back during one argument, and pushed her into a bedroom, and held the door closed.
“It hurt,” said Fifield, though she added that Platner “didn’t break my arm.”
Fifield also discussed Platner’s infamous “Totenkopf” tattoo, a skull-and-crossbones symbol associated with the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS). Fifield said Platner “would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo” and chose the symbol while on leave from the Marines in Croatia because “it was relevant” to his military unit. “They were like a death unit, they were killers,” Fifield said. Platner has claimed he was not aware of the tattoo’s meaning before launching his campaign for Senate.
Platner’s campaign responded to the allegations by calling Fifield, a former Heritage Foundation fellow, a “lifelong G.O.P. operative who’s dedicated her career to electing Republicans.” But other Platner exes, including a lifelong Democrat, recounted similar experiences with Platner.
Jenny Racicot, who dated Platner between 2019 and 2021, told the Times she found Platner’s behavior “reckless” and “unsettling” and recalled an incident in 2021 when he showed up to her house drunk against her wishes. Platner’s Reddit posts about women also rang a bell for Racicot, including a 2013 missive in which he said rape victims should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”
“I was like, that makes sense,” Racicot said. “This person does not respect women.”
Platner broadly denied Fifield’s allegations in an interview Thursday night with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes.
“There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about, are simply not true,” Platner told Hayes. “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.”
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