Graham Platner’s insurgent bid for Senate in Maine was gathering steam last summer when his campaign was confronted with some potentially explosive information.
Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told a senior campaign aide that he had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.
It was the kind of revelation with the potential to damage the political newcomer just as his campaign to unseat Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, was beginning to resonate with voters, especially in a state where female voters make up a large share of the electorate.
Mr. Platner’s exchanges with women were confirmed by current and former campaign officials, who gave different accounts of some of the details. Ms. Gertner said the couple, who had married in November 2023, according to the town clerk of Sullivan, Maine, was working through his indiscretions in marriage counseling.
Genevieve McDonald, a former state legislator who was the Platner campaign’s political director before leaving in October, said Ms. Gertner reached out just days before a big Labor Day rally with Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and was concerned her husband’s behavior could become a political liability.
Ms. McDonald said Ms. Gertner told her that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with as many as a dozen women.
A current Platner campaign official said Mr. Platner had been communicating with up to six women.
The current official said that the messages surfaced when Ms. McDonald asked Ms. Gertner if there was anything she wanted to share amid an internal vetting process. Ms. Gertner told the campaign that the couple had dealt with the issue in counseling, according to the official.
The revelation threatened to add to Democratic anxieties about the state of the Maine race, which the party sees as critical to its chances of winning control of the Senate in November.
In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by “the invasion of our privacy.”
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”
“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”
Ms. McDonald’s account of Ms. Gertner’s discovery of the messages and alerting the campaign to them last summer before the rally with Mr. Sanders was confirmed by another person who was told about the messages at the time. The Wall Street Journal
earlier reported the existence of the messages on Saturday afternoon.
Ms. McDonald shared with The New York Times what she said was a screenshot of a text message exchange with Ms. Gertner that started in the early hours of Aug. 27, 2025. Ms. Gertner had sent a message to a broader group, asking someone from the campaign to contact her, and Ms. McDonald offered to talk. In their conversation, Ms. Gertner told her about the messages, which she described as “sexting,” according to Ms. McDonald.
“The United States Senate is not a training ground for redemption,” Ms. McDonald said. “It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity.”
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Ms. McDonald was one of three campaign officials who resigned in October after revelations about controversial social media posts by Mr. Platner and scrutiny of a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol.
In the months since then, despite a barrage of headlines about inflammatory remarks Mr. Platner made about women online years ago — remarks for which he has apologized — the candidate went on to have a stunning rise to become the presumptive Democratic nominee in one of the nation’s marquee Senate races.
His campaign has become a movement in Maine, and some Democrats are already discussing Mr. Platner, a fiery populist
running on his working-class credentials, as the future of the party.
Yet as he heads into a tough general election fight against Ms. Collins, the incumbent, some Democrats remain anxious about how Mr. Platner, who acknowledges having a messy personal history, will stand up to scrutiny. It is an issue that voters have already raised with him directly on the campaign trail.
Republicans, for their part, are broadcasting a steady drumbeat of old Reddit posts in which Mr. Platner insulted women, Black people, white rural people and others.
Mr. Platner has spoken openly about struggling for years with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and drinking tied to multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I was just a wreck of a human being,”
he told The Times.
He sought therapy and has apologized for some incendiary posts on Reddit, urging Mainers not to judge him for “the worst thing I said on the internet, on my worst day 14 years ago.”
But those online comments have continued to dog Mr. Platner’s campaign.
In 2013, he posted that women afraid of rape should not get so drunk that they “wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to,” a remark for which he has since apologized.
In another post, he responded to a cartoon about sexual assault in the military, dismissing challenges faced by service members who bring claims of rape.
“When every whisper of a misplaced hand brings down a feature length film, anyone who actually thinks the military is purposefully covering up rape,” he wrote, “is clearly both an idiot and junior enough in rank or life experience to think it matters.”
In January of 2020, he waded into a debate over whether West Coast Marines were more “chill,” arguing that “they get to bang LA chicks, whores in TJ, and hit up Vegas,” an apparent reference to Tijuana, Mexico.
Mr. Platner deleted his comment history ahead of his campaign kickoff, though his posts resurfaced anyway.
As the primary heated up, Gov. Janet Mills, his Democratic opponent, seized on his posts, releasing ads featuring women responding to his remarks about rape with disgust.
Mr. Platner apologized for the posts, saying he was “horrified” when he reread them.
“I did not recognize in them myself or the man that I am today,” he said.
His campaign
organized an online event aimed at helping its female supporters talk with their networks about Mr. Platner’s posture toward women, suggesting language they could use to allay the concerns of their friends and family.
And, in the spring, Ms. Gertner, who is on the campaign payroll, began to play a more visible role on the trail. In April, she introduced Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, at a campaign rally in Portland, Maine, highlighting the struggles people in the state face to receive health care, afford housing and operate small businesses.
“The Maine that we love so much is under attack,” Ms. Gertner said. “And I know that he’s the right person to do the job.”
The couple has been vocal about
their in vitro fertilization treatments and struggles to start a family. Ms. Gertner mentioned those treatments in her statement on Saturday.
“It is no secret that Graham and I have struggled on our fertility journey,” Ms. Gertner said. “We did the hard work that marriage requires. We went to counseling. We were honest with each other in ways that weren’t easy. And we came through it.”
The ads Ms. Mills ran about Mr. Platner’s online statements did not improve her standing. In late April, weeks before the June 9 primary, she quit the contest, turning Mr. Platner into the presumptive nominee. Supporters of Mr. Platner saw his political strength as evidence that voters had processed and forgiven his past statements.
Republicans are in the early stages of testing that theory, believing they can drive an image of Mr. Platner, who is currently leading in the polls in the Democratic-leaning state, as unfit to serve.
So far, there are few signs that Mr. Platner’s previous remarks about women are hurting him.
A poll released last week from the University of New Hampshire showed Mr. Platner leading Ms. Collins by nine points — and by 20 points among women.
Still, the issue is weighing on some voters.
Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.
“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.
Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.
Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.
“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.
Asked in an interview how he could be so certain that there was no other information that would come out about him after the event, Mr. Platner was terse.
“I lived my life,” he said. “That’s how.”
