A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.
The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.
Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.
“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”
I’m expressing frustration at how prevalent rape is in our government. That simply being a rapist isn’t enough to derail a political campaign.
As far as what we do moving forward? I don’t know. How do we stop putting up people with Nazi tattoos and rape allegations as primary candidates? Why didn’t we take his past allegations seriously?
Yeah I get you then. It’s maddening.
I think most realistically, the path to evicting sexual assault from government is to get the parties themselves to enact background checks on their anointed candidates, and no-excuses dismissals of those credibly accused. That includes not looking back at Al Franken with regret.
Ironically they won’t do that because of the nature of power, so you have to replace them from the outside.
Which is a rocky road because as we’re seeing, outsiders certainly are not and will never be held to such standards either.
More and more I believe we simply don’t have standards. If leftists are willing to look away when it comes to rape, what standards do they have over those on the right?
Why do women have to continue to sacrifice for the greater good to allow a rapist to be elected because he’s anti-fascist?
These are rhetorical questions, not necessarily directed at you. This was an entirely predictable scenario to come up and I’m mad that the left continued to infight about purity testing around this when we could just NOT CHOOSE RAPISTS PLEASE, for fucks sake.
Thanks for understanding where I was coming from with that previous comment.
Of course. Re: My thoughts on the rhetorical questions… This is what hierarchy does. It makes those it forces and coerces abandon their ethics. That is at it’s core what it is designed to do. People with no ethics do as they’re told. So long as there is a power hierarchy there will be unacceptably prevalent abuse and assault. The only reason I don’t propose overthrowing the government and enacting town-to-town horizontal communes as a solution is because I’m looking for something ‘realistic’ to propose in reply since the larger conceptual issue is far outside the realm of partisan politics. /anarchist