The wife of Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner told his campaign in 2025 about sexual messages he had sent to other women.
Amy Gertner, whom Platner has been married to since November 2023, told the campaign about the texts during an internal vetting process last year at the beginning of his campaign. Gertner’s disclosure of the texts was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
In a video posted by Platner’s campaign’s social media, Gertner said, “I just really wanted to make sure that everyone knows that Graham and I have a great marriage.”
“Being married is hard,” she said. “Being newly married is hard. Being newly married and going through infertility is hard. Being newly married, going through infertility and a Senate campaign is hard. I don’t even know if I have the right words to describe what we’ve been going through, but our marriage counselor helps, my personal counselor helps, Graham’s personal counselor helps and we work on our mental health every day. No marriage is perfect.”
In a statement from Gertner provided by the Platner campaign earlier Saturday, she wrote that they have gone through counseling and that their marriage today “is stronger than ever before.”
“I 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’t changed, and it won’t,” she added.
She also notes how she shared “deeply personal details about my marriage” to an unnamed campaign staffer.
“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 — and I am deeply hurt by her betrayal and the invasion of our privacy,” Gertner wrote.
In a statement Sunday to CBS News, Platner said, “Amy and I went through something hard — because of me. We did the work, and I’m grateful for her every hour of every day. I’ve learned throughout this campaign is that people don’t care about gossip or headlines, they care that you’re fighting for their hospitals, their paycheck, their kids. This campaign is about the ideas that will move Maine forward and past a broken politics of the past. Our opponents want politics to be empty of content and empty of actual change — and beating that is exactly what our movement is about.”
Platner also pushed back on certain aspects of the reporting from other outlets, telling local reporters on Sunday that what his campaign’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald, told the New York Times was “not true.”
“I’m confirming that what Genevieve McDonald said in the New York Times is not true,” Planter told reporters when asked if he was saying the messages don’t exist.
Asked to clarify what he was specifically alleging wasn’t true, he said: “We talked about things in Amy and I’s marriage that we’ve gone through over the years. We talked about that, because that’s our marriage. And we discussed it with the campaign. What Genevieve McDonald claims isn’t true.”
A campaign official told CBS News following those remarks that the messages exist, and that Platner is not denying that.
“Graham isn’t saying the texts to other women at the start of the marriage are not real. They are,” the official told CBS News. “He’s frustrated by the sensationalization of several private facts relayed by a former confidante to journalists.”
Sophie Park / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee who will likely be taking on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the November midterm elections after his main Democratic primary opponent, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, dropped out of the race in April. He has faced controversy over several problematic internet comments he made, as well as for a tattoo he got during his time in the Marines that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. He later covered the tattoo up.
The winner of the Maine Senate race is expected to play a key role in which party controls the chamber after the midterms. Platner has been endorsed by, and campaigned with, progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He has ran a more populist campaign centered around his working-class background.
In an April interview with CBS News’ Major Garrett on “The Takeout,” Platner said previous controversial opinions he held were due to post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as to his time serving in a military that he described as “a hyper-masculine, hyper-violent place.”
“We have a crude sense of humor in the infantry. We certainly have a, I would say, narrow view of a lot of topics, and that colored my opinions and my beliefs,” Platner said. “Over the years in between, I met a lot more people, had a lot more experiences, learned a lot more about the world. And my opinions have changed with it.”
