‘Can you look me in the face, as a survivor, and offer me more than shallow words?’ woman asks at town hall
BUCKSPORT, Maine—A sexual assault survivor confronted Graham Platner over his Reddit post asserting rape victims need to “take some responsibility for themselves.” The woman broke down as she asked the Democratic Senate candidate whether he would show “true remorse” for the comment rather than “shallow words.”
“The day that Reddit post dropped, my heart sank,” the woman said at a Saturday afternoon town hall Platner held in the Midcoast town of Bucksport.
“Your comments on sexual assault victims cut deep. I am a survivor. My story is remarkably similar to the one you outlined in that comment. I never shared my story. I never reported it, and I didn’t because I knew I’d be defending myself against that mentality.”
The woman, who did not give her name and said she was sharing her story for the first time in 20 years, was referring to a 2013 post from Platner on a Reddit thread about underwear designed to prevent sexual assault. Platner said rape victims should “act like an adult for f—s sake” and “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”
“Rape is a real thing, if you’re so worried about it to buy Kevlar underwear you’d think you might not get blacked out f—ed up around people you aren’t comfortable with,” he wrote.
The woman told Platner she “consumed every interview” Platner gave since his remarks surfaced last month, hoping the Democrat would show “true remorse.”
“I’m asking right now: Can you look me in the face as a survivor and offer me more than shallow words?” she asked. Platner apologized and said he penned the Reddit post when he “had come out of the infantry” and “had a frankly myopic worldview on this issue.” Platner was nearly 30 years old at the time.
“Sexual assault is not a matter of decisions people make,” he told the woman. “It is never the responsibility of the person imposed upon. It is always the abuser. It is always the person with power who is responsible. I do not believe now, and have not a long time, that it’s the responsibility of people, of those who get assaulted, but I had to learn that.”
Platner’s political future appears to depend on how voters react to answers like that one.
The Democrat has faced criticism over social media posts that, in addition to the sexual assault comment, denigrated police as “bastards,” labeled rural white Mainers “racist,” and called himself a “communist.” A recent poll from liberal group EMILYs List found Platner trails incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins by 19 points when voters read “additional information, including quotes in his own words from his online posts.”
During his Bucksport town hall, Platner, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, broadly referred to those posts as “jokes” and said he had “no excuse” for them.
“I don’t think of myself as a fully formed human being,” he said. “If anybody thinks they are, we should probably not trust them.”
