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Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner cited his combat deployments and struggling in the aftermath when confronted during an interview that aired Sunday about his past social media posts about sexual assault.
“I wonder, though, if you think how damaging this thing might be politically, because, I read those posts and, you know, they’re bad. Those posts are terrible,” CNN’s Manu Raju said.
Gov. Janet Mills, who is running against Platner in the Democratic Senate primary, launched an ad campaign against him that features women reacting to comments he made over a decade ago on Reddit about rape. The Mills campaign highlights Graham’s comments, as an actor in a voice that resembles the candidate, reads snippets of them aloud. Among the comments is one from 2013, which Platner later deleted, that people concerned about rape should not “get so f—ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”
Platner said he regretted the posts when pressed by Raju.
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“Oh, of course… Yes, deeply. But, I was at a time in my life where I was really struggling after I’d come back from my combat deployments,” Platner told Raju. “I was very isolated, very alone, very disillusioned, very angry. And I think like a lot of people, I went on the internet to find some form of community or serotonin boost.”
He added he was able to reconnect with his community and said he wouldn’t have got to this point without the struggles in his past.
“After many years of kind of being back in society, reconnecting with my community, reconnecting with, frankly, like, the great state of Maine, that has allowed me to really become the person I am today, which I’m very proud of. But I don’t get to be who I am today without the struggles that I had to go through,” Platner added.
Platner also told Raju that he spoke about the posts in October and has allowed the people of Maine to ask him about them directly.
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“I have gone all over the state of Maine and allowed people to ask me about it all directly, for months now. And it is, I think for a lot of folks in the state, to see this get kind of dragged back up, months and months after we’d already talked about it,” he said.
He added, “I will just say, the feedback we have received statewide is that people find all of this to be everything they hate about politics. And I think that that’s, politically in the state of Maine, that is more damaging than the fact that people can understand that I, as a person, have transformed over time and changed, which actually I think a lot of folks can identify with.”
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Platner has also faced backlash over a tattoo that is widely viewed as a Nazi symbol.
He announced in October that he covered up the tattoo.
Platner is endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. The primary election will be June 9.
The eventual Democratic nominee will go on to face incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who has held the seat since 1997.
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