Married Democrat Senate candidate ‘sexted’ multiple women on controversial app

(LifeSiteNews) – Up until this weekend, Democrat U.S. Senate hopeful Graham Platner had an active profile on a private messaging app that has been described as a “predator’s paradise” in the latest of a string of scandals to plague the candidate hoping to unseat GOP incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

Platner is a veteran who served three tours with the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq and one tour in Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. A former defense contractor and oyster farmer, he is one of four Democrats running for the party’s nomination to go up against Collins, a long-serving liberal Republican. The RealClearPolitics polling average currently has him leading Collins by almost eight points, giving Democrats hopes he could be the key to flipping the seat.

However, almost as soon as the party began to coalesce around Platner, a steady stream of scandals arose to shake it. On May 30, The Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, notified the campaign within days of its launch that her husband’s phone contained “sexually explicit texts with several women” that could pose future political headaches. Campaign aides “ultimately decided the texts were a private matter that was being handled by the couple in marriage counseling,” according to the report.

Potentially more concerning than the salacious content of the texts is the application used to send them. Platner’s account was with Kik, a platform the WSJ describes as “widely used for sexual encounters” with a reputation for even more nefarious purposes.

In 2023, the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) dubbed Kik a “predator’s paradise.” The report notes the platform bills itself as a “fun, safe place to connect” that was “built especially for teens,” in the process attracting not only minors but those seeking to prey upon them, made all the worse by features including but not limited to “Meet New People” pairing complete strangers together.

“Users only need an email, which remains hidden from public view, and a chosen username to sign up for an account. The username can be completely arbitrary and need not reveal the user’s identity,” NCSE explains. “As such, those who are seeking to groom children can very easily access their preferred pool of victims on Kik (ie. the predominantly young userbase), while pretending to be anyone they want. The strict privacy on Kik also makes it difficult for law enforcement to become involved when reports of grooming or other criminal behavior are made.”

Kik has been at the center of numerous child predator grooming cases over the past several years, and the child exploitation research group Thorn reported that as of 2021 it tied with Instagram and Tumblr for the second-highest rate of online sexual interactions between minors and correspondents they believed to be adults.

The Platner campaign told the WSJ that not deactivating the account was an innocent oversight, and the candidate had long since deleted the Kik app from his phone.

Still, Platner’s sexting history and use of Kik continue a spring of bad news for the candidate’s public image that has been reported in just the past few weeks.

Among them have been a skull-and-crossbones tattoo resembling a Nazi death’s-head symbol (he claims the resemblance is purely accidental), old social media comments mocking combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient Teddy Daniels as a “dumb motherf***er” who “didn’t deserve to live” after surviving a Taliban ambush, and a wealth of crude sexual comments on the platform Reddit. He has also been accused of misrepresenting the circumstances of his own service by attacking Collins for having “voted to send me to Iraq” when in fact he chose to enlist after the Iraq War had begun.

“It’s not a possibility that more will come out. It’s a certainty,” one worried Democrat Capitol Hill staffer predicted in anonymous comments to the New York Post. “Someone who behaves like this almost never behaves like this in isolation. I’m sure there’s a pattern of this kind of behavior he’s had throughout his life.”

Republicans are facing an uphill battle in this year’s midterm elections, with many seeing the Trump administration’s various struggles as an opportunity to pick up seats. But Democrat candidates like Platner and James Talarico of Texas could ultimately prove to be the GOP’s political salvation.

RaceToTheWH currently projects Republicans to just barely hold the Senate and Democrats to take the House of Representatives.