Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine's 2026 Senate race, still has an active account on Kik, the anonymous messaging platform that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation designated a "predator's paradise" in 2023, even as he battles fallout from allegations that he sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women while married.
Fox News Digital reported that it reviewed Platner's Kik profile and found it still active. The profile contains a sexually suggestive photo showing Platner's naked torso with a towel draped around his waist. It remains unclear when the image was taken, but Platner created the account in June 2016.
The Platner campaign said over the weekend that the candidate deleted the Kik app from his phone "long before" The Wall Street Journal's reporting on the cheating allegations. But deleting an app from a phone is not the same as deactivating an account. Fox News Digital reached out to the campaign for comment on the still-active profile and did not hear back.
Kik requires only an email address to create an account. There is no enforceable age-verification mechanism. Roughly 70 percent of the platform's users are estimated to be between 13 and 24 years old, according to multiple industry reports cited by Fox News Digital.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation placed Kik on its "Dirty Dozen" list for facilitating and profiting from sexual exploitation, saying the platform was rampant with "predatory behavior and child sexual exploitation." Bark, a parental-control and online-safety platform, rated Kik the worst app for severe sexual content in 2024.
Between 2023 and 2025, at least four Maine men were sentenced for distributing child pornography or soliciting nude pictures from underage girls by posing as minors while using Kik. No evidence has surfaced that Platner communicated with minors on the platform. But the fact that a major-party Senate nominee maintains an active profile on an app with that record raises an obvious question about judgment, one the campaign has so far declined to answer.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Platner sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women while married to Amy Gertner, whom he married in 2023. Gertner first discovered the messages in spring 2025 and later divulged them to a since-departed campaign official, the Journal reported.
Gertner released a video Saturday evening criticizing media coverage of her husband's alleged infidelity. She called it "gossip" and insisted she has a "great" marriage with Platner.
"It makes me really angry, disappointed. And I find it really shameful that there's a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on."
Gertner serves as a financially compensated volunteer coordinator in Platner's campaign. Her defense may satisfy some supporters, but it does not address whether the Kik account was used for the alleged messages, or why it remains active.
The scandal has drawn attention from national Democrats. A linked Fox News headline states that Sen. Cory Booker acknowledged Platner "has questions to answer" following the latest revelations. When even allies concede there are unanswered questions, the candidate's silence becomes its own kind of answer.
The Kik profile is not the first time Platner's digital footprint has caused problems. Fox News Digital reported that Platner previously sparked backlash for posting vulgar messages on a since-deleted Reddit account. In one exchange, responding to a user concerned about exploitation of female prostitutes in Colombia, Platner wrote:
"You don't have much experience with Latin American hookers, do you?"
In another Reddit post, Platner dismissed the idea that marital fidelity reflects on a person's broader trustworthiness, a sentiment that reads differently now, given the cheating allegations.
"I've heard that idiotic sentiment made within the confines of the the [sic] military. 'If you can't remain faithful to your wife, how can you remain faithful to your comrades?' Well, I have many good buddies who lied and cheated with women, and yet were straight shooting hard men when it came to their work."
He added: "I find it is a sentiment only held by moral relativists who need something to cry about, intelligent people realize they are not mutually exclusive."
The posts also included Platner calling himself a communist, denigrating rural White people as "racist" and "stupid," and singling out Black people for not tipping well. The Reddit account has since been deleted, but the content was captured before it disappeared. Candidates with trails of racially charged posts and far-left commitments keep surfacing in Democratic primaries, and the pattern says something about the party's pipeline.
Platner also faced scrutiny over what Fox News Digital described as a "Nazi-linked chest tattoo." Platner said last year that he got the black skull-and-crossbones tattoo while out drinking with fellow Marines in 2007 during leave in Croatia. He denied knowing the symbol's Nazi origins.
Whether that explanation is credible is for voters to decide. But the accumulation of controversies, the tattoo, the Reddit posts, the cheating allegations, the active Kik account, paints a picture of a candidate who either exercises poor judgment repeatedly or hopes voters won't bother connecting the dots.
In a political environment where dramatic developments in national politics move fast, the Maine Senate race could easily slip below the radar. That would be a mistake. Platner spoke at a campaign event in Portland, Maine, on May 17, 2026, pressing forward as though none of this warrants a serious public accounting.
Several straightforward questions remain unanswered. When did Platner last log in to Kik? Did he use the platform to send any of the sexually explicit messages reported by the Journal? If he deleted the app from his phone, why didn't he deactivate the account? And why won't the campaign respond to press inquiries about it?
These are not gotcha questions. They are the kind of basic accountability inquiries that any candidate for the United States Senate should expect to face, and should be willing to answer. The fact that congressional accountability efforts are ramping up across multiple fronts makes Platner's evasiveness all the more conspicuous.
Fox News Digital's review of the Kik profile is a matter of observable fact, not partisan inference. The profile is there. The photo is there. The account remains active. The campaign's only response, that Platner deleted the app from his phone, answers a question nobody asked while dodging the one everyone did.
Maine voters watching this unfold might also wonder what it says about the Democratic bench in their state. If Platner is the presumptive nominee, who else was in the field? What does it tell you about a party's vetting process when its standard-bearer has a deleted Reddit account full of crude remarks, a tattoo he can't fully explain, cheating allegations sourced to his own wife, and an active profile on a platform that child-safety organizations have flagged as one of the most dangerous apps in America?
In an era when political commentary and media scrutiny can shift public perception overnight, silence is a strategy, but not a good one. The longer Platner refuses to address these questions directly, the more the unanswered record speaks for itself.
Character isn't a side issue in a Senate race. It's the whole ballot.
