Thursday morning on X, Lyndsey Fifield — a Washington D.C.-area woman and conservative who revealed she had an abusive relationship with Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner — tore into New York Times reporter and supposed #MeToo dean Jodi Kantor for her partisan hijinks and “horrific smears” in callously dismissing allegations she and other ex-girlfriends shared with The Times.
As a reminder, here was what Kantor said Wednesday on CNN’s The Arena (click “expand”):
WATCH: New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor – who wrote many of the #MeToo stories – DEFENDS Graham Platner and DISMISSES the allegations against him by @LyndseyFifield and other ex-girlfriends because they were not “abuse” and women saying they just “did not like what” they saw… pic.twitter.com/qMSSXa3XNU
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 10, 2026
Well, let’s talk about what they may or may not be willing to overlook. The accusations against Graham Platner are not classic MeToo accusations. They’re not about a boss and a young female employee being subjected to sexual advances. They’re — they were mostly made in the context of consensual relationships. There are these, like, very sensational texts about sex. There are allegations from former girlfriends that are not — the way my colleagues reported them were not like classic abuse allegations. They were mostly like being his boyfriend gave me a view into him and I did not like what I saw. His character was scary. He had this Nazi tattoo. Et cetera.
There was one allegation of crossing a line physically, but I think that means that these are pretty different accusations than, say, the one that — the ones that President Trump faced. And, of course, in the Access Hollywood tape, President Trump bragged about grabbing women against their will. And so I think it speaks to the kind of confusion of the long post MeToo moment in which, like, gender related accusations get bundled together. But they’re actually very different.
Fifield didn’t go after Kantor by name.
Instead, she took the high road, starting with the acknowledgment that, since her story about Platner went public, she had “heard from dozens of women who have been victims of domestic violence” and “[m]any have remarked not just how much they relate to my story overall but how they, too, once qualified their abuse in the same way I did in my interview with the Times: Clarifying that Graham didn’t break my arm, didn’t ever punch or slap me.”
Because of this qualifier, she didn’t realize that, while she “didn’t want to exaggerate,” she had “downplay[ed] his violence and the deep, lasting impact it has had on my life.”
Fifield emphasized that, if it wasn’t clear in The Times story, that she “was never, ever antagonistic, never picked a fight, and took great pains to try to keep him from becoming enraged.”
Inching towards addressing those like Kantor who’ve discounted her experience, Fifield said, “[m]y friends have pointed out that” her need to clarify she didn’t push back on Platner’s abuses were “not normal.”
“I shouldn’t feel the need to insist to the public that I didn’t do anything to deserve or provoke physical intimidation, control, or abuse. No one does,” she added.
Fifield again showed grace most would never afford to those who’ve wronged them in empathizing she “forgave Graham years ago and was glad to see that he had gotten sober and seemingly had gotten help for his mental health issues—I sincerely wished him well but when I realized I was not the only woman he had done this to, that he has a lifelong pattern of deep contempt for women, I realized he had suckered me once again.”
Along with invoking another former ex-girlfriend in Jenny Racicot, her final two sentences were more unambiguous jabs at Kantor’s decision to deem Platner’s abuse unworthy of the #MeToo moniker: “And instead of support for coming forward, Jenny and I have been met with horrific smears, told it was ‘karma,’ or that it wasn’t ‘that bad.’ So... yeah, that is actually pretty classic.”
