The Wall Street Journal<\/a> reported that shortly after Platner announced his Senate campaign last year, Gertner flagged to campaign staff sexual text messages her husband had with other women.\n <\/p>\n\n \u201cI know who Graham is,\u201d Gertner said in a statement delivered through Platner\u2019s campaign. \u201cI know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn\u2019t changed, and it won\u2019t.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Genevieve McDonald, the former political director for Platner\u2019s campaign, confirmed to CNN on Saturday that Gertner disclosed to her last year that Platner had been sexting multiple women and that the campaign evaluated the matter as a potential political liability.\n <\/p>\n
\n According to both The Times and The Journal, Gertner told Platner\u2019s campaign last August about text messages she had found in spring 2025 between her husband and other women early in their marriage. The publications reported that she flagged the messages as Platner\u2019s campaign internally vetted the candidate.\n <\/p>\n
\n CNN has not independently confirmed the existence of the text messages. CNN did verify that an account on the messaging app Kik appears to belong to Platner. The account, under the username \u201cphustle0331,\u201d features a profile photo showing Platner shirtless in a bathroom with a towel on his waist and uses a handle similar to ones on his since-deleted Reddit account and a now-deleted Instagram account.\n <\/p>\n
\n According to The Times, Gertner reported her husband\u2019s messages to other women to his campaign\u2019s then-political director, McDonald \u2014 whom Gertner appeared to refer in Saturday\u2019s statement.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,\u201d Gertner\u2019s statement said.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives \u2014 the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind \u2014 and I am deeply hurt by her betrayal and the invasion of our privacy,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n
![\"Graham](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ap26120727660620.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Platner, a Marine Corps veteran with no prior political experience, has become a lightning rod since announcing his upstart campaign to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.\n <\/p>\n
\n He received fierce blowback early in his campaign after it was revealed that he had a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol on his chest. Platner said he got the tattoo when he was in his 20s and in the military and did not realize its significance until recently. He has since said he has covered the tattoo.\n <\/p>\n
\n But reporting by CNN\u2019s KFile<\/a> later undercut his claim of ignorance over the tattoo\u2019s symbolism. In a social media thread from 2019, Platner discussed the emblem \u2014 a skull-and-crossbones \u201cTotenkopf\u201d \u2014 while noting that many US service members had adopted the imagery.\n <\/p>\n\n CNN and other outlets have also reported on other statements Platner made<\/a> before he was a Senate candidate. He once called himself a \u201ccommunist\u201d and dismissed police as \u201cbastards.\u201d He disavowed those comments during a previous interview with CNN.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary The wife of Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner says she is deeply hurt by public revelations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-675332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}