Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, posted a topless selfie on Kik, a messaging app widely associated with hookups and plagued by child safety scandals, and engaged in sexually explicit messaging with multiple women outside his marriage, according to reporting from the New York Post. The revelations come as Platner, an oyster farmer and former Marine endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, faces renewed scrutiny over a Nazi-linked tattoo he has carried since 2007.

Platner's wife, Amy Gertner, discovered the explicit messages in late spring 2025 and flagged them to campaign staff in August, concerned they could become a liability. The couple married in 2024.

The number of women involved is itself in dispute. Gertner told ex-campaign director Genevieve McDonald that Platner had been sexting with 12 women, the New York Times reported. A Platner campaign representative, who was not named, claimed the number was six and insisted Platner had stopped communicating with the women before launching his Senate bid.

The Kik account and the image

The New York Post obtained a mirror selfie from Platner's Kik account showing him in a bathroom, bare-chested and wearing a towel, with multiple tattoos visible. The Wall Street Journal reported that the account was created in 2016 under the username "phustle0331." Platner claimed he deleted the app from his phone but never deleted the account itself.

That distinction matters less than the candidate might hope. Kik has roughly 15 million monthly active users, and nearly 60 percent of them are between the ages of 13 and 24, Forbes reported. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has labeled the platform a "predator's paradise." The app has been at the center of numerous pedophilia scandals.

A sitting U.S. Senate candidate maintaining an active profile on such a platform, complete with a shirtless photo, is not a minor oversight. It is a judgment question, and the facts do not flatter Platner.

A pattern on Reddit

The sexting is not an isolated lapse. Fox News Digital reported on Platner's extensive Reddit history, which includes crude and sexually derogatory posts stretching back more than a decade. In an April 2012 post, Platner wrote: "You don't have much experience with Latin American hookers, do you?"

In another undated Reddit post, Platner offered a defense of marital infidelity that reads less like a throwaway joke and more like a personal philosophy:

"I have many good buddies who lied and cheated with women, and yet were straight shooting hard men when it came to their work."

Yet another post advised fellow service members to "spend your leave banging hookers in Thailand instead of getting b----ed at by the wife back home, and you could sell it as avoiding federal income tax." In a separate thread on the military subreddit, Platner posted about pleasuring himself in portable toilets while serving in the Marines.

These are not statements ripped out of context from a teenager's account. They come from a man who went on to seek statewide office, and who secured endorsements from two of the Democratic Party's most prominent progressive senators. Whether Sanders and Warren were aware of this record before lending their names to Platner's campaign remains an open question. Neither senator has publicly responded to the revelations.

Platner is hardly the only Democrat to face uncomfortable questions about personal conduct and public credibility. Texas Democrat James Talarico recently drew scrutiny over deceptions about his personal life, a reminder that voters increasingly expect transparency from the people who ask for their trust.

The tattoo that won't go away

Layered on top of the sexting scandal is the matter of Platner's tattoo, a totenkopf skull and crossbones, imagery associated with the Nazi SS death squads responsible for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Platner has said he got the tattoo while on leave from the Marines in Croatia in 2007 and never realized its meaning.

His own former campaign director does not buy that explanation. Genevieve McDonald posted on Facebook:

"Maybe he didn't know it when he got it, but he got it years ago, and he should have had it covered up because he knows d*** well what it means."

McDonald's criticism carries weight. She is not a political opponent or a conservative media figure. She ran Platner's campaign. When the person who managed your operation publicly says you "know d*** well" what a Nazi symbol means and chose not to cover it, the claim of innocent ignorance wears thin.

The broader pattern compounds the problem. A candidate who boasted online about prostitutes, defended adultery, and maintained an active profile on an app flagged for child exploitation now asks Maine voters to believe he was simply unaware that a skull-and-crossbones tattoo carried dark historical meaning. Each individual excuse might survive on its own. Stacked together, they paint a picture of a man whose judgment, or candor, falls well short of what a Senate seat demands.

The wife's defense

Gertner, for her part, has stood by Platner publicly. In a video statement posted on X from the campaign account, she said:

"Graham and I have a great marriage, being married is hard, being newly married is hard, being newly married and going through infertility is hard."

Breitbart reported additional remarks from Gertner's statement, in which she said the couple went to counseling and "came through it, not in spite of how much we've been through, but because of how much we love each other and the life we've built." She also criticized media coverage of the scandal, calling it "gossip" and saying she found it "really shameful that there's a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip, instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on."

The marriage is a private matter. The candidate's fitness for office is not. Gertner's loyalty is her own business, but voters are under no obligation to extend the same grace. And the "gossip" Gertner objects to consists of her husband's own words, his own Kik profile, and his own Reddit posts, all of which he authored voluntarily and publicly.

It is worth noting that Newsmax also covered Gertner's response, underscoring how widely the story has traveled across national outlets. This is not a localized hit piece. Multiple newsrooms, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to Fox News Digital, have independently reported elements of the Platner saga.

What remains unanswered

Several questions hang over the Platner campaign. Has he withdrawn from the race or does he intend to continue? The available reporting does not say. Have Sanders and Warren rescinded their endorsements, or do they stand behind a candidate with a Nazi tattoo and a trail of sexually explicit online activity? No statements from either senator appear in any of the reporting.

The gap between six women and twelve women also deserves resolution. Platner's own wife told his campaign director the number was twelve. His campaign says six. Someone is minimizing the scope of the problem, and voters deserve to know who.

Democratic leaders have spent years lecturing the country about character, decency, and the moral fitness of public servants. From Eric Swalwell's lavish campaign spending habits to AOC's eyebrow-raising campaign expenditures, the gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive conduct keeps widening. Platner's case is simply the latest, and among the most vivid, examples.

Maine voters will ultimately decide whether a man who sexted a dozen women on a platform notorious for child exploitation, boasted about prostitutes on Reddit, sports a Nazi tattoo he claims not to understand, and then asked his wife to clean up the mess on camera deserves a seat in the United States Senate.

The answer should not require much deliberation.