A decade ago, I dated Graham Platner.
He was never once cruel to me. He was warm and funny and, in the ordinary sense of the word, respectful. We drank too much. We slept together. We were careless with ourselves in the way a lot of people in their twenties are, but not with each other. It was extremely casual and short-lived.
When he launched his Senate campaign, I was genuinely thrilled and reached out to congratulate him. We have stayed in friendly touch ever since, and in every message he has been decent to me.
Until this week, I was a supporter. I believed he could be the kind of plainspoken, populist progressive “Mamdani for Maine” candidate that our party is starving for.
And I believe Jenny Racicot and Lyndsey Fifield.
I want to leave those two sentences sitting next to each other, because the discomfort between them is the whole point.
We say we believe women. What we usually mean is that we believe women when it is cheap. We believe them when the accused is a stranger or a Republican or a man none of us liked anyway. The real test is what you do when believing her costs you something. When the man is your friend. When he was good to you. When you have the texts on your phone to prove he was never anything but kind to you.
Here is what I know and what I do not. I know the man I dated 10 years ago. But I do not know who he was in a relationship in 2021, because I was not there. Abuse does not announce itself evenly to everyone a person has ever dated. My good experience is not evidence against these women's accounts. It is only my experience.
Racicot kept her story to herself for years and has now said on the record that Platner forced her to have sex after she repeatedly told him to stop. Fifield has also come forward accusing Platner of physical abuse, saying he grabbed her hard enough to leave marks and locked her in a bedroom overnight during arguments. Platner denies it. I believe them.
That he was gentle and kind to me does not make me a character witness for who he was with her. It only means abuse is not one fixed thing that shows up the same way in every room. I know the blank look Racicot describes. I know the smell of alcohol on a man's breath, the way desire can flip into violation in the space of a minute. I lived that in a relationship with a man whose drinking and untreated PTSD made him someone else in the dark. So, I did not arrive at this belief casually, and I did not arrive at it as a stranger to the subject.
I have spent my whole adult life involved in progressive politics. I have sat in offices where men with flawless progressive resumes talked over me, diminished me, and made it clear that the equality they preached in public did not always extend to the women beside them.
In 2024, I left a job at a progressive tech company because I was being sexually harassed. I did not make a fight of it. I named it quietly on my way out and otherwise let it go, because we were in the progressive space, where you are supposed to be among allies, and because I was afraid of what it would cost me to be the woman who made a scene.
For a decade, Democrats have told ourselves that we looked at the Trump era and resolved to root this out. We are the party of “Me Too.”
In practice, we can be just as quick to protect our own men and reassure ourselves that it is different because our men vote the right way.
And I understand exactly what is at stake in Maine. I know the Senate math. I know Susan Collins is beatable, and I know that a scramble to replace a nominee is the last thing my party wanted three months out.
But before anyone tells me this seat is too important to lose over an accusation, consider who currently holds it.
In 2018, Susan Collins cast a decisive vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court after Christine Blasey Ford sat before the country and described, under oath, being assaulted by him. Susan Collins told us she was satisfied. She assured us Kavanaugh respected precedent and that Roe was safe in his hands. Four years later, he supplied one of the votes that ended it.
Millions of women now live under the consequences of that decision, and it is a large part of why I do this work at all. That is the price of waving a woman away when believing her is politically expensive.
So no, I will not help beat Susan Collins by doing the very thing that made her who she is. A victory built on telling Jenny Racicot or Lyndsey Fifield that their assault is a distraction is not a victory. It is the same rot, handed to the other party.
I believe Jenny Racicot and Lyndsey Fifield. I am grateful to them both, and I am sorry that speaking has cost them what it has cost so many of us.
“Believe women” cannot be a phrase we reserve for our enemies. The measure of whether we mean it was never how loudly we say it about them. It is what we are willing to say about our friends.
Emily Suttle-Braun is CEO of Doodle Mom Strategies and a Democratic strategist.
