Why the Graham Platner situation is sickeningly familiar to many of us

I started dating my first boyfriend in eighth grade. He wanted to be a musician. We had a lot of the same friends; the suburbs of Las Vegas are small. After we broke up, I didn’t really understand what had happened to me in our relationship. It was like I was admitting the severity of everything to myself little by little, in bite-sized pieces.

So when the first accusations that came out against Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner were relatively quaint, I knew something bigger was going on. I was heartbroken reading the quotes from these women, hedging their stories and reassuring reporters that Platner wasn’t too physically violent. Never hitting or punching, never breaking bones. It wasn’t the full story.

I was 15 when I broke up with my boyfriend, in the late summer aughts of COVID. I’d been sexually coerced. He was still a good guy, I thought: after all, I hadn’t said no. I hadn’t pushed him away. We could still be friends, because he hadn’t really done anything wrong. It was all a misunderstanding. I told my parents, and they had comforted me; that was enough.

But I struggled with it for months. I came to understand it. I’d been sexually and emotionally manipulated. I was traumatized. My mood changed. I would have random bursts of anger throughout the day, for months. I used an ancient typewriter, saved from my mother’s office building, to write pages of letters I’d never send him.

My friends were still his friends, and that drove me up a wall. I couldn’t understand why he should continue to find solidarity in a community that should be against someone like him. I couldn’t understand why I had to deal with the consequences of what had happened to me, when it was his fault.

On New Year’s Eve in 2020, I sat in my room agonizing over whether to post my story on social media. I ended up writing something vague about wanting to cut ties with him. I don’t remember it well, but I remember that I didn’t really say what had happened.

I ended up taking it down. I cried to my mom over the phone. She told me, “You can’t save anyone else.” That’s what hurt the most.

When Platner took to social media Tuesday to deny the stories yet again, he said about the same thing he did after the first allegations. He said about the same thing he did after every controversy of his: that it was a convenient story to rob him of the very voter base he’d worked so hard to gain, and that his movement, his movement, wouldn’t be swayed by this attempt to beat down the little guy.

As a woman, doubting yourself is intrinsic. You must hedge your bets on anything you say in regards to a man’s reputation, regardless of its veracity: you can either be careful of what you say and be dismissed, or you can be holistic and become a slut, an opportunist. A debased victim with no face except a statistic and no name except “Jane Doe.”

Men who want to be musicians, who want to be politicians, really want to fulfill their need for the command of people’s attention. Platner was angry in the response video he posted. He verged on tears. But it wasn’t for care of the movement he betrayed by knowingly campaigning with these skeletons in his closet. It was for the loss of his moment in the spotlight.

I’m sure Graham Platner will remain in some small sphere of the cultural psyche. He’s the kind of man who would rather see his name covered in mud than gone altogether. My first boyfriend is still out there; maybe he’s better now, I don’t know. Part of the healing process is understanding your injustice and letting go. It’s not fair. It never will be. Women are forced to find peace in that, again and again, as they have for decades. And as long as men like Platner continue to seek the spotlight — as long as they continue to be heard out despite repeated misdeeds, like a child breaking the same vase over and over — women will continuously be left to pick up the pieces.