Why the Graham Platner Allegations Didn’t Surprise Me
From my first sexual assault investigation before #MeToo to years uncovering Epstein’s crimes with Virginia Giuffre, here’s why I’ve learned that silence is often the first chapter—not the last.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
The first time I reported on sexual assault, no one would put their name on the record.
It was 2013, and I was twenty-five years old, sitting in the midtown headquarters of the New York Post. I didn’t become a journalist to write about celebrity feuds or who was seen leaving which restaurant, and after two years in the gossip mine of Page Six, I had finally worked my way up to the Metro desk where I hoped to pursue stories of real consequence. I was fascinated by the newsroom legends who exposed abuses of power that everyone else either ignored or accepted. They called those reporters muckrackers, a term I loved and aspired to.
One afternoon I received a call from a lawyer named Stanley Arkin, someone I’d met during my Page Six days.
He wanted to discuss something serious. His friend’s daughter believed she had been raped at Columbia University. But this wasn’t a simple crime story. What Stanley was tipping me off to was a complex tale about a system. Stanley told me that his friend's daughter had accused a fellow Columbia student of rape. Two other students had made similar allegations against the same young man, and the families believed the university had failed them.
This was six years after the Duke Lacrosse scandal and six years before #MeToo. Bill Cosby had just hosted a Comedy Central special. Survivors alleging rape rarely became the subject of national media attention because their stories were often considered impossible to report. Few were willing to identify themselves publicly.
I hung up with Stanley and walked up to my editor’s desk. I remember almost pleading for permission to pursue the story. I knew it would be difficult. I wasn’t sure anyone would ever agree to speak publicly. But I also knew this was exactly the kind of reporting I wanted to do.
I secretly hoped the Harvard-Columbia rivalry might tip the scales in my favor. The editor-in-chief was a Harvard grad.
And I did it. The Post published the investigation. The headline read: “Columbia drops ball on jock ‘rapist’ probe: students.”
Not one victim was quoted by name.
I still remember the anxiety of walking onto Columbia’s campus to knock on doors and confront the young man accused in the complaints.
That was part of the job.
Journalism meant going to uncomfortable places and asking uncomfortable questions.
The following year, after the university declined to expel the student she accused of assaults, one of the anonymous women I had spoken to for my investigation decided to identify herself publicly.
Her name: Emma Sulkowicz.
She carried her dorm mattress across Columbia’s campus.
It was an act of protest. It was also a cultural and political event with ripple effects that reverberate still. Overnight, she became a national symbol of female courage.
She had been brave when I spoke with her on background.
She was even braver when she chose to go on the record.
Over the next decade, I would devote much of my time listening to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and reporting on the powerful systems and people who conspired with or otherwise enabled him.
Since then many of my nights were spent seated across tables from women who cried as they told me pieces of their past. Many of my days were spent fielding calls and absorbing their rightful anger.
Weeks later, they would call again and ask if they could take everything back.
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Some ultimately went public.
Many never did.
What most people don’t appreciate is that silence is usually the beginning of these stories — not the end.
The public often imagines that if something truly terrible happened, someone would immediately report it to police, tell their family, call a reporter, or speak publicly.
My experience has taught me almost the opposite. Many survivors spend years trying to convince themselves nothing happened.
They minimize what occurred.
They rationalize it.
They wonder if they’ll be blamed. They worry about destroying their careers, disappointing their families, becoming known forever as “the woman who accused someone.”
That’s another way to say a woman who causes trouble.
The fear isn’t always that people won’t believe them.
Sometimes the fear is that they will.
Because once the story becomes public, there is no going back to the life they had before.
Over the years, I came to understand something that changed not just my reporting, but me.
After years of covering survivors, I realized there were aspects of this psychology I understood not just as a reporter, but as a person with my own perspective and experiences.
That realization didn’t make me less objective. If anything, it made me more patient, more careful, and more aware of how long it can take someone to find the words for what happened to them.
I also came to understand why hearing another survivor describe the exact same abuse can be so powerful. It validates that what happened was, in fact, abuse. For many survivors, years of manipulation and degradation leave them questioning their own memories, their own judgment—even wondering whether they somehow deserved it or brought it on themselves.
Before I sat across from survivors of Epstein, I thought the hardest part of my job would be uncovering evidence or persuading editors to publish difficult stories.
I was wrong.
The hardest part was earning trust.
It meant spending months—sometimes years—listening to people who weren’t sure they ever wanted their names in print. It meant asking questions no decent person wants to ask another human being, knowing they could end the interview at any moment.
It meant understanding that someone might tell you ninety percent of their story and never be ready to tell the remaining ten.
And you have to respect that.
Not because the story isn’t important. Because the person is.
Over time, I began to notice patterns.
People who abuse power often behave in patterns.
Victims do too.
Predators frequently repeat their conduct. Victims frequently remain silent, compartmentalize what happened, and spend years trying to convince themselves it wasn’t what they feared it was.
I’ve watched women who have never met each other describe remarkably similar experiences with the same man. I’ve watched survivors leave out names, incidents, or details they simply weren’t ready to say aloud. Sometimes they returned months later. Sometimes years later. Sometimes never.
That is why, when another allegation surfaces after an initial story, my first instinct isn’t surprise.
It’s curiosity.
That’s why reporting these stories is unlike any other kind of journalism I’ve done.
Political reporting is adversarial. Investigative reporting on corruption is painstaking.
Reporting on sexual violence requires something else entirely: patience.
You prepare yourself for the possibility that someone you’ve spent months interviewing may decide, at the last minute, they simply cannot bear to relive the experience publicly.
And you respect that decision.
Not because the story isn’t important. Because the person is.
Years later, I would travel around the country with Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers. By then, much of the public knew her name. I knew the quieter moments—the conversations away from the cameras, the weight she carried every time she chose to revisit the most painful parts of her life so strangers could judge whether they believed her.
People often imagine that once someone goes public, the hardest part is over. It isn’t.
For many survivors, telling the story once is only the beginning. Every interview requires reopening wounds. Every headline invites a new round of scrutiny. Every inconsistency, every forgotten detail, every decision they made in the aftermath becomes evidence for people determined to discredit them.
Watching that process up close changed me. It reinforced something I’d first learned as a young Metro reporter at the New York Post: silence isn’t evidence that nothing happened. More often, it’s evidence of how difficult it is to tell the truth when the person you’re accusing has power.
President Trump’s reelection underscored a difficult reality: public accusations against powerful men do not necessarily end their careers. For many survivors, that can reinforce the fear that coming forward may cost them far more than it costs the person they’re accusing.
Which brings me to the recent allegations involving the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine Graham Platner.
When the initial New York Times reporting appeared, many people viewed two of the three accounts as isolated incidents of troubling behavior involving alcohol. Others dismissed the credibility of the third woman, who alleged physical abuse, because she was a Republican political activist.
Then one of the three women came forward to POLITICO and explained that she hadn’t initially told the full story. Only after seeing another accuser publicly attacked did she decide to disclose Monday that she alleged he had forcibly had sex with her.
“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” Jenny Racicot told Politico. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”
When I read that, I wasn’t surprised. Not because I know how every story ends.
I don’t. But I know how hard it is to get one victim on the record.
On Monday evening, Graham announced that he was canceling future events while he takes "time to reflect on the best path forward."
Every allegation deserves scrutiny. Every accused person deserves fairness. Journalism demands evidence, skepticism, and verification.
But after eighteen years reporting on people who wield power—and after spending years sitting across from survivors trying to decide whether they could bear to tell the truth publicly—I’ve learned something that has shaped every investigation I’ve pursued.
The first version of a story is rarely the whole story.
Sometimes there is less than initially appears.
Sometimes there is far more.
Either way, my job isn’t to decide outcomes before the facts are known.
My job is to keep reporting long after everyone else has moved on.
That’s the journalism I believe in.
And it’s the journalism I hope you’ll continue to support.
The democrats rushed to pick someone who looked the part but did extremely poor vetting if at all, hence we knew little about his character. I knew he was an ahole but I was going to vote for him anyway. I’m a Mainer and there’s still time to defeat Collins. Bread mold should be able to defeat her.
I'm thinking I owe Tara a apology, I had the Platner story and got it wrong, trust Tara I say!