Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner still has an active profile — complete with a sexually suggestive photo showing his naked torso draped in a towel — on Kik, an anonymous messaging app so dangerous that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation dubbed it a "predator's paradise" back in 2023. This despite his campaign's claims that he deleted the account. They lied. Fox News found it still up.
This is the Democratic bench, America. Sexting scandals, Nazi-linked tattoos, and an active account on an app the FBI warns parents about. Somebody get these people a better recruiting firm.
Let's rewind for the folks just tuning into this soap opera. Platner married his wife, Amy Gertner, in 2023. By spring 2025, Gertner discovered explicit messages her husband had been sending to multiple women. The Kik account? Created back in 2016 — years before the wedding, but apparently never abandoned after it. According to Fox News, approximately 70% of Kik's users are aged 13 to 24, and child safety watchdog Bark rated it the worst app for severe sexual content in 2024. At least four Maine men were sentenced between 2023 and 2025 for crimes connected to the platform.
No evidence has surfaced that Platner communicated with minors. But that's a heck of a bar to clear, isn't it? "He's on the predator app, but probably not for the predator stuff." Put that on a campaign bumper sticker.
Gertner went public with a video statement, saying, "It makes me really angry, disappointed." She then added, "I find it really shameful that there's a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip." Ma'am, it's not gossip when Fox News can pull up his active profile with a suggestive photo still attached to it. That's called evidence.
And it gets better. Platner's old Reddit posts surfaced too, including this charmer: "You don't have much experience with Latin American hookers, do you?" Real senatorial material right there. Then there's the tattoo he got in 2007 — one with Nazi-linked imagery — that he later covered up. Because nothing says "I've grown as a person" like literally hiding the evidence under more ink.
Even Senator Cory Booker — not exactly a right-wing attack dog — acknowledged that Platner "has questions to answer." When Cory Booker is distancing himself from you, your campaign is in the intensive care unit.
As Fox News reported, the campaign's story keeps shifting, the profile keeps staying live, and the scandals keep stacking up like cordwood. This is a man running for the United States Senate. In any functioning political party, he'd have been shown the door after scandal number one. But this is the modern Democratic Party, where standards are aspirational and accountability is somebody else's problem.
Maine deserves better. Frankly, even the Democrats deserve better — though they seem determined to prove otherwise.