The Maine Senate candidate and the case for a messy marriage.
Since Alexander Hamilton admitted to having an affair with Maria Reynolds, a married woman, in a tell-all pamphlet in 1979, the sex scandal has been a part of the political landscape. They still, to this day — depending on their sordidness — have the ability to torpedo political ambitions. And, in a world where workplace affairs get people pink slipped and Jumbotron canoodling becomes headline fodder for several news cycles, public cheating can be hard to bounce back from.
But those rules are being rewritten in time by Amy Gertner, the wife of Maine Democratic senate candidate Graham Platner. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner had been exchanging sexual texts with other women prior to launching his campaign in 2025. The source? His wife: Gertner had told campaign staffers during the vetting process. In the Journal’s words, “Gertner disclosed the texts to a campaign aide to make sure they didn’t pose a risk to her husband’s nascent campaign.” Meaning, she already knew, and she didn’t want it to hurt his political prospects.
The number of women Platner texted remains up for debate — some campaign officials guesstimated up to 12, while others say up to six. But the general outline of the story remains the same, and a big USDA-certified nothingburger. Gertner knew about the texts, told the campaign when asked and acknowledged they were working through the issues in marital counseling. The conversation wasn’t even new, a cornerstone of something being news.
Rather than apologizing on his own, Platner shared a video from Gertner herself. Unlike the usual “woman standing by her man” trope, or even denying that these allegations are true, Gertner told the truth. In a five-minute walk-and-talk video, Gertner stands up for her and Platner’s “imperfect” marriage, as well as sharing the work they do to maintain it, both together and separately.
“No marriage is perfect and I don’t want a perfect marriage, I want my marriage,” Gertner said. Throughout the video, Gertner talked about the many issues she and Platner are handling as a couple, including infertility, the public scrutiny of a Senate campaign, his alleged indiscretions and the fact that he saw an immense amount of violence during his time in active deployment.
“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,” she said. “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.”
She also slammed news outlets for focusing on Platner’s personal life instead of on the issues that are central to his campaign.
“I find 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, like health care and education and child care,” she said. “It’s shameful behavior to spend time and energy and resources on negative ads and negative stories on Graham when all he’s trying to do is improve the lives of people who work for a living. That’s it, he doesn’t have any other agenda.”
Part of what Gertner is saying has been backed up by science. One study that followed heterosexual couples who had survived infidelity found that they experienced many positive outcomes, including feeling closer to their partners, becoming more assertive and realizing the value of their relationship.
Ilana Grines, a family therapist and certified sex therapist told Playboy that infidelity is one of the most common reasons couples land in her office and that many marriages survive it.
“Betrayal is a rupture, and ruptures can be repaired when both people choose the work,” she said.
She called what Gertner did in her video “rare,” saying that she is “doing that repair out loud.”
“Secrecy is part of what gives an affair its power, so naming the counseling on a platform that size strips some of that power away,” she said. “She’s taking the story back; she’s deciding what her marriage means instead of letting a leaked text decide it for her.”
Platner, an oyster farmer and Marine Corps vet, has gained national attention – and scrutiny — for his progressive platform, which includes Medicare for All and tackling the American affordability crisis. He’s also been a controversial figure in his ascendancy. Platner has endured multiple scandals that have been worth scrutiny by voters, but extramarital sexts that he’s already working through in therapy with his wife are not necessarily one of them. He has apologized for old Reddit posts blaming sexual assault on women and covered up a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol. He said that he had gotten the tattoo during a night out drinking while in the Marines in 2007 and didn’t know it was a symbol of the SS, Nazi police force, per the Associated Press.
Following the news breaking on Saturday, Platner similarly spoke out against the coverage of his alleged sexually-charged texts with other women.
“It’s no surprise to me that the establishment media outlets are just gonna run gossip instead of wanting to talk about the things that actually matter in this race, which are the material realities that Mainers are working with,” Platner told local news affiliate WMTW while calling the story “journalistic malpractice.”
He added, “They’re going to come after us in every awful way that they possibly can, and we’re just going to keep talking about the fact that the hospitals are closing, the fact that child care facilities are closing, the fact that teachers and nurses aren’t paid enough and the fact that everybody down here continues to work harder and longer and get less.”
While feeling targeted by journalists might not be anything new for political families, Gertner also said she felt “deeply hurt” by the “invasion of privacy” by Genevieve McDonald, the former Platner staffer who was the main source for both the Journal and New York Times stories on the matter, per MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” Gertner said. “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.”
Platner’s main competition in the June 9 Democratic primary, governor Janet Mills has already dropped out, setting him up to face senate stalwart Susan Collins, a Republican, in November. He leads Collins by about 9 points in pre-election polls.
