I spend a good part of my professional life as an expert witness, which means courts pay me to tell the difference between evidence and narrative. Judges want dates, corroboration, and contemporaneous accounts. What they do not want is a story that changes shape depending on who benefits from believing it. That is the standard I bring to Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate whose party spent a year deciding his conduct toward women was a footnote right up until it wasn’t.
Jenny Racicot says Platner let himself into her home uninvited in late 2021, drunk, and forced himself on her after she told him no. She has a date, a location, and, per Politico, text messages and people she confided in at the time, including her therapist and an ex-boyfriend. Platner denies it, calling the account “troubling, serious and false.”
Compare that to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when Christine Blasey Ford could not name a date, a location, or a corroborating witness, and the people she did name said it never happened. Compare it to Tara Reade, who gave a specific year, a specific Senate hallway, and named her mother, her brother, and a friend she told at the time. Reade got a cable-news shrug. Racicot got a chorus of senators pulling endorsements within a day. The difference was not the evidence. It was the letter next to the accused man’s name.
And even Racicot did not get that reaction on the merits alone. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called Platner “my kind of man” at an April rally, months after his campaign had already survived a Nazi-linked tattoo and Reddit posts suggesting rape victims share the blame for getting “effed up.” Also on that list: an active account since 2016 on Kik, an app child-safety group NCOSE calls a “predator’s paradise” for adults targeting children — no evidence he contacted minors, but Warren campaigned with him anyway.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) campaigned with him after the New York Times reported an ex-girlfriend’s account of controlling, physically rough behavior, and on CBS’s Face the Nation on June 7 called it “shameful” while insisting there was “no evidence of violence.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) stayed silent for roughly a day after Racicot’s story broke. These are men who had already made peace with everything short of the word “rape,” and moved only once the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee threatened to pull funding.
This is a party that told the country it must automatically believe women, then spent a year explaining away a tattoo, a pattern of Reddit misogyny, and an ex-girlfriend’s account of being manhandled. Ask whether Mike Pence, mocked for refusing to dine alone with women who were not his wife, was ever the reckless one here.
The pattern predates Platner. Former President Bill Clinton faced Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky, whose account came with DNA evidence more concrete than anything in the Kavanaugh matter. Harvey Weinstein bundled roughly $1.5 million for Democratic campaigns and was praised by Michelle Obama as “a wonderful person” at a 2013 White House event, before his predation became impossible to bury. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced 11 accusers and resigned only when his own attorney general left no room to spin it. Andrew Gillum, once the party’s Florida rising star, was found in a 2020 hotel room with a man who had overdosed, indicted on federal fraud charges in 2022, and arrested again this week, on July 2, after Alabama police allegedly found methamphetamine, marijuana, and a glass pipe in his car.
None of this means every accusation is true or that every accused man is guilty. It means the standard of belief a party applies should not move depending on the letter next to a name. Racicot’s account deserves the same scrutiny Reade’s got and the same seriousness Ford’s got from a sympathetic press corps.
The tell is timing. What finally moved Warren, Khanna, and Sanders was not conscience. It was the DSCC threatening to pull the money that keeps a Senate campaign alive. Take that funding threat away, and several of them would likely still be onstage with him talking about grace and redemption. That is not moral clarity. That is a spreadsheet.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.