Key Democratic leaders appeared to continue their support for embattled Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner on Tuesday after meetings in Washington DC.
Platner is contending with yet another revelation – this time about sexually explicit texts with women outside of his marriage – threatening his campaign, which is at the center of his party’s hopes of regaining control of Congress.
“I met with Graham Platner today. We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate,” the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.
Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with other women during his marriage, according to information his wife shared with his campaign last year, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported, and which the Guardian has confirmed.
Journalists learned of the texts from the campaign’s former political director Genevieve McDonald, who obtained them from Amy Gertner, Platner’s wife, in the common process of proactive opposition research. The Platner campaign released a statement from Gertner, in which she said she had been “deeply hurt” by McDonald’s action.
“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.”
The incident, however, built on other findings of past indiscretions.
There is a bit of a leap here being made. Note specifically that nowhere in this coverage (nor any other I've seen) does Gertner say she was upset with Platner about said sexting.
I have no way of knowing what sort of relationship they have, but jumping straight to infidelity is framing. My ex-wife sexted with other guys and women, and I sexted with other women. We didn't get into fights over it; we'd show each other and usually laugh (lots of people are terrible at sexting). I also shot highly explicit photos of her with the intention of posting in a decently sized online community.
She's an exhibitionist.
The act itself is not indicative of internal meaning for the relationship.
You're begging the question. What proof do you have that this particular incident is a red flag? I want quotes before I'm willing to accept that. It's a funny thing called journalism, and you're falling for the framing where the practitioners failed.
If tomorrow, Gertner says she was deeply hurt and it nearly tore the marriage apart, I'll readily accept that this was infidelity. To claim otherwise before that is unfounded moral judgment.