On Tuesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Last Word,” host Lawrence O’Donnell said there was an image of Graham Platner created “by the eager news media…of a humble, roughly-educated oyster farmer in Maine” that wasn’t true and “Platner supporters and endorsers” ignored his accusers when they first came forward.
O’Donnell said, “The image created by him and by the eager news media was of a humble, roughly-educated oyster farmer in Maine who decided he was just mad as hell and couldn’t take it anymore and he was going to step up and save Maine from Donald Trump and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and he could do it because he knew the struggles of the working people of Maine who were being ignored by the Republican policies of Susan Collins and Donald Trump. But he didn’t. He’s never known those struggles. … His mother owns a restaurant and is the biggest customer for his oysters. And here’s what Graham Platner knows about the affordability of housing: The New York Times reports, ‘Property and tax records show he bought the home for $205,000 and received a $200,000 mortgage loan from his father.’ So his father bought him a house and his mother buys his oysters. I found it very, very difficult to take Graham Platner’s claims about himself seriously after reading those facts about him, publicly available facts. But the enthusiasm kept building and building, and when The New York Times reported that he was really a rich kid, the image of honest oyster farmer somehow just miraculously held.”
He continued, “Then came the women accusing him of being abusive, and they were ignored by the Platner supporters and endorsers because Graham Platner denied the accusations. Then Monday, a woman offered detail of an encounter with Graham Platner that she said was non-consensual … That report in POLITICO, using the woman’s name, was the breaking point in this story. And here is the big, big problem with that: That same woman had already been an unnamed source in other reporting about Graham Platner’s abusive conduct with women, and she thought what she had said as an unnamed source was clear enough about his aggression with women. But she was ignored. And so the very same person decided that she needed to go public on the record with her name, including in a video interview, and tell the story, tell her story, with all the details of what she says happened to her. And only then did the people who ignored her the first time take her seriously this time, even though Graham Platner, once again, denied her accusations.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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