NYT: Ex GF of Platner Says He Knew All About "My Totenkopf," Used Physical Force Against Her, Bragged That He Would Rape His Male Enemies, "Not in a Gay Way," But to Show "I'm Dominant"

Coming soon: Claire McCaskill demsplains that fantasizing about homosexual rape of your enemies to prove your dominance is not psychopathic, but rather "authentic" and "blue collar."

Well this is definitely not the sexual assault exposé I was expecting, or that I got you amped for, but... eh, maybe for now, it's enough.

I don't want the SA stuff coming out yet (if it exists) anyway.

This feels like the NYT is warning Maine Kampf to withdraw before the next round of disclosures.

On Tuesday evening, after a whirlwind day in Washington, Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, rushed home.

Rumors were spreading from Portland to the Potomac about Mr. Platner's messy personal life, after news reports that he had sent sexual messages to women while married. Democratic senators were pressing him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were swarming, staking out his hometown.

Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.

...

But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and "toxic" relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.

Mr. Platner could be charming and charismatic, they recalled in interviews, but also demeaning to women and, in at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful.

He claims it's all due to PTSD which is playing the role of Biden's Childhood Stutter in this narrative. Anytime he's discovered to be lying or abusive, he says it's his childhood stutter brought on by PTSD, and you cannot question him about it, or else you Hate the Troops.

...

Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as "cavalierly contemptuous of women's emotions, of our 'weakness.'" Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts "reminded me of just how much he hated women."

Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. "When I saw the old comments that he made online," she said, "I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with."

Some of the women also raised questions about his trustworthiness. Mr. Platner's insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield sai. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as "my Totenkopf."

His campaign strongly denied that he knew what the tattoo stood for. And in a statement to The Times, Mr. Platner said he had "too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend" during what he described as a "very dark period of my life."

...

This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including six women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner.

...

Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he "never hit me, he never punched me."

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders -- sometimes hard enough to leave marks -- and, 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 an injury, it didn't break my arm."

...

Ms. Fifield also recalled that Mr. Platner's displays of weaponry and discussions of violence sometimes left her uneasy.

...

He had what she described as a "warrior ethos" and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.

It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.

"He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them," she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in "a sexual way, not in a gay way."

"He was like, I would rape them to show them that I'm dominant," she said.

Is he a former reader? Does he not know that the quote is "I would f*** him, not in a gay way, but like a Viking"?

...

Mr. Platner, who had overlapping relationships with other women while he and Ms. Fifield dated, also referred to women as "hatchet wounds," Ms. Fifield said, a crude term for female anatomy.

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Ms. Fifield said she did not expect her friends to offer that corroboration because she did not tell anyone at the time, saying she had been embarrassed.

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Caroline Lemp, who dated Mr. Platner for several months in 2013, described him as a "gentle giant." She said he never made her feel unsafe or showed any signs that he was struggling with the physical or mental effects of his military service.

Does that mean his PTSD excuse is a lie?

...

Last fall, a few months after announcing his campaign for Senate, Mr. Platner said that he had learned from news media inquiries that the tattoo on his chest was widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, and he moved to cover it.

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"It was not until I started hearing from reporters and D.C. insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol," Mr. Platner told Politico in a statement in October. "I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that -- and to insinuate that I did is disgusting."

Ms. Fifield called that a lie.

Mr. Platner, she said, knew when they were dating years ago that the tattoo was a Nazi symbol, and that he called it "my Totenkopf."

"I would never have known what that was," she said. "He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo."

Ms. Fifield said he told her that he and other members of his unit selected the tattoo because "they were like a death unit, they were killers," and saw a parallel between their unit and the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or S.S., unit, that used the skull-and-crossbones image.

"They literally, deliberately, selected it because it was relevant to their military unit," she said.

...

Throughout his campaign, Mr. Platner has presented his life as a story of recovery and personal growth.

He has described himself as "self-medicating and drinking heavily" and "becoming very emotionally distant" during his time in the military, which ended in 2012, he says, and the years immediately afterward. A relationship with a girlfriend while he was serving in the Marines "totally fell apart because I was just a wreck of a human being," he said in an interview with The Times last month.

Then, in 2016, he returned to his small hometown, Sullivan, Maine. With therapy from the Department of Veterans Affairs, he got treatment for PTSD, anxiety and depression and began to build a new life. In 2018, he took over an oyster farm from a family friend.

"Took over" sounds a lot like "was given as an act of charity towards a drug-addicted layabout bum."

Still, he stayed active on Reddit, offering a glimpse into his unvarnished thinking in more than 1,400 messages between 2016 and 2021, when he says he stopped posting.

...

"I'm a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days," he wrote. "Still got the guns though, I don't trust the fascists to act politely." He has since said he abhors political violence.

But his relationships with women have remained complicated.

...

Asked about the post in a follow-up interview this spring, Ms. Racicot, who said she agreed with many of Mr. Platner's policies, said she had an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Platner and had positive memories.

But she was not shocked, she said, when she saw the incendiary comments he had made about women that have surfaced during the campaign. "I was like, that makes sense," she said. "This person does not respect women."

Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior "reckless" and "unsettling."

...

On the campaign trail, Mr. Platner has consistently worked to reassure voters who have been rattled by what they have read about his messy personal history. He has said that he had not lived a "very complicated" life.

Needless to say, Maine Kampf denies just about everything negative the women say about him.

Not really terribly damaging. Most stuff will be dismissed because it's from a "right wing" Republican, who apparently isn't all that right wing because she dates communists.

She confirms that he's lying about not knowing it's a Totenkopf tattoo, but Democrats don't really believe him about that, anyway. They know they're backing a Nazi. They are pro-Nazi, because they are antisemites and increasingly part of the Islamic jihad.

Is this all the New York Times has, or is this the first volley?

I don't know. I'd say it's the first volley, but this article doesn't seem to allow for the possibility that they spoke to other women who alleged sexual assault.

But then, that stuff seems to be about his "conquests" as a young nepo baby at Hotchkiss. None of the girls that would tell those tales would be categorized as women who dated him as an adult.

I guess we'll see.

It just might be that the former communications director for the National Man-Boy Lincoln Association got it wrong, if you can believe that. (Or did he hype it in order to make the story feel like a let down? Like false claims that Clinton got red faced and enraged during his deposition?)

Or, it could be that the NYT shied away from reporting the really toxic stuff they'd found.

During Pride Month, dude?!

DURING PrIde MoNtH dUdE??!?!

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:20 PM

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