Graham Platner is a serial philanderer with a drinking problem and a long record of obscene and misogynistic public comments. That made it unsurprising when the New York Times gave his ex-girlfriends space to describe his abuse.
But Platner is also the Democratic nominee for a competitive U.S. Senate seat, and his top competition has dropped out. That made every conservative reader skeptical that the Times would actually publish anything to make him look bad. The follow-up to the Times story, published this week by Politico, seemed to confirm that skepticism.
When the Times published a lengthy piece a month ago airing three ex-girlfriends’ allegations against Platner, it smelled to conservatives like something of a “catch-and-kill.” That’s the term for when reporters dig up a story and then bury the most important parts, protecting the target.
Why did the Times focus most of the story on just one girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, and spend 250 words describing how conservative she was?
Why did the Times reporters, according to Fifield, make her believe that the story wouldn’t focus on her, but on the other girlfriends?
Also, why did the Times decline to contact three of the sources Fifield said could corroborate her account, and then write “The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations”?
Whatever the reporters’ intent in writing the story they did, the pro-Platner effect was obvious in its aftermath.
First, leading Democratic politicians and liberal reporters dismissed the accusations as partisan attacks or minor personal foibles.
“Seems like a lot of nothing,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) declared. “I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations.”
Whitehouse was echoing the standard liberal response on Twitter: The only accusations come from Fifield, who’s a right-winger.
New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, a chronicler of the #MeToo moment, argued on CNN that Platner’s offenses didn’t meet the threshold of the sort of sexual misconduct she tracks.
“They’re not about a boss and a young female employee being subjected to sexual advances,” Kantor explained. “They were mostly made in the context of consensual relationships… 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.”
Here’s another way to judge the Times piece. Jenny Racicot, one of Platner’s other ex-girlfriends, felt compelled by the Times story to go to two reporters at Politico to get out her full story.
Here are the relevant passages from the Politico piece:
Racicot previously described “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner to The New York Times, but says she didn’t go public with the specific assault claim because she didn’t want to be known as a rape victim.
Racicot said she later felt compelled to go public about her experience because the reaction to the Times story was dominated by controversy about another woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who alleged Platner mistreated her and faced attacks because of her ties to the Republican Party. (Contacted by POLITICO, Fifield stood by the allegations she made to the Times and declined to comment further.)
“My part of the story was just a read-over,” Racicot said in an interview. “And the story was Lyndsey, and the accusations of her being politically motivated.”
Three key points here:
- Racicot felt that the Times story downplayed her experience at Platner’s hands.
- Racicot felt that the Times led readers to disregard Fifield’s account as politically motivated.
- Racicot apparently didn’t give the Times her full story on the record. She first went on the record with the sexual assault story with Politico.
That last point is important. It doesn’t mean the Times coverage was fine. It doesn’t mean the Times reporters never misled Fifield and failed to corroborate what they could have corroborated.
It just suggests that there wasn’t exactly a catch-and-kill here — the Times never killed Racicot’s story of being raped by Platner, because the Times didn’t have it on the record.
This is corroborated by the Times story: “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.’”
A key phrase there is “she declined to elaborate.”
When I asked the Times questions about this story, a spokesman sent me a wordy answer, with a helpful phrase or two peppered in there: “The article … provided readers with context about what the women were and were not willing to share at the time… Politico advanced this public understanding with even more information that they independently reported.”
So I’ll read between the lines, and lay out what I believe most likely happened:
The Times reporters knew that Racicot said Platner raped her, and intended to build their story around that. Racicot declined to give them her account on the record, and so the reporters shifted the focus to Fifield, who had spoken at length on the record about Platner’s violence.
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Also, re-read that Times piece and you may detect what I detect: The 250-word essay about Fifield being a right-winger seems tacked on — maybe by editors after a call from the Platner campaign.
The Times, I believe, did not cover up Racicot’s rape allegations — again, both Politico and the Times report that she declined to go on the record about it. But the Times did mishandle this story in a way that temporarily helped Platner, made Fifield into a target, and convinced Racicot she needed to say more. And she did.