Graham Platner, Maine Democratic Senate candidate, joins MS NOW host Chris Hayes to respond to new reporting from the New York Times that details allegations with several women describing parts of his behavior as “unsettling.”

CHRIS HAYES, HOST:  Tonight we have some breaking news surrounding Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner.  New York Times has exclusive reporting tonight on three women who previously dated Platner and called his behavior in those relationships unsettling, volatile, and toxic.  Graham Platner will be joining me in just a moment to address the allegations reported in that story.   Now, the report comes as Democrats are more aware than ever about how the effort to hold Trump accountable will, of course, require flipping seats in the currently Republican majority Senate.  And lots of political observers agree that one of their best shots at flipping a seat should be in Maine.  It’s a state that Donald Trump actually lost three times.  He lost it to Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden.  It is represented by longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins, who has held that seat since 1997, even as the state has elected Democrats at other statewide offices and for president.   And Collins has long been an electoral powerhouse.  But Democrats feel like this November is the time to finally unseat her, and she has been polling behind in head-to-head matchups for months now.   On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls in Maine for one of the most closely-watched primary contests in the country.  And you might remember that late last year, a little-known oyster farmer named Graham Platner took the state by storm with a barnburner of an introductory political ad.  That’s the one we’re playing on your screen there.  It’s pretty memorable.  You probably saw it.   And it’s also very clear that Platner is a very natural, high-level political talent.  He’s been able to draw large crowds throughout the state, sometimes in small towns where half the town’s there.  He has barnstormed basically nonstop doing event after event after event.   It’s also true that Platner is a political unknown.  He’s a combat veteran who readily admits to have — having a very messy past.  And with that past has come a slow, consistent drip of negative headlines that he has had to reckon with since entering the race.   So the first was a revelation that Platner had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest.  He says he got it while drinking with some buddies when he was overseas as a Marine, and that he did not know what the symbol meant at the time.  He has since had that tattoo covered up.   Later came the revelation of stuff that Platner wrote on his Reddit account as a private citizen and some ugly stuff denigrating women, insulting rural voters.  His campaign says the comments are representative of a lost man struggling with alcoholism and PTSD after leaving the military.  They argue his story is one of redemption, and Platner relying on his community in Maine to lift him out of that dark place.   Now, Platner has addressed many of these issues with voters in Maine, and we should just be clear here, when some of these revelations came out, people expected the polling to veer away from him.  But it didn’t.  And in some cases, it got even stronger.  Both the polling data and reporting from on the ground in Maine have indicated pretty strongly voters, these are Democratic primary voters, at least, right, were willing to forgive the tattoo and the stupid posts.  They liked what they were getting from Graham Platner.   The narrative did change a bit last week, I think, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had previously confided in a former campaign aide at the beginning of their campaign where they’re sort of going through vetting that she had caught her husband sending consensual, sexually explicit text messages to other women shortly after they married in 2023.   Now, that was before Platner was a public figure.  The campaign aide subsequently told the story to the Journal.  Republican critics, not surprisingly, pounced on the story, partly because they’d just nominated Ken Paxton in Texas and wanted to direct attention away from that.  And some Democrats began to fret about widespread rumors that this wasn’t it, that other shoes would drop.   Well, this afternoon we have this story from The New York Times, right?  New York Times published a story.  They said a number of women who had previously been romantically linked to Platner.  Per The Times, many of the women described a thoughtful, caring partner.  Three of them, in fact, still friends with him.  Three others described a more troubling situation.   The most troubling, I think, was one of the women who’s named Lyndsey Fifield.  She met Platner 13 years ago, and she made specific allegations about Platner acting roughly or threateningly with her, including yanking her out of a cab, twisting her arm.  She says she was hurt but not injured.  She also says Platner never punched or hit her.  And we’re going to address those allegations at length with Mr. Platner in a moment.   For his part, Platner’s campaign called Fifield, quote, a longtime GOP operative who’s dedicated her career to electing Republicans.    Now, The Times describes her as a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns.  She has made statements supportive of Susan Collins.  She’s linked to a conservative group that’s worked with Collins, though she says she has not been active with the group recently.   But Platner’s campaign does not deny he has shown poor judgment in the past, as we just sort of ran through, right?  That has been part of the story of who this guy is and how he came to this moment.  In a statement to The Times, he said that in the past he had, quote, ‘too often self-medicated with alcohol and was far from a perfect boyfriend during what he described as a very dark period of my life.  I take responsibility for all of that and wish I had been better’, he said, ‘any characterization beyond that is false and, I believe, politically motivated.  I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since and the movement we are building in Maine’.    Graham Platner, Democratic Senate — candidate for Senate in Maine, joins me now.   Mr. Platner, it’s good to have you on.  Thank you so much for doing this.   GRAHAM PLATNER (D-ME), U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE:  Yeah, thanks, Chris.  I really appreciate it.  Thanks for having me on.   HAYES:  I just want to say at the start that like, you know, we’ve had you on before and I think you and I are both people that in other contexts talk about income inequality and health care and all those issues which are extremely important and we devote a lot of time to on this program.  We are — this is not, you know, the thing that we spend a lot of time chasing.  But, you know, there’s some serious stuff there I want to go through with you.  And I think voters have a right to know about it.  And I want to with what Ms. Fifield says about being rough, is the term The Times wrote.   And I’m going to just read you the account so you have it.  This is from The Times.  Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid.  In the interviews, she grappled with how to process her experiences.  She was quick to note, ‘He never hit me, he never punched me’. She said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders, sometimes hard enough to leave marks, on one occasion yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.  During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was calm.  Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning. ‘It hurt’, she said.  But she added, ‘It didn’t cause any injury.  It didn’t break my arm’.    Did that happen?   PLATNER:  No, it did not.  There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about are simply not true.  Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.   In this piece, there’s a lot about my struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol.  And I’ve been very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service.  And that’s what that combat — that’s what that kind of life looks like.  And — and so there are things in this that I absolutely will take responsibility for and — and have been speaking about openly for months now.  But those serious allegations are just not true.   HAYES:  You did not grab her by the wrist, you did not put your hands on her shoulders, you did not push her into a room that you closed the door on?  She’s — she’s lying about that… PLATNER:  No. HAYES:  … is what you’re saying?   PLATNER:  Yes.  That is not true.   HAYES:  You mentioned the tattoo, so I want to talk about that because I think this was troubling to a lot of people.  And I think, again, your account of it assuaged some of that, that fear, clearly in Maine voters, as reflected, again, by reporting and polling.  She says, same person, that you referred to the tattoo as my Totenkopf, which is the German word for this particular Nazi symbol.  There is other reporting in Jewish Insider in October, in which an anonymous acquaintance says you used that same phrase.   Did you know what this tattoo was about before last October when you said you first became aware of it?   PLATNER:  No, I did not.  And I also think it’s important to note that it’s very likely, and I think that she is that same source.  She’s the person who’s been telling people this from the beginning.  And it’s a — so I feel like, you know, we’re kind of rehashing the thing we’ve been through.  I had that tattoo for 17 years.  It’s a skull and crossbones.  I got it with other Marines, who I served with in Iraq, in Croatia.  And in the time that I had it, I got a security clearance with the State Department.  I re-enlisted in the United States Army where I was screened for gang and hate tattoos, and I took my shirt off in front of my family, many of whom are Jewish.   We even released as a campaign a video, which you’re putting up on the screen right now, of me dancing at my brother’s wedding to his wife, who is Jewish, and her fully extended Jewish family.  And I would not have taken my shirt off in that context if I had known.  And so any statement saying that I did know is — is, again, totally false.   HAYES:  I — I do want to follow up one place on this, and I don’t want to get too forensic, but, you know, The Times reported that they — they saw texts of hers, including a text in August, I believe, August 3rd of last year, this would be before October of last year, in which she basically said that you had a, quote,  Nazi tattoo,  and she joked about how she was going to go volunteer for Collins.   Now, again, this is a text that got sent so like we can place the time, right?  This is in August.  How does she know it’s a Nazi tattoo in August of last year and you don’t know it’s a Nazi tattoo in August of last year?   PLATNER:  Well, she certainly didn’t send that text to me.  So whoever she sent it to and was talking to, that’s — I — I can’t say why, but I will say that I certainly didn’t know.  And — and the text messages she sending to friends who may have recognized it, that’s — they didn’t tell me that, so.  HAYES:  Can we talk — I want to talk about the piece that came out before this, which was about the — what your wife had alerted your internal campaign folks to.  And — and just to sort of stipulate, to get out ahead, that like, I think some people view this as a real betrayal by your former campaign manager and that — that may be true.  And I understand and I also watch the video that your wife put out, which I found incredibly compelling and moving, about what you’ve worked through.  But just to be clear again on the details here, and there’s obviously two subtexts here, right?  This is you facing Maine voters in a primary and also a general election that’s going to happen.  We all know that, right?  We’re all on the same page.   Were you sending sexually explicit messages to other women back in 2023-2024 as reported in the piece?   PLATNER:  So this is the first time in my life that Amy and I’s marriage has been the interest of people besides Amy and I.   HAYES:  Yes. PLATNER:  And it’s — it’s definitely a bit jarring, a bit strange.  It’s also a marriage that is very strong and that I do believe we deserve some privacy in.  I will just say this, I — at the beginning of our marriage, I made mistakes and Amy held me accountable for them.  And we worked through them.  And the work that we did made our marriage significantly stronger.  And who we are today is an incredibly faithful and happy married couple.   Amy is my best friend.  I love her more than anything else.  And quite honestly, the hardest part about this whole campaign is I don’t get to spend as much time with her as I like to.  And so it has been a — yeah, it’s been a hard experience to have — have gone through this together as a couple long before our lives were brought out into the public, and then to have it essentially outed by someone that we put our trust in, who then turned around and betrayed Amy’s trust and has now turned, frankly, our private parts of our marriage into a bit of a public political spectacle.   It’s — it’s hard.  But it is — but it’s our marriage and it’s a good marriage.  And we’re very happy in it and we’re very happy with each other.  And I thank my lucky stars every single day that Amy is my wife and that she has given me a lot of — a lot of grace and a lot of love over the years.  And I’m a lucky man for it.   HAYES:  (inaudible) you don’t want to get into specifics, in details, and I can — I can respect part of that, but I do want to just make sure on the timeline, right?  Because I think there’s — there’s two things going through people’s heads a little bit here, which is, you know, you have talked about self-medicating with alcohol and being pretty messed up when you got back from the service and trying to figure out what you’re doing and doing things maybe you don’t — you wouldn’t stand by now and saying things you wouldn’t stand by.   But this is 2023.  And so there’s a — there’s a difference in the time.  And I think the first question is like, when did this stop?  If it stopped, if there was stuff that you’re not proud of that you worked out with your wife, you don’t want to talk about the details, when did it stop?   PLATNER:  Oh, it — it stopped when it was happening.  I mean, like, it was a — Amy and I — Amy and I — it happened soon after we got married.  And we dealt with it very, very early in our relationship.  And so that’s — that’s when it stopped.   HAYES:  Are there texts of yours, pictures of yours floating around out there, which, again, maybe from a time capsule, but people I think are understandably a little nervous, maybe you’ll be the nominee, probably be the nominee for the Maine Senate on Tuesday, and then it’s October 10th, and here’s a text or picture of Graham Platner that is not the kind of thing that you want to see?  Like, are you worried about that?  Are there texts like that?   PLATNER:  I’m — I’m not worried about it.  I mean, I — one, I went — as I’ve talked, I went through my life through a number of years struggling and not exactly acting under — with the best behavior.  I’ve been very, very open about that.  And if people would like to continue to drag things up from that time in my life, I’m sure that we are going to see at some point somebody attempt to do exactly that.   Just know that these are things that happened before I became a public figure, before I got into politics.  And it’s a part of my life that I’m very happy to talk about and talk about the struggles within.  And so I do think that as we move forward, you know, what we’ve built up here is really something quite spectacular.   It’s very new.  And I think one of the reasons why it’s worked so well is because I have been very open with the people of Maine.  I go all over the state.  I’ve held over 80 town halls.  And I ask or I answer questions from Mainers regardless of what the question is.  I’ve made myself very accessible to people.  And I want them to know about my struggles because I firmly believe that if you believe in a transformational politics, you’ve got to believe in the ability for people to transform.   And my journey is one of transformation.  And I’m very happy to talk about that earlier part in my life.  And I have no doubt that people will attempt to continue to revisit Reddit posts, continue to try to revisit parts of my past.  But I think what’s really important to note here is that these are things that I talk about in my past, things that I’m not proud of, but it is a past that I had to go through to get where I am today.  And I’m very proud of who I am today.  And I’m very proud of the movement that we’ve built up here in Maine.   HAYES:  Just to be clear, just about revisiting, right, I mean, I think channeling concerns, I think, of Democratic voters and — and Democratic officials, and a lot of people, right, that it’s not a question of revisiting, right?  It’s new revelations.  Like vis-a-vis, you know, texts or pictures.  And I just — I know you want to give some privacy to your marriage, but I really do feel like I need to get these answers from you, which is like, the people you were texting with, whatever that was, in whatever context, they were adult women.  You knew that.  And it was consensual.  Is that true?   PLATNER:  Yes.   HAYES:  And you have that — you confirmed that.  You knew their age.   PLATNER:  Yes.  Oh, God, I mean, yeah, yes, of course.   HAYES:  I want to play something for you that was a reaction of Senator Elissa Slotkin as this story came out.  She was talking to MS NOW, and she had this to say.  Again, I don’t even know if she had gotten a chance to read — read that story yet.  So she may be reacting to essentially the headline, but here’s what she had to say.   (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. ELISSA SLOTKIN (D), MICHIGAN:  I have not read the whole thing.  I look forward to the day where I am not answering every single week a question about bad behavior by another dude.  I just — I look forward to that day. (LAUGHTER)  NICOLLE WALLACE, HOST, DEADLINE: WHITE HOUSE:  You and me, both.  SLOTKIN:  On camera, live.  I look forward to that.  And I haven’t read like the piece, but what my team told me, like, look, first of all, I think about the women who are coming forward.  Second of all, I think if — if there are allegations of violence, I got a real problem with that.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, if there’s violence, that’s not OK.  So I haven’t gotten into the details.  I’m sure I’ll have to get, just like every week, the same briefing from my team on what happened and what — you know, and but frankly, I’m sick of it.  We’ve got a lot of bigger issues to, you know, fry here.   (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES:  What’s your response to that?   PLATNER:  My response is that I — I agree.  If there was violence, that’s a huge issue.  But those allegations are false.  And I also agree with the senator that we do have much bigger things to fry here.   You know, we are talking about a moment in American history that is going to go down as quite unique.  We are facing incredible challenges across our society.  Here in the State of Maine, we’re facing the fact that our health care system is collapsing and people can’t afford homes, and the average Mainer is struggling just to pay their bills because the price of goods and services continues to go up.  And that’s why we built this movement.   I — I will say that, you know, it is — I am — the people of Maine are the people that I’m trying to answer to here.  The opinions of the pundit class, the opinions of, frankly, just even establishment politicians, that’s not my audience.  That’s not who I’m trying to appeal to.  And they can have their opinions and they’re entitled to them.   But to me, it’s the people of Maine who I’m going out to, listening to every single day, and trying to make sure that I can represent their values and their will in the United States Senate.  And — and that’s why I go out and will continue to go out and face my future constituents day in and day out.   HAYES:  Part of that, though, and people of Maine, right, is that like they’re going to react to new information, right?  They’re going to — they’re going to keep forming an opinion and you’re going to run a very — again, if you are the nominee, as you know, it appears you are headed to be, a pretty brutal campaign against Susan Collins, who is — has been a real electoral colossus and has beaten back, you know, nominee after nominee and did beat Sarah Gideon by however many points after she was polling up 9.   And when people think to themselves, and I know this was the meeting that you had in Washington, right, where you stood in front of Democratic senators and said, you know, the worst rumors you’ve heard aren’t true, I think was the sentence that was reported, at this point I guess people have to take you at your word that that’s true and that there’s nothing else.  Is that what you are saying?   PLATNER:  Yes.  Oh, of course.  And even this new reporting, the — the new things are false.  And the fact that I was, you know, a bad boyfriend a decade ago, that’s something I’ve talked about openly at length for quite some time in multiple places.  So there is an element where, yeah, no, I mean, there — now I have no doubt, like I mentioned earlier, that this is a dirty campaign.  I do expect the Republican Party to fight as dirty as possible.  And I expect them to try to create things.  I expect them to try to drag stuff up consistently, but there won’t be anything new.   It’s going to be a rehashing of essentially the same stuff.  And I honestly think that’s why it’s just going to fall flat, because I’ve been incredibly open and accountable for everything throughout this campaign.  When we’ve been faced with allegations of things, when people have brought up stuff from my past, I don’t run away from it.  In fact, I lean into it and we have a deep conversation about it because I do think people need to see that it is possible to really change over time and become a better person.   And every single day I wake up trying to be a better version of myself than the day before.  And that’s exactly what I’m going to continue to do.  And I think that’s a — it’s a pretty core part of our message and a core part of the campaign itself.  And whether it’s being accountable for my — my online behavior at an earlier part of my life, whether it’s realizing that a tattoo I had was harmful to some folks, I immediately got it covered up, whether it’s being accountable to my wife, which everybody has very publicly learned about, these are things that, like, accountability is important to me, and I’m going to continue being honest and accountable about things that are real.  But I am going to push back against allegations that are just patently untrue.   HAYES:  There was a — a statement from Janet Mills, who is the governor, who was running against you until she dropped out, and she said this after the story about the messaging or texting with — with women came out.  She says, people have the impression that I withdrew or dropped out, but I simply suspended active campaigning.  I am still on the ballot.  How do you understand that comment?   PLATNER:  I mean, I — I’m not going to really speak to what the intent of the governor was there.  I think a lot of people can probably draw their own conclusions.  She is correct.  She is still on the ballot.  It is a statement of fact.  I — I do believe that, you know, it’s — it’s a bit of opportunism, but I think, you know, that’s kind of anybody can sort of see that, so.   HAYES:  At any point over the course of the past week, have you considered dropping out of the race?   PLATNER:  No, not once.   HAYES:  You’re someone who I spoke to you very early in this campaign after that campaign ad came out.  And you’re not a person who’s been in public life, you haven’t run for office.  And I think that has been incredibly appealing to a lot of people.  Sometimes say, why don’t we get other people like, you know, in public office, a broader pool?  And then, you know, you run for public office and it’s a lot, right, is going to come out. PLATNER:  Yeah. HAYES:  And… PLATNER:  It’s a lot. HAYES:  And given — and I’ve got to say, you know, watching — watching your wife’s video, which again, I found very affecting, very compelling, and very moving, like, do you regret doing this?   PLATNER:  No, not in the slightest.  It is — Amy and I knew when we got into this that we were going up against an entrenched political machine.  We were going up against, frankly, a — the entire political apparatus.  The message of our campaign is that we need to have a political revolution and change how we do politics in this country.   Part of that really has to be making politics accessible to people who have lived regular lives, not just to people who prepared for it.  And we knew that because we had lived regular lives with all the challenges that come with that, and backgrounds that come with living a life, that we were going to see everything torn to pieces, and people were going to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and try to find anything to attack us.  And that is exactly what has happened.   It’s not surprising.  I mean, this is — and I hate to say it, but it’s also why most regular people don’t want to get involved in politics.  I — we don’t doubt what we’ve done.  We are very proud of what we’ve built.  We believe deeply in our politics.  But it’s hard.  This is a hard experience.  It’s been hard on my family.  It’s been hard for both Amy and I.  And it’s just hard in general to have to go through life having been a private citizen when nobody was paying attention to, to suddenly have the entire world really, really caring or digging through everything that you’ve ever done.  It’s an unpleasant experience.  And I — I get why people look at this and think, yeah, I don’t — I don’t want to do that.   I’ll say this though, we need to change it.  It shouldn’t be like this.  We need to have a politics where we’re talking about policy, where we’re talking about the future, where we’re talking about really the kind of political system we want to see.  And the only way that we’re going to get that is by getting more regular people into it.  And those of us who are going to really start off, we’re going to take a lot of lumps, but somebody has to.   And Amy and I knew early on that we were going to take lumps, and we just are — we’re dedicated to this.  And it has never crossed our mind to drop out of this thing.  I’m — I’m… HAYES:  I want to… PLATNER:  … fully committed… HAYES:  I want to connect… PLATNER:  … to this until the end.   HAYES:  I want — I want to connect this to policy, though, because I do think I — you know, I agree and like I said at the top, right, like that’s a lot of what we spend our time on here.  You know, truthfulness or candor or people feeling like they trust you is connected to policy, right?  Because… PLATNER:  Yeah. HAYES:  … if they don’t feel like you trust you, if they feel like, well, if you’re in a bad situation, you’re going to say whatever gets you through the next interview the next week, then you could do that about policy.   PLATNER:  Right. HAYES:  You could do that about what your core principle commitments are, right?  So for like people that think, you know, I don’t — he says he didn’t know what the tattoo was, this person says he did.  He says that he never put hands on this woman, she says he did.  You know, people can just decide who they want to believe there.   PLATNER:  Yeah.   HAYES:  But — but your candor, the fact that, like, whether people can trust you, you would agree is a legitimate issue for voters to consider.  It’s not — that’s not some trivia.   PLATNER:  No, no, not at all.  I mean, that’s — and honestly, that’s why I’ve run the campaign that I’ve run.  Like I’m sick and tired of a politics where politicians come across as these sort of focus group-tested, two-dimensional figures who just repeat talking points.  It’s — it’s the reason I’ve been willing to go out and talk to everyone and talk about really private parts of my life very publicly, and to make sure that people can see that I am open and I am honest, even if it’s uncomfortable.  I’ve been doing that the entire time and will continue to do so.   Yeah, I mean, look, at the end of the day, people can say things and if they’re not true, then I’m going to point out that they’re not true.  And that is, of course, up to someone to believe who’s telling the truth in that.  But I — I do hope that the kind of campaign that I’ve run and the way that I’ve been accessible to people, and frankly, the candor that I’ve just displayed the entire time, I really do hope that it engenders in Maine voters an understanding that I’m going down there to do what I say that I’m going to do, which is to represent the working people of Maine and to fight back against the political system that doesn’t care about them, and to fight back against an economic system that is rigged against them.  And I think people understand that.   HAYES:  Final question for you.  Have you had any communication with the folks at the DSCC or Democratic operatives who have talked about dropping out, who have talked about other options?  Have you received any communication today about that?   PLATNER:  No, I have not.  And — and I expect that we will not, primarily because what we’ve built up here, it’s robust.  It’s very strong.  I mean, even just the past couple days, the outpouring of support that Amy and I have seen has been deeply humbling.  We have people dropping off food at our house.  We have neighbors coming across with eggs.  Everybody is incredibly concerned about our well-being because they feel like we’re being attacked in some way, and they want to help protect us.  And it is that kind of feeling of community, that feeling of standing up for each other that I really think embodies this whole campaign.  And that’s why we’re going to beat Susan Collins in November.   HAYES:  All right.  Maine Senate Candidate Graham Platner, who will be on the ballot on Tuesday, in Maine.  We will be covering that here.  I really — I do appreciate you taking all that time today to do that interview.   PLATNER:  No, of course, thanks, Chris.  

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