The New York Times came thisclose to having the Graham Platner rape story. So what happened?

With the meltdown of Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate candidacy still playing out, I want to take a look at how The New York Times let it slip away.

The pieces are clearly visible, so you may already know where I’m going with this. But it’s worth tying them together and asking how the Times could come so close to breaking it wide open only to be relegated to the sidelines while Politico delivered the final blow.

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Early Monday afternoon, rumors began spreading on social media that a big story was about to break. Platner, a Maine Democrat, was reportedly canceling campaign events. Then it dropped: Politico published an interview with Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine woman, who claimed that in 2021 Platner entered her home and drunkenly, violently raped her.

Reporters Jessica Piper and Adam Wren wrote that they had interviewed Racicot three times over the previous two weeks. Their article had the sort of details that lent considerable heft and credibility to Racicot’s allegations. She supported Platner politically. There were text messages from years past in which she told an acquaintance that she’d “ended up in a bad situation with him,” adding that Platner was “consensually careless” and “doesn’t listen to you when drunk.” There were emails with her therapist.

The Times was so close to having this. On June 4 — five days before the Democratic primary — Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer reported that several women they had interviewed described “volatile and ‘toxic’ relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.” Racicot was among those they interviewed; but they focused on Lyndsey Fifield, who told them Platner had been physically abusive toward her on several occasions and once “shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”

Despite the seriousness of those allegations, Fifield was dismissed by Platner’s supporters because she was a Republican activist and because, if you squinted really hard through Platner-colored classes, you could dismiss her claims of physical abuse as ambiguous. (To be fair, Fifield herself tried to play down those incidents even as she was describing them, saying that “he never hit me, he never punched me.”)

Fifield quickly came to regret her decision to talk to the Times, complaining on social media that the paper ignored what she told them about other women who might be willing to talk. As Dominick Mastrangelo wrote for The Hill the next day:

After the piece was published Thursday, Fifield said she asked Times journalists, “Wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)?”

“The editors said it was too much, they explained,” she continued. “The Times also failed to include any mention that I DID confide in multiple friends through the years that Graham had been abusive — long before he was running for office. Those friends confirm they told the Times so.”

So where was the follow-up? In reading the Times story when it was published, it seemed to me that there were a number of threads its reporters could keep pulling on — including Racicot, who, as it turned out, had a much more compelling story to tell than Fifield. Did they let it drop? Or were Racicot and other women unwilling to talk with the Times after Fifield’s experience?

According to Politico, after the Times story was published, Racicot contacted Cheyenne Hunt, a Democratic lawyer and head of a nonprofit organization called Reckoning Action, which “exists to confront misogyny and gender bias in American public life — in its structural forms, in its cultural expressions, and in the institutions of power that enforce the subjugation of women.” There is no mention in the story, though, of why Racicot didn’t reconnect with the Times.

Nor does a piece by Lehrer and Glueck in today’s Times shed any light on why Racicot ended up telling her story to Politico rather than to them.

At some point (like now? like, you know, six months ago?), we’ll look back in disgust at how many warning signs Platner’s supporters chose to ignore — the Nazi tattoo that he couldn’t tell a consistent story about, the racist and misogynistic Reddit posts, the sexting, and his “volatile and ‘toxic’” relationships with women. The allure of the working-class oyster farmer coming out of nowhere to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins proved nearly impossible to overcome until, finally, he was credibly charged with rape.

As of this morning, Platner still hasn’t dropped out of the race, although all indications are that he’ll do so soon. And Maine Democrats will have a chance at a do-over. Gov. Janet Mills performed so poorly in her campaign against Platner that she’s unlikely to get another look, but there are several quality candidates who might be drafted. It’s too late for a primary, and it’s not entirely clear how Democratic state officials plan to proceed.

What is clear is that the end of Platner’s campaign gives Democrats one last chance of defeating Collins, the MAGA Lite senator who’s always “very concerned” but who rarely does the right thing. It remains to be seen whether they can avoid screwing this up once again.