Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, a Democrat vying to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, issued a lengthy apology video Friday after inflammatory Reddit posts he’s made in recent years came to light.
“As I read through them, I read things that I absolutely do not agree with. I read through and I see things that words and statements that I abhor,” Platner, who served in the United States Marine Corps and the Maryland Army National Guard, said in the video posted to social media.
Platner’s apology comes a day after CNN confronted him about his comments on the forum, where he called himself a “communist” and said he’d become “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist” who’d “pretty much stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense” since being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
But more troubling comments were uncovered Friday by The Washington Post. In those posts, Platner dismissed concerns about sexual assault in the military, claiming that “every whisper of a misplaced hand brings down a feature length film” and that “anyone who actually thinks the military is purposefully covering up rape” is an “idiot.”
In another comment, he said people who are “so worried” about rape shouldn’t over-consume alcohol.
Platner appeared to focus on those comments in his apology video, though he did not address them directly. He described the effect that being in the “very male-dominated,” “very masculine world” of the military had on him, even after he’d left the service in 2012.
“When I got out, I still had the crude humor, the dark, dark feelings, the offensive language that really was a hallmark of the infantry,” he said.
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“It’s important to know that this was a time in my life where I was struggling deeply,” Platner continued. “I got out of the Army in 2012. I had PTSD, I had depression, I had all of the things that come with serving in a war ― two wars ―that I eventually began to not believe in at all. It left me feeling very unmoored. It left me feeling very disillusioned, very alienated and very isolated.”
Platner, an oyster farmer with a big endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), also apologized in comments to the Post and asked for grace from his potential constituents.
“I don’t want people to judge me off the dumbest thing I said on the internet 12 years ago,” he said. “I would like people to engage with who I am today.”