Last month, The New York Times revealed new allegations involving Graham Platner, then a top Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. Three women who had dated him told The Times about troubling and demeaning behavior from Mr. Platner, including at least one incident where he was physically threatening.
Since the article was published, The Times has received a range of questions about our Platner reporting. How do we report and corroborate allegations? How do we handle off-the-record allegations? More broadly, what is the threshold for The Times to publish allegations? And what did we know about a rape allegation against Mr. Platner, which he denies, that led him to drop out of the Senate race this week?
I spoke about these questions and more with Felice Belman, a deputy editor on our Politics desk who edited last month’s article and other Times coverage of Mr. Platner.
Felice, let’s start with the basics. When and why did the Politics team pursue reporting about Mr. Platner’s treatment of women?
FELICE BELMAN: We have a keen interest in the Maine race because the seat is critical to both parties’ hopes of controlling the Senate. Mr. Platner was a relatively unknown candidate when the campaign began, and we were eager to tell readers as much as we could about him. Our reporters, Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer, were in Maine reporting a different story about Mr. Platner this spring. On that trip, they heard concerning stories about his relationships with women.
What did the reporters do next?
FELICE: Katie and Lisa sought to talk to as many people as possible who had been in Mr. Platner’s orbit — past and present — to determine whether these tips had merit. They found three women who had dated Mr. Platner and who described volatile and toxic relationships. They spent weeks trying to learn more. Interviews with those women were the heart of our story, but that is not where our reporting stopped. We sought to corroborate what they said, and show that reporting to document facts of the allegations for readers to see.
What did that corroboration work involve?
FELICE: The reporters looked for evidence that the women had discussed these experiences with others or made notes about it to themselves. Among the questions they asked: Did the women have diaries from the time? Had they told friends or family or therapists about it? Did they have emails or text messages describing their experiences? We asked for the names of people we could interview to corroborate specific details and contacted them about the on-the-record allegations we were looking to report. We also made sure the women knew how their accounts would be presented before the story was published.
So, we surfaced credible, well-sourced allegations about Mr. Platner’s treatment of women, and reported and published as many on-the-record details as we could confirm at the time. But some people criticized the story or wanted it written differently. Many Republicans wanted it to be tougher on Mr. Platner. Some progressives wanted it to discount one of the accusers because she is a conservative. Some critics thought we downplayed his treatment of the three women. How do you see all this reaction?
FELICE: Yes, we have been accused of publishing damaging information about Mr. Platner with the purpose of hurting his campaign. And we have been accused of withholding information with the purpose of helping him. Neither is true. Our job is not to take sides but to fairly report the facts.
This kind of reporting requires sensitivity from journalists. We don’t pressure people, but we’re also seeking details that are often hard for the person to talk about. Walk us through that preparation and process.
FELICE: For the reasons you suggest, articles like this generally take a long time to report. Most people are not used to hearing from journalists or eager to talk when they do. We are asking people to make public some of the hardest moments of their lives. And the reaction from readers can be unpredictable, to say the least. Making a subject comfortable with this idea doesn’t typically happen immediately.
In the case of our reporting on Mr. Platner, our journalists traveled to suburban Virginia and to Maine, where the women live, to meet with them in person. They conducted hours of interviews over the course of many weeks. The women told them some details on the record — meaning that we had permission to publish that information in The New York Times — and some things off the record. We honored those agreements.
How did you decide if the women’s experiences and allegations involving Mr. Platner met our threshold for publication?
FELICE: The on-the-record allegations we had in our June article painted a picture of a man who had treated the women he dated in a manner they sometimes found menacing. In one case, it involved physical intimidation. We sought to confirm and corroborate as many on-the-record details as we could, which is key work to meeting the publication threshold.
Mr. Platner denied the allegations about physical intimidation, which we included in the article.
Mr. Platner’s status as a leading candidate in one of the country’s most high-stakes Senate races made the allegations more than a private matter. We believed they merited consideration from readers, especially voters in Maine.
This week, one of the women in our story, Jenny Racicot, was quoted by Politico and CNN saying that Mr. Platner forced her to have sex with him in 2021. That allegation was not in our article. She told Politico that she had told The Times more details of that night off the record. We don’t talk publicly about information we get off the record. But can you talk about our approach to handling off-the-record information?
FELICE: Especially with allegations of sexual violence, people sometimes feel comfortable speaking to reporters off the record initially and then considering what they are willing to put on the record and make public. Their thinking on this often evolves over time.
As Jenny Racicot has said elsewhere, we published what she was willing to tell us on the record about that incident. Anything she told us off the record was not included in our story, and we did not share any off-the-record information with the Platner campaign.
Some critics have said that we should have found some way to signal Ms. Racicot’s rape allegation in the story. Do you think they have a point?
FELICE: Without revealing anything that Ms. Racicot told us off the record, I can say that our reporters and many Times editors wrestled with how best to report her experiences with Mr. Platner. Key to our discussion was that we would honor our agreement not to include anything she had told us in confidence. This is the way our story described her allegation:
Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling.”
That paragraph faithfully honored what she was willing to put on the record.
How do you navigate a person wanting to go off the record while describing a newsworthy allegation? We want to report the news.
FELICE: It’s not surprising that interview subjects’ initial impulse would be to speak off the record in difficult cases like this. Our reporters listen to their accounts and ask them to consider whether they would be comfortable putting any or all of it on the record. That negotiation sometimes takes place over more than one conversation.
Unlike politicians or other people on the public stage, most people being interviewed for these stories are not used to thinking about what’s on or off the record. So these interviews often start with the reporters explaining that idea, making clear that we will publish only what they are willing to say on the record. We are scrupulous about that, and the story was reviewed by a team of top editors before publication.
We interviewed several women for our article. How did we decide whose accounts and experiences to describe in greater detail?
FELICE: Of all the people interviewed for this story, three women described troubling interactions with Mr. Platner. The story of one of them, Lyndsey Fifield, was included in the greatest detail because she gave us the most detailed, on-the-record account. The accounts of the other two women provided critical context.
The story described the political leanings of the three women. Ms. Fifield is a conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns; the other two are Democrats. Why get into their politics?
FELICE: We wanted to be forthright with readers about the political views of people making accusations against a political candidate. For instance, we noted that Ms. Racicot agreed with many of Mr. Platner’s policies. We included Ms. Fifield’s background in conservative politics, including whom she had worked for and when, and that she wasn’t connected to the campaign of Mr. Platner’s opponent, Senator Susan Collins.
Our reporting showed that their accusations were serious and credible, which is why we ran the article.
