A New York Times journalist on Wednesday shockingly downplayed accusations leveled against Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner by his ex-girlfriends as “not like classic abuse allegations.”
Jodi Kantor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse, suggested Maine voters may have been willing to overlook the scandals plaguing Platner’s campaign in Tuesday’s primary because they “are not classic MeToo accusations” – before comparing them to President Trump’s scandals.
“They’re not about a boss and a young female employee being subjected to sexual advances. They were mostly made in the context of consensual relationships,” Kantor said in a CNN interview about the allegations against Platner reported in the Times.
“There are these, like, very sensational texts about sex. There are allegations from former girlfriends that are not — the way my colleagues reported them were not like classic abuse allegations,” she argued.
“They were mostly like being his boyfriend gave me a view into him and I did not like what I saw. His character was scary. He had this Nazi tattoo. Et cetera.”
The Times reported Platner’s alleged women-hating behavior last week, citing three of the Maine Democrat’s former girlfriends.
Lyndsay Fifield, who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, told the outlet that the former oyster farmer and Marine veteran “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 another incident, Fifield claimed, “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.’”
“There was one allegation of crossing a line physically,” Kantor acknowledged, without detailing it, “but I think that means that these are pretty different accusations than, say, the one that — the ones that President Trump faced.”
Kantor specifically referenced the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, which Trump dismissed as “locker room talk.”
“I think it speaks to the kind of confusion of the long post MeToo moment in which, like, gender related accusations get bundled together,” Kantor argued. “But they’re actually very different.”
Fifield has accused Times reporters Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck of twisting her account of Platner’s alleged abuse into “a gift” for the Democrat’s Senate campaign.
She claims the outlet spiked allegations of sexual assault made against Platner by other women and refused to include accounts from her friends corroborating her story.
Despite his scandals, Platner clinched the Democratic Senate nomination Tuesday night with about 72% support.
Fifield did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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