The Left Covers for Graham Platner

    In 2018, The New York Times talked to every person who may have ever met me at any time during my years on planet Earth. They harassed family, neighbors, old girlfriends, people I hadn’t seen since the third grade. All in an attempt to prove that I had seen Brett Kavanaugh try to get on top of a woman named Christine Blasey Ford at a high school party in 1982. They dissected our high school yearbook looking for clues. They slipped notes under the doors of the homes of my siblings. They accused Kavanaugh and me of drugging girls, and gang rape, and sat on evidence that proved them wrong. Hell, they are still covering up their evil.

    When they came up with nothing because the entire thing was an oppo hit from the DNC and Silicon Valley, the media resorted to making things up. The Washington Post did a profile of a man named Mike Sacks who said he grew up near Kavanaugh and me, knew our type, and that when we were drinking, “all bets were off.” By his own admission and the admission of the Washington Post, Mike Sacks has never laid eyes on Brett Kavanaugh or me.

    Yes, I do hate the media enough.

    However, I also don’t want to see an innocent man destroyed, the way the media tried to destroy me. This brings us to the case of Graham Platner. Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, is facing charges that he abuses women. These come on top of revelations that he has a Nazi tattoo, uses violent language, and drank too much.

    People might not like this, but I don’t really care about Platner’s Nazi tattoo (and I love Jewish people), or his horror-movie talk about what he would do to a would-be male intruder, or his drinking, or his contrition about being a lousy boyfriend. The guy’s a combat veteran. My experience in 2018 was nowhere close to what our military heroes endure every day to protect us and defend the right of opinionated a-holes like me to keep doing what we do. I cannot imagine what our veterans go through, and I give them a huge amount of leeway to deal with their demons. I would much rather be led by any one of them than by Sheldon Whitehouse.

    Speaking of which, Whitehouse, the man who introduced the term “boofing” into the Congressional Record, is giving Platner a pass. As is Cenk Uygar, Krystal Ball, and all the other leftists who screamed bloody murder and tried to crucify me for drinking beer and publishing an underground newspaper in high school. They tried to destroy my life, making me radioactive and unemployable (even by conservatives, who should have shown more guts). It has not been fun.

    Still, the Platner case comes down to one thing for me – did he physically abuse women, and is there solid proof of that? The New York Times just dropped a piece that reveals Platner’s behavior with old girlfriends. One of them, Lyndsey Fifield, is described this way: 

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.”

    This is the whole case for me. His language, the tattoo, none of that is great, but none of it matters as much as whether or not Graham Platner physically harms women. That’s the entire case. Twisting arms and locking someone in a room is abuse, plain and simple.

    After the Times story broke, Lyndsey Fifield responded on X:

I bucked all advice from my friends (and resisted my conservative bias) and decided to fully trust the Times journalists.

As they left my home they asked that I not talk to any other outlets and I insisted then and repeatedly over the following weeks that I would keep my word and only share this story with them.

But then the weeks dragged on. They kept coming back to us saying the editors needed more. I needed to go on the record (okay). We need more screenshots (okay). I met every bench mark they set, eager to provide more sources or evidence as needed.

After the story went up I began to ask them … wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)? 

Why does it say “nobody could corroborate” when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?

Why did they include an out of context quote from a friend joking “do not call Graham” after I called off my wedding? (Because she knew I would never).

Where were the screenshots they’d said they would use? Or the mention that I’d supported local democrats and that most of my family (and husband) are liberal?

The editors said it was too much, they explained.

The Times also failed to include any mention that I DID confide in multiple friends through the years that Graham had been abusive — long before he was running for office. Those friends confirm they told the Times so.

It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.

And at the end of my call with them I reluctantly accepted their insistence that this was still a powerful story and that I had done a brave thing. And I thanked them for all the hard work they had put into it.

Still fawning after all these years.

    So it looks like the New York Times, the same paper that a year after Kavanaugh was seated was still printing fake stories about him, has tried to soft-pedal Platner’s physical abuse of women. 

    Despite everything that Mordor launched at me, in the end, the truth came out. Kavanaugh is innocent. I was never a perfect person, but I was always a decent and conscientious one. And I never touched a woman in an aggressive or inappropriate way. According to the account in the Times, Platner did. Forget the tattoos, forget the Looney Tunes language about home intruders, forget the stuff that men under a great amount of pressure sometimes do. Grabbing a woman in any way, even by the wrist or shoulders, is disqualifying.

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