Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat who hopes to oust Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, has taken heat for comments he made about rape more than a decade ago. His campaign strategy emphasizes his present views, including his support for legislation to improve tracking of rape kits.
“Our campaign played a key role in passing Representative Valli Geiger’s landmark rape kit bill in Maine,” Platner said in an April 14 X post, sharing a TV ad on the topic. (Geiger’s bill didn’t pass, but Gov. Janet Mills signed a budget in April that included rape kit tracking, which Geiger proposed in her bill.)
“Rape kits” is shorthand for sexual assault forensic evidence kits. Medical professionals collect evidence from sex assault victims’ bodies and clothing to help law enforcement investigate. Past studies and news reports showed that many rape kits remained untested in Maine.
During the past several years, states have passed laws that aim to eliminate a rape kit testing backlogs. Maine was the last state to pass such a law, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, a group that advocates to wipe out backlogs.
Geiger narrated the Platner ad, which aired in April: “I wrote a bill to ensure rape kits are tracked to protect victims and identify perpetrators. Every year its passage was blocked. But then I told Graham Platner and the first thing he said was ‘Valli, how can I help get this bill passed?’ He campaigned on it. He spoke to hundreds of Mainers about it. He brought in an army of volunteers to call about it and the bill will soon become law.”
Platner, an oyster farmer, veteran and political newcomer, has faced criticism about comments he made about rape on Reddit in 2013. A PAC associated with Collins aired ads about his statements.
Trailing Platner in the polls, on April 30 Mills dropped out of the Senate race, making Platner the likely nominee. David Costello, who has held government jobs in Maine and Maryland, remains on the June 9 Democratic primary ballot, but lags far behind in polling and fundraising.
Platner’s ad has a point that past efforts had failed — Mills signed no such a bill in 2024, citing a procedural objection. But it’s hard to parse whether Platner played a “key role” in the passage; he did invite a lawmaker advocating for the legislation to speak at one of his town halls.
Maine passed a rape kit bill in 2026 after a previous effort stalled
The Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault conducted a 2018 study that recommended investing state money in its state crime lab to analyze sexual assault kits to maintain a minimal backlog. A kit’s evidence can validate a survivor’s account, the study said, and may make some more willing to participate in the justice process. The evidence also helps identify offenders.
But it took years for Maine to pass extensive legislation.
In 2024, Geiger sponsored LD2129 to require the state inventory untested rape kits and establish a statewide rape kit tracking system. It passed with unanimous support.
The bill was among 35 that Mills said legislators sent to her after they adjourned. She didn’t sign them into law, in what’s called a pocket veto. Mills wrote that even if she saw value in some of the bills, she feared a legal challenge since they were last minute.
When asked in 2024 about not signing the rape kit bill, Mills said she was working with police to improve rape kit tracking. WMTW reported that Mills was referring to a limited pilot program passed by the Legislature the previous session that had yet to be implemented.
“I feel strongly about this bill, too,” Mills said, referring to Geiger’s bill. “I feel strongly that we have to respect the rights of survivors of sexual assault, I always have taken that position.”
At the time, Geiger blamed the Legislature – not Mills – for the bill’s failure.
“She shouldn’t have had to make that kind of decision,” Geiger said of the pocket veto. “The Senate and the House failed to do the work as it’s usually done.”
Geiger told us in an April 30 interview she stood by those comments and didn’t think it would have been a sound strategy to blame the governor. But she said she had thought that Mills, the state’s first female attorney general and district attorney, would make an exception for the rape kit bill.
In 2025, similar legislation passed the House but wasn’t funded and didn’t reach the governor’s desk.
Platner gave Geiger a platform at a town hall
We asked Platner’s campaign for information about what he did to campaign for the bill. A spokesperson pointed to one action: Platner held a “tax the rich” town hall Jan. 6 in Portland, Maine, where he gave the stage to Democratic lawmakers, including Geiger, to promote their bills. The campaign sent us video clips of the town hall.
“We are the only state in the nation that has not passed a rape reform kit bill,” Geiger said at the event, as she recounted the bill’s 2024 demise. “Despite the fact that I know that the governor strongly supports women’s rights, she vetoed that bill.”
Platner urged the audience to call their legislators and the governor’s office.
Geiger told PolitiFact that hundreds of people attended the town hall, which drew media coverage: “I can’t tell you how many women and men said ‘I am writing the governor. I will call the governor” after listening at the town hall,” Geiger said in an interview.
About a month after the town hall, on Feb. 4, Mills said she included in her supplemental budget proposal $267,000 for the Department of Public Safety to establish a tracking system for completed rape kits. She said it aligned with a bill in the Legislature that was not the same as Geiger’s but had some similar elements.
The funding was in the budget Mills signed into law in April requiring an inventory of untested rape kits and the establishment of a statewide tracking system.
The night before Mills dropped out of the race, a spokesperson for her campaign sent us a statement by Rep. Holly Stover, a Democrat and appropriations committee member, and a co-sponsor of the bill that Mills cited in her budget proposal. Stover credited Mills and legislators for the passage. The Mills campaign spokesperson said in the fall of 2025, the governor informed legislative leaders that she would include rape kit funding in the supplemental budget, but the spokesperson provided no evidence to back that up.
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This story originally appeared on PolitiFact
