The horribly familiar story behind the whole Graham Platner debacle
From the moment it begins, a sexual assault condemns a victim to a lifetime of grim calculations.
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Jennifer Racicot’s allegation that Maine’s former Democratic US Senate nominee raped her in 2021 is a seismic political story. Democrats of all stripes are rightly searching their souls right now, analyzing this debacle for lessons they desperately need to learn.
But being lost in all the politics is a human story, and an achingly familiar one for survivors. It is the story of how victims of sexual assault must choose between two unimaginably awful options: staying silent or standing up.
Racicot chose to stand up and describe the night in 2021 when Graham Platner allegedly raped her.
“In that moment, I evaluated my safety,” Racicot told CNN host Jake Tapper. “A person who’s blackout drunk is in my home, has these intentions with me … has already caused this amount of destruction and is not listening to me.”
She and Platner, who announced Wednesday that he would suspend his campaign, had been casually dating for a couple of years. He’d let himself into her house that night even though she had told him not to come over, she said, and forced himself on her even though she told him no repeatedly and tried to push him away. She did not think she could fight him off.
In other words, she did the brutal calculus far too many women are forced to do.
“He’s big. He’s strong,” she recalled thinking. “I felt like complying for my safety was the least worst option.”
“Complying is not consenting,” she told Tapper. “[It] is getting it over with.”
Once Platner was done, and had fallen asleep in her bed, Racicot had more impossible decisions to make. Should she call the police? Should she try to make him leave? If she did that, he could hurt someone else.
“If I woke him up and sent him home, like I am now making the decision to put somebody that drunk on the road,” Racicot said. “And I didn’t want to live with the fact that like, if he got into an accident or hurt somebody else.”
So she lay awake beside him all night “in a state of panic,” trying to calm herself with the sound of ocean waves from her noise machine.
She confronted him the next morning, but Platner did not remember what he’d done, she recalled, and he didn’t bother asking. She told him never to speak to her again.
Platner categorically denied Racicot’s allegations in a statement issued after she first came forward. His campaign blamed “out of state establishment operatives,” for coaching and coordinating his accusers.
Like most survivors, she decided not to go to the police, Racicot told Tapper. She told a few people, and tried to forget it.
Five years later, she watched Platner’s insurgent campaign for the US Senate catch fire. Mainers were eager for somebody who would fight for working people, stand up to the president, and call corruption what it is. Racicot understood his appeal. She shares his views. She, too, wanted a Democrat to unseat longtime GOP Senator Susan Collins.
But she watched as stories came out that were consistent with the Platner who allegedly raped her that night. Reddit posts emerged in which he had written disparaging comments about rape victims. He had a tattoo associated with a Nazi symbol, but claimed he had no idea what it meant. He’d been sexting other women even though he was recently married. His campaign director left in protest, and others would soon follow, but voters and prominent endorsers — and some of Racicot’s own friends — seemed to look past his transgressions.
Platner and his defenders dismissed all of the damaging stories as politically motivated, the work of establishment Democrats and corporate types who were threatened by the movement coalescing around him.
Racicot knew that wasn’t true. In June, she spoke to The New York Times about her experiences with Platner. In that article, another former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, alleged Platner had been physically rough with her, and that he had said vile things about women. Fifield said he also repeatedly told her he would rape anybody who broke into his house, “to show them that I’m dominant,” she told the Times.
But Racicot faced the choice every victim of sexual assault does, especially when their alleged attacker has a public profile: She worried that telling the whole story would mean sacrificing her privacy, and making herself a target. She also struggled with what she called a “huge moral conflict,” because speaking up could jeopardize Democrats’ chances of ousting Collins.
Racicot tried to strike a balance. Though she told the Times she was not surprised at his awful comments about women, she did not disclose the alleged rape on the record. She said only that he was drunk and had come to her house against her wishes, and that she had cut off contact afterward.
She soon realized what every survivor who steps into view, however carefully, does: Her privacy was gone anyway. And for nothing. After the Times story came out, the women’s allegations were lost amid claims that Fifield, a conservative, was motivated by politics.
“My part of the story was just a read-over,” Racicot told Politico, which first reported her rape allegation.
No one could blame Racicot for stepping back after that, gathering up what was left of her anonymity, and moving on. But she decided voters should know the whole story. And so she told it.
There was so much smoke surrounding Platner by that point that even most of his willfully blind supporters had to concede there was almost certainly a fire here. Because Democrats stilltend to care about these things, Platner’s endorsers, and the party, withdrew their support.
The nominee said he would exit the race. As he inched toward the door, he cast himself as the real victim, blaming the Democratic establishment for using what he describes as false allegations to drive him out.
“This is exactly the kind of political system that everyone voted against on June 9th,” he said in a video announcing his exit. “We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change. And we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me.”
He is not suspending his campaign because of the allegations, Platner said, but “because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”
But it’s men who do what Platner is accused of who have the power. Because it still costs so very much for women like Racicot and Fifield to speak up.
They could have chosen to protect themselves. Instead, both women decided to pay that price.
“There are a lot of men in this world relying on the silence of women to be where they are,” Racicot told CNN. “And I don’t want to contribute to that.”
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