Graham Blattner’s wife called media reports that her husband had previously exchanged sexually explicit text messages with multiple women “disgraceful” over the weekend, the latest controversy to hit the Maine Democratic Senate campaign.
Blattner, an oyster farmer and war veteran, posted a video taken by his wife, Amy Gertner, who reportedly texted his campaign last year. In the five-minute video, Gaertner avoided speaking directly about the text messages her husband sent, calling the wider coverage “gossip” and saying “marriage is hard.”
“I find it really shameful that there is a bunch of media outlets and people willing to spread gossip,” she said in an informal video, as she walked along the route. “No marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage. I want mine.”
Blatner is seeking the Democratic nomination for one of the most closely watched Senate races where Democrats hope to defeat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the party’s efforts to take control of the narrowly divided Senate. The Maine primary is June 9.
Genevieve McDonald, one of Blatner’s campaign staffers at the time, told the Associated Press that the candidate was “sexting multiple women while they were married” and that “the campaign tried to assess that as a weakness in the election.”
Blattner told reporters on Sunday that what McDonald said was not true. When asked if he confirmed that the text messages did not exist, Plattner replied: “I confirm that what Genevieve MacDonald said in the New York Times is not true.” Blattner did not provide any details. He was referring to a story the Times ran with MacDonald’s name on Saturday The Wall Street Journal The story was reported for the first time.
Gaertner told the campaign in August about the messages she discovered on his phone last year to ensure they did not pose a liability to the campaign, according to the Wall Street Journal. Blatner’s campaign team reportedly determined that the text messages were private and were being handled by the couple, who married in 2023. Gaertner said the two are undergoing counseling.
Blattner told reporters that he and Gertner had spoken with the campaign about their marriage, but reiterated that McDonald’s allegations were false.
Blatner’s campaign on Sunday did not specifically confirm the text messages sent to the AP, but did release a statement from Gertner saying the revelation of conversations she had with a campaign aide was a betrayal that “hurts deeply.”
“I trusted this person through the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our minds,” she wrote.
Blatner, who has never held public office, is taking a tough, less hard-line approach to the campaign, has shaped a platform around economic equality and has already had to navigate rhetoric that has emerged from his past.
The candidate was A The tattoo has been recognized as a Nazi symbolWhich he said he did not realize until several weeks into the campaign. There was also a lot of interest in his previous Reddit posts, which denounced military sexual assaults and used homophobic slurs, for which he apologized.
Blatner’s campaign weathered those earlier revelations in what was considered one of the most competitive Democratic primaries before Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race in late April due to a lack of campaign funds. Mills, a two-term governor, was viewed as one of the top 2026 Democratic recruits when she entered the Senate race before her campaign fizzled.
Blatner is still drawing support from prominent Democrats, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ruben Gallego as well as U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna. The latter is scheduled to meet Blattner on Friday, and so far it appears that he has not lost any support with this latest revelation of the text messages.
On Sunday, two Democratic senators declined to address the issue directly when pressed by reporters. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Blatner served his country and his community, but he “also made mistakes and acknowledged that.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union” program, New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was also overtaken. “With any election campaign in the country, the character and transparency of the different candidates will emerge, and voters will decide what they think in the end,” Kim said.
Stepping forward on Sunday, Blattner posted a video on X from a “Happening Now” event in which he entered a room to a standing ovation from cheering supporters.
Questions about whether additional controversial information about Blattner could emerge have made some Democrats more concerned about his general election chances against Collins, who has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997.
In October, after it was revealed that Totenkopf had a tattoo on his chest, which he quickly covered up, the AP asked him if there were other scandals on the horizon.
Blattner said he expected his opponents to “continue to delay things.”
“They will keep making things up,” he said. “I fully expect people to lie about me at this point.”
Voters are aware of the couple’s struggles, including infertility and traveling out of the country to afford IVF treatment, which they discussed on the campaign trail.
In late April, Blattner shared that Gertner had suffered a miscarriage, and discussed his mental health struggles and the role of his family and therapist in helping.
McDonald initially worked for Blatner’s campaign as his political director and resigned a few months later when his now-deleted Reddit posts began to surface, saying she could not stand behind him as a candidate. She later rejected a severance offer from the campaign in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement.
McDonald wrote Saturday on Facebook that Blatner’s campaign “demanded” that she retract her statements to the Wall Street Journal or his team would accuse her of violating the couple’s trust. MacDonald was not mentioned in the newspaper article, but after that exchange, she said she chose to be publicly mentioned in a New York Times story.
“His advisors greatly overestimate how unambitious I am to be like them,” she wrote on Facebook.
After resigning from Blatner’s campaign, McDonald moved to assist Democrat Jordan Wood in his congressional campaign in Maine’s 2nd District. McDonald submitted her resignation from Wood’s campaign on Saturday morning, according to Wood’s campaign.
Wood endorsed Platner after Mills withdrew.
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Bidayen reported from Austin, Texas, and Croisi reported from Providence, Rhode Island.