A rising Democratic star in Maine with his sights set on a crucial Senate seat was exposed by his own wife for sexting other women.
Amy Gertner, the wife of Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner, told a senior campaign aide about the sexting when her husband was beginning his race to unseat vulnerable GOP Senator Susan Collins last summer.
Genevieve McDonald, who was the campaign’s political director until last October, revealed that Gertner told her last year that her husband had been sending sexually explicit messages to as many as a dozen women.
A current campaign official has said that Platner ended the sexting before his campaign began.
Now Gertner says she and her husband were both betrayed—apparently by the campaign aide, McDonald. She said she told the aide about the sexting under pressure for a vetting process so that the campaign could be prepared for any damaging information that might arise.
She characterized the revelation of that sensitive information as an invasion of privacy, and said she was “deeply hurt” by the betrayal.
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” Gertner said in a statement released by the Platner campaign. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives—the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.” She added that her “marriage today is stronger than ever before.”
Gertner, who married her husband in late 2023, noted in a video she posted on social media Saturday that she and her husband are both in therapy and attending couples counseling to work through their issues, including her husband’s struggles with his “violent” past.
Platner, 41, a Marine Corps veteran and ex-Army infantryman, served four tours overseas—three in Iraq as a Marine and another in Afghanistan as part of the Maryland Army National Guard.
Now, Gertner complained in her video, certain “media outlets” are transfixed by the sexting and ignoring the political issues of the race, like “healthcare and education and childcare.”
She added: “I want everyone to know Graham and I have a great marriage,” though she noted that “marriage is hard.”
Being “newly married is hard,” she emphasized. “Being newly married and going through infertility is hard. Being newly married, going through infertility and a Senate campaign is hard."
But to go after the couple’s marriage is “extra sh---y,” Gertner added, because what people really care about is “affordable gas” and to be “able to see their doctor when they’re sick” and to “send their kids to a nice school,” and to safely raise their families.
Gertner called it a “waste of time” to attack her husband when “all he’s trying to do is improve the lives of people who work for a living.”
Platner, a charismatic yet down-to-earth progressive Democrat, exploded on the political scene last year. But the political novice has faced questions and concerns about several issues, including deleted Reddit posts about sex workers, and he has admitted to covering up a Nazi-linked tattoo.
