https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/politics/platner-maine-senate-girlfriends-relationships.html
By Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer
Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, two veteran political reporters, have been covering the Platner campaign. They spoke to more than two dozen people for this article.
The disclosures last week that Mr. Platner, now married, was exchanging sexual messages with women as recently as last year have complicated that narrative and unnerved Democrats, who see the Maine seat as key to their efforts to regain control of the Senate.
In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women described Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.
But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.
Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”
Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
The third woman, a Democrat from Maine who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had a long-distance relationship with Mr. Platner on and off for years, as recently as 2016.
The three described him in similar terms. Spending time with him could be exhilarating, they said. But they also recounted patterns of heavy drinking and womanizing. Asked to sum up how he treated her, the third woman said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”
When Ms. Fifield first met Mr. Platner in 2013, he was a student at George Washington University, and she was working on veterans’ issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and beginning to make a name for herself as a conservative activist online. Their roughly two-year, on-again, off-again relationship, as Ms. Fifield described it, was heady and passionate.
Mr. Platner “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, his campaign said. The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations.
Ms. Fifield, who is affiliated with Independent Women, a conservative group, insisted that her political beliefs had nothing to do with her choice to come forward. She worked briefly on Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and before that for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Ms. Fifield said she had not been paid by any campaign or political entity since Ms. Haley’s campaign.
Ms. Fifield said she had no connection to the campaign of Senator Susan Collins, Mr. Platner’s likely Republican opponent. She acknowledged that Independent Women had been supportive of Ms. Collins but said she had not been active with the organization recently.
“I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat — it has nothing to do with that,” Ms. Fifield said. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”
“I will personally go campaign for Collins,” Ms. Fifield wrote in a private chat group last summer. Two of her friends reacted with a crying laughing emoji. The comment was a joke, Ms. Fifield told The Times.
Records show no evidence of any relationship between Ms. Fifield and the Collins campaign.
Mr. Platner, who had overlapping relationships with other women while he and Ms. Fifield dated, also referred to women as “hatchet wounds,” Ms. Fifield said, a crude term for female anatomy.
Asked about those remarks, a Platner campaign official did not dispute them. A friend who knew Mr. Platner and Ms. Fifield during that period said the comments sounded out of character.
The Times reviewed texts between Ms. Fifield and Mr. Platner, along with Google Chat exchanges, texts and Facebook messages between Ms. Fifield and her friends during and after the relationship. The Times also reviewed some of Ms. Fifield’s diary entries from after the relationship had ended, and spoke with two of her friends who confirmed that the pair had an emotionally volatile relationship but could not corroborate the physical altercations or the most controversial comments she described.
Ms. Racicot, who said she agreed with many of Mr. Platner’s policies, said she had an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Platner and had positive memories.
But she was not shocked, she said, when she saw the incendiary comments he had made about women that have surfaced during the campaign. “I was like, that makes sense,” she said. “This person does not respect women.”
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.”
Caroline Lemp, who dated Mr. Platner for several months in 2013, described him as a “gentle giant.” She said he never made her feel unsafe or showed any signs that he was struggling with the physical or mental effects of his military service.
“He was a great boyfriend,” said Ms. Lemp, 36, who now lives in St. Louis. “He was super kind, very nice, fun.”
The others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Platner was never physically threatening. One, a nurse from Belfast, Maine, who dated him for a couple months after he returned home to Maine, described him as responsible, intelligent and supportive. Another, who dated him in Washington between roughly 2011 and 2013, said she witnessed some “potentially problematic behavior,” referring to his heavy drinking. But she “felt really safe with him,” she said.
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Platner has presented his life as a story of recovery and personal growth.
Still, he stayed active on Reddit, offering a glimpse into his unvarnished thinking in more than 1,400 messages between 2016 and 2021, when he says he stopped posting.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.
"I cover American politics with an emphasis on the Democratic Party. I work to illuminate the personalities, debates and coalitions that define this moment. I believe deeply in on-the-ground reporting."
"I was a campaign road warrior twice: as the reporter covering Ted Cruz for Politico in 2016, and as the Biden beat reporter for The Times during the 2020 presidential campaign. After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, I worked in Washington at Politico and in McClatchy’s D.C. bureau before moving to New York and later joining The Times."
"I go through an intense fact-checking process to help meet those goals. In a volatile political environment, I believe it is all the more important to seek a diverse range of perspectives, interrogate conventional wisdom and let the reporting drive the story. I protect my sources."
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
"I cover the intersection of campaigns, elections and political power. I examine the big personalities, ideas and emotions that drive American politics. I see politics as an expression of the country’s values, so I am particularly interested in examining how those are shifting in this moment of technological, cultural and economic change."
