The Platner Pattern

Are we really doing this again?

Earlier this week, a woman accused U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner of raping her. Jenny Racicot’s story is devastating, credible, and entirely unsurprising. From The New York Times’ exposé on Platner’s history of mistreating women to the Maine politician’s now-removed Nazi tattoo—with all that smoke, there was bound to be fire.

Just today, another woman came forward: Lyndsey Fifield told The Washington Post that Platner would stealthily remove condoms during sex against her wishes.

“I confronted him both during and after [sex] because he knew that I was not on birth control and how dangerous that was…He would act like cute about it, like ‘Oh sneaky me.’”

This is the man we’re meant to believe would protect reproductive rights?

Chances are, more women will come out—as will more stories of various kinds of wrongdoing. After all, men who rape women and sport Nazi tattoos don’t tend to be standup guys otherwise. Abuse of women has long been the canary in the coal mine—a bright red waving flag, warning of broader offenses yet to come.

Ignoring it has always come with a cost, and not just in political races.

United Nations officials call misogyny “the gateway, the driver, [and] the early warning sign” of extremist violence and terrorism. Mass shooters often have a history of domestic violence that, if taken more seriously, could help prevent future tragedies. The connection isn’t limited to individual acts of violence, either: one of the earliest signs of fascism is attacks on women and their rights. And before authoritarians subject entire nations to violence, they often start with individual women. (We should know.)

Don’t get it twisted: I’m not suggesting Platner is akin to a mass shooter, or even Donald Trump. What I am saying is that the hatred of women is serious. And the left’s inability to accept or grapple with that fact is no small problem.

New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom got at something important when Platner’s Nazi tattoo became news in 2025. She pointed out that Democrats appear to believe that poor white people aren’t just racist, but “uniquely ignorant of their racism.” Their belief, she wrote, is that ”Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.”

I think the same is true of the left’s willingness to overlook misogyny. It comes from a place of believing that men are just like this—white working class men, especially. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s so dangerous. It’s not normal for grown men to call women “hatchet wounds,” as Platner did, or to leave Reddit comments suggesting that women are to blame for their rapes.

Up until the most recent allegations, Platner’s team and supporters treated his history of sexist statements and abuse as the acts of a damaged guy who didn’t know any better. Some asked detractors to give him a break, pointing to his mental health struggles. Didn’t we know he had PTSD? Don’t we think people can change and grow? As if Platner was a young wide-eyed boy rather than a middle-aged man running for the United States Senate.

Others insisted that the whole thing was a coordinated smear campaign targeting a non-establishment candidate. As if it were Platner who was in need of protection from the women sharing their stories. (We saw this often amid #MeToo: in a country where men are perpetually protected, women talking about assault is the real act of violence.)

And while women were asked to suck it up and support yet another abuser for the good of the country, let’s not pretend everyone around Platner was holding their nose—or saw his racism and sexism as hurdles.

Part of the reason men voted for Trump in the first place is because they liked his misogyny. Does anyone really believe that thought hadn’t occurred to Platner’s team? It would be foolish to think that this fetishization of white working-class voters isn’t also, in part, a fetishization of the racism and sexism they’re assumed to carry.

At the end of the day, apathy to misogyny isn’t just a moral failing—it’s a political one. Anyone who cares about progressivism, or purports to want to build a better world, can’t treat sexism as an acceptable trade-off. Not just because the hatred of women predicts broader harm antithetical to the values we all claim to hold, but because women are people. In a moment when that fact is up for debate in half the country, we need a movement that’s crystal clear about where it stands. (And it can’t be just short of rape.)

Right now, conservatives are going all in on women’s subjugation: debating whether we should be executed for having abortions, fighting court battles to let us die in emergency rooms, and floating the idea of taking away our right to vote.

When Fifield spoke to the Times last month, she said Platner had left marks on her, yanked her, and once twisted her arm behind her back. “It hurt,” she told them, but, “it didn’t break my arm.”

That can’t be the standard—for any of us. A world worth fighting for won’t need to twist our arms to win it.