In June, the New York Times reported that Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, fantasized about raping a home intruder in order to prove he was "dominant."
On Monday, Platner was credibly accused of raping an ex-girlfriend after entering her home uninvited in the middle of the night.
Nevertheless, the alleged crime is not a "classic #MeToo" situation, according to Times reporter Jodi Kantor's previously enumerated criteria for assessing such cases.
(Context: #MeToo was a hashtag-driven social movement centered on public disclosures of sexual misconduct and respect for the women making them. Democrats canceled the movement in 2019 after Joe Biden, the party's presumptive presidential nominee, was credibly accused of sexual assault.)
"The accusations against Graham Platner are not classic #MeToo accusations," Kantor said on CNN last month while downplaying her own paper's reporting on the candidate's disturbing behavior towards former lovers.
The Times story included allegations of physical abuse from a different ex-girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, whom Democrats promptly smeared as a liar because of her ties to conservative political groups. Kantor outlined the following criteria for an accusation to qualify as a #MeToo event:
1) The accused is a powerful "boss."
2) The accuser is a "young, female employee being subjected to sexual advances."
3) The allegations are not being "made in the context of consensual relationships."
4) Unstated, but come on: The accused is a Republican.
The home-invading rape allegation against Platner does not satisfy the first three. The alleged crime occurred in 2021, when Platner was living off of disability benefits, taking six-figure loans from his father, and selling oysters to his mother.
This was years before Democrats and journalists anointed him a champion of the forgotten "working class." He was not a powerful "boss." The accuser, 41-year-old Jenny Racicot, was not his young employee.
Racicot had engaged in an "on-and-off relationship with Platner" for two years before the alleged rape, and her accusations were "made in the context of consensual relationships."
(Context: Platner allegedly raped Racicot more than a decade after getting a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, but we're not sure how that figures into Kantor's assessment of #MeToo allegations.)
What about the fourth criterion?
Nope. Platner is a Democrat, and the accusations against him are likely to hurt Democrats' chances of retaking the Senate. Racicot is also a Democrat. She told Politico she was reluctant to come forward due to the "huge moral conflict ... between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person."
It is unclear if Kantor considers Democratic victims to be more credible than Republicans. She did not respond to a request for comment asking her to confirm the findings of the Washington Free Beacon analysis.
Kantor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking down Harvey Weinstein, appeared on a Times podcast that described Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation battle as a "national trial" of the #MeToo movement even though Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was not a "young, female employee subjected to sexual advances" from her boss.
Times columnist Charles Blow appeared to endorse Kantor's criteria for assessing #MeToo allegations. He downplayed Racicot's rape accusation as something that "sounds horrible" and should be investigated further—unlike Blasey Ford's "compelling testimony" about being "raped" by Kavanaugh.
(Context: There is no evidence that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh ever met.)
We don't know if Kantor was aware of Racicot's allegations before they were reported in Politico, but some of her Times colleagues definitely were. Racicot first spoke to the Times in the spring, sharing "off the record that Platner had assaulted her," according to Politico.
Racicot's rape allegation did not appear in last month's Times article, which noted that she had "declined to elaborate" on a 2021 incident when Platner "arrived at her house drunk" and uninvited.
Racicot said she was ultimately compelled to come forward after watching Democrats and journalists smear Fifield—Platner's ex-girlfriend who accused him of physical abuse—as a lying GOP operative.
"My part of the story was just a read-over," she told Politico. "And the story was Lyndsey, and the accusations of her being politically motivated."
Meanwhile, Fifield criticized the Times for failing to contact several references who could have corroborated her story, and then writing that the paper could not "independently corroborate" her accounts of abuse.
For future reference, here is a handy guide to the official Jodi Kantor method for determining whether an allegation can be classified as #MeToo:
