cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/62988948
A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.
The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.
Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.
“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”
Can someone please explain why this particular race is getting so much attention?
Like I’m seeing a lot of people point to Graham Platner specifically as evidence that working class Americans cannot take back the DNC from the Epstien-billionare class.
I don’t understand why this particular race has become so front and center.
It’s probably the most contested race between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. If there’s any hope of Democrats taking the Senate, Maine is a must-get. The race was always going to me important regardless of the candidate.
Add to that that Platner’s rise there is a direct challenge to the centrist political philosophy and that’s why there’s so much money going after him (not saying this woman isn’t telling the truth). If Platner’s progressive messaging could win in a purple state, then the idea that the Democrats need to moderate to win outside of deep blue areas is proven wrong.
☝️
Right now the centrist machine claims leftist politics (part of which is cutting funding for Israel) only works in deep blue states so centrism and all the money flowing into it is still the strategy to win elections. Platner win in Maine puts a grenade in the mouth of the machine. Once that nade explodes, we’re gonna see a whole lot more leftist challengers all over the place. And that would be a big material problem for the ruling class as taxes will be next.
The one-two punch of Mamdani showing that progressive policies can actually be implemented to improve people’s lives and Platner showing that unabashed progressive policy can win battleground states would be devastating to them.
Who knows what’s going to happen with Platner now, but he is definitely a huge threat to shitty centrist politics.
My bet - heartfelt apology, like he did before, then pedal to the metal on that red hot communism! He’s gonna put this at the feet of the corporate political machine which wants to keep Mainers from having free healthcare, etc. And I think it’s going to work.
Nah, he’s cooked this time. Many of his high profile supporters who stuck with him through the previous allegations are currently retracting their endorsements on Twitter. He’s done.
High profile supporters aren’t what win races.
No but they are a strong indicator of the way the wind is blowing. The Maine Democrats organization has just also called for him to stand down and the pressure is quickly mounting.
Soon the pressure to drop out will be so strong, his base will splinter and he won’t have a choice but to concede. It’s looking pretty much inevitable at this point.
The establishment weren’t ever supportive of him on the first place. They’ve been blowing their wind against him the whole time. They lost.
Honestly, I do think he can just power through this. Charisma and the election being about bigger things will get people to just forget about stuff they don’t really want to think about. The visceral emotional anger against him would need to last for months and that just hasn’t been how people tend to respond to misdeeds by politicians.
I get you’re new to rhetorics, but the metaphor is:
’Cause last time I read, this populist Senator wasn’t campaigning on rearming his constituency. There’s no grenades, only straws to the grinder.
Part of it is that this IS a very important race. It is a genuine chance to unseat collins and is a big part of the effort to… probably still not flip the senate but get it to within the range where even one republican caring about remaining electable can stop a vote.
But mostly it kind of became a flashpoint in the Democratic party itself. platner is a laughably horrible candidate. Like, if he were a character on The Simpsons or South Park, it would be deemed as unbelievable. But his populist platform means he is saying stuff that gets online leftists clicks so the podcast bros LOVE him and establishment Democrats kinda glommed on to. So… every single time some other horrifying revelation about the blackwater nazi comes out, it becomes a huge controversy about how everyone is out to stop the leftists and blah blah blah blah blah.
And then… people realize it isn’t just bernie supporting him but a lot of other Democrats and we kinda remember why there was so little push by the Democratic party to actually act on the epstein files and… yeah.
And I think conservatives (and tankies) have realized this is a great way to undermine all the great work the DSA et al have been doing. Who cares about AOC or Tlaib or Mamdani or any other genuinely inspiring candidate. Here is a nazi rapist who got bored standing guard at Abu Ghraib and decided to join blackwater.
Wait so is bro an actual nazi?
I’m Canadian and I’m pretty tapped out trying to keep up with the USA anymore. Basically accepted that the next 10-20 of the USA is going to be the type of shit I tell kids around the barrel-stove while the more able bodied adults hunt radroaches
He’s not. Some people here are nutty and think everyone recognizes a specific skull and bones as a third rate Nazi symbol and then instead of saying or doing Nazi shit throughout their lives or running for the party that embraces Nazis, would instead keep their Nazi ideology secret, but still keep the tattoo, and run on progressive political messaging to challenge someone who’s already been letting the Nazis do whatever they want.
It’s a really daft theory.
Literally the symbol from the “are we the bad guys?” sketch.
He’s not, people scraped his reddit history and the worst they found was some typical ex-military grunt angst and some meat head talk. Nothing anywhere close to nazi-ism. The tattoo was a bad choice but it’s very obvious to anyone who does even 5 minutes of research into him that he’s not. He’s pro-LGBT, believes in supporting minorities, is anti-authoritarian and wants to cut military spending. But leftists hate nazis so the billionaire media is paying big bucks to get leftists to hate him.
20 some odd years ago, during his “service” (can’t be arsed to check if it was while he was a guard at Abu Ghraib during the tortrure and sexual assault or afterwards when he joined Blackwater as a merc…) he got a “skull” tattoo on his chest. A tattoo that just happened to be a totenkopf: One of the bigger symbols of nazi germany and basically the logo of the SS. He would spend the next two decades insisting he had no idea what it was (even though he was a self proclaimed “military history buff” and a pretty regular user of reddit where Mitchell and Webb’s “Are We The Baddies” skit/memes are common…) until he finally removed it last year… and replaced it with celtic imagery associated with white supremacy.
So he walks like a nazi, oppresses non-whites like a nazi, and tattoos his skin like a nazi. And while one can argue that “death’s heads” are common in predominantly white militaries around the world… does it matter?
Just want to point out he did not spend twenty years pretending he didn’t know what his tattoo was. He spent like the last two or three years doing that. Before he reportedly was open about it. He’s just a liar about his nazi tattoo lately.