Jenny Racicot, who accused Graham Platner of sexual assault in an interview published in Politico on Monday, detailed her recollection of the alleged assault in an prolonged interview with the NCS host Jake Tapper that aired on Monday night.
She mentioned that Mr. Platner had drunkenly assaulted her at her dwelling in 2021, and she or he described the encounter as rape. Detailing the violent battle that she mentioned occurred, she recounted {that a} stitching cupboard had been knocked over, inflicting a needle to be caught in her leg.
“This is something that I tried for many years to forget,” Ms. Racicot mentioned.
Mr. Platner, 41, referred to as all allegations of nonconsensual conduct “categorically false” in a video posted on social media on Monday.
Ms. Racicot, 41, mentioned that she met Mr. Platner on a courting app in 2019 and located him “intelligent” and “charming,” however that he additionally self-medicated with alcohol. On one evening in 2021, he texted her that he would come over to her home, she mentioned.
“I said, ‘No, don’t come over,’” Ms. Racicot advised NCS. “Like, ‘I’m not in the mood. Don’t come over.’” She didn’t hear again from him, so she assumed “he got the message,” she mentioned, however “half an hour later, I heard a noise outside my door and then he came in. He just came into my house. It was unlocked.”
After coming into her dwelling uninvited, Mr. Platner “jumped on top of” her whereas she was mendacity on the sofa and “indicated that he had intentions that were sexual in nature,” Ms. Racicot mentioned.
“I remember just at first being like, ‘Hey, I’m not into this,’” she mentioned. “‘Like, don’t, I’m not in the mood.’” Then she observed a “look in his eyes” and the odor of alcohol, she mentioned.
“I was like, ‘This is different — he is heavily intoxicated,’” she mentioned. “And that blank stare was kind of like a photographic memory that I still have of that night.”
Ms. Racicot mentioned that she pushed Mr. Platner away when he was on prime of her that evening in 2021, and that he backed into her vintage stitching equipment, inflicting stitching needles, tape and yarn to scatter and fall to the ground.
“I remember specifically him grabbing at my chest, and I hit his hand and I said, ‘Don’t touch me,’” she mentioned.
Evaluating the state of affairs and his degree of intoxication, “I basically felt safest just complying,” Ms. Racicot mentioned. Before that time, she maintained that she had so stridently mentioned no that, in her view, he couldn’t have believed she was consenting.
“I don’t believe that you can think that that scenario was consensual,” she mentioned, including, “when somebody in the middle of it says, ‘Don’t touch me,’ like, that’s obviously not consensual,” she mentioned, including that he had apologized in moments of lucidity.
At the identical time, she mentioned, he appeared unaware of what he had completed. He fell asleep in her mattress afterward, she mentioned, after which awoke and “went to go put his arm around” her, which Ms. Racicot mentioned made her understand “this person doesn’t know that what happened wasn’t OK.”
“I remember taking his arm and throwing it back at him, and I said, ‘Are you serious, Graham?’” she recounted, including an expletive. “And he’s like, ‘What?’ And I’m like, ‘Do you not remember what happened last night?’ He was like, ‘No.’”
She had lain in mattress “in a state of panic” all evening, she mentioned, and later apprehensive that he had gotten her pregnant. She mentioned he didn’t converse to her once more.
Ms. Racicot had described a few of what occurred that evening to The New York Times this spring, saying that he had arrived at her home drunk after she had requested him to not come over. At the time, she declined to share additional particulars of the encounter on the document, however she mentioned she had discovered his conduct “reckless” and “unsettling” and had reduce off contact with him quickly after that episode.
She mentioned on NCS that on the time she “felt really protective of my own privacy.” But after the article got here out and she or he was named in it, she mentioned, “I kind of just made the decision that I’m going to say my piece and get it out there.”
Ms. Racicot additionally mentioned she had hesitated to talk out towards Mr. Platner as a result of she “felt really uncomfortable with the responsibility of and the weight of my story and what that might do,” on condition that she agrees along with his politics.
“I understand why people want someone like him in office, and I felt like me coming forward would essentially potentially take that away,” she mentioned.
She declined to say whether or not or not Maine voters ought to forged their ballots for Mr. Platner when requested by Mr. Tapper.
“I’m just here to tell my story, to give a clearer picture of who he is and the type of past that he has,” she mentioned. “I just think it’s fair to the democratic process to let people know who they’re voting for.”