Maine Democrat Graham Platner Caught Lurking on Chat App Dubbed "Predator's Paradise"

The Democratic superstar has been embraced by Bernie Sanders, Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Hannah Pingree, but new sexual misconduct revelations threaten to implode his U.S. Senate campaign.

U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s campaign is reeling after a report Sunday revealed the far left progressive cheated on his wife with at least six other women, using an anonymous chat app described by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as a “Predator’s Paradise.”

Platner, who until Sunday was the front-runner in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he’d engaged in several adulterous affairs after marrying his wife, Amy Gertner, in 2023, while Gertner later confirmed her knowledge of the affairs in a video posted to social media.

Platner used the anonymous chat app “Kik” to arrange his clandestine assignations, using a profile of him shirtless and the user name “phustle0331.”

P-Hustle is also the username Platner used with his now infamous Reddit account. The number in the handle — 0331 — is the U.S. Marine Corps Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) code for a machine gunner, which was Platner’s MOS until he left the USMC in 2009. The Kik handle is also identical to the username Platner has used on Instagram.

In an image attached to the Kik account, Platner’s tattoos are unmistakably visible, with the exception of the Nazi death camp tattoo on his chest, which is covered up by his phone.

Screenshots reviewed by The Robinson Report show the account was created in 2016, six years before Platner got married and when the self-described communist would have been 31 years old.

The Kik picture is sexual in nature, with the oyster farmer-turned-Senate hopeful facing a mirror, shirtless, with a towel wrapped around his waist. The flagrantly sexual nature of the profile picture is an odd move for a social media platform that, according to Search Logistics, has a user base that is 70 percent young people between the ages of 13 and 24.

As of Sunday afternoon, the account remained active despite Platner’s campaign claiming he “deleted the app from his phone but hadn’t deactivated his account.”

The Predator’s Paradise

Kik, the WSJ noted, is a platform “widely used for sexual encounters.” However, Kik isn’t just known for promiscuous sexual encounters between consenting adults like Tinder, Hinge, or Grindr.

The app has also been singled out by law enforcement and child safety advocates as a key tool online predators use to target underage girls and boys for illicit sexual encounters.

Child abuse advocacy groups, such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), National Center on Sexual Exploitation, and others like Thorn or Internet Matters have framed Kik’s design features — i.e. anonymity, low barriers to entry, stranger discovery, and group chats — as enabling grooming, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) sharing, and exploitation, often calling it a high-risk or “predator-friendly” environment.

NCOSE has repeatedly labeled Kik a “predator’s paradise,” a phrase originating from a convicted child molester interviewed by CBS News, and placed it on its “Dirty Dozen” list of entities facilitating sexual exploitation. They document rampant grooming, CSAM trading, and prostitution ads, noting that anonymity and weak early moderation made it a haven.

Because of the nature of the app, there’s no way to inspect Platner’s interactions in the decade since he first downloaded it, but the WSJ did not surface any evidence that the Sullivan man used the app to communicate with underage girls or boys.

The Kik revelation is only the latest layer in a pattern that has Maine women speaking out publicly — and raises uncomfortable questions about why a man running to unseat Sen. Susan Collins would maintain a presence on an app with such a notorious track record for enabling the worst kind of criminal behavior.

At the time Platner downloaded Kik, the app had already developed a reputation as a dark instrument for sexually deviant adults.

In February 2016, the New York Times highlighted the dangers of Kik in a story about two college kids who used the app to message Nicole Lovvett, a 13 year old girl and cancer survivor, before abducting and murdering her. The article said Kik has “increasingly become a source of concern for law enforcement” due to the “growing number of abuse cases” connected with the app.

More recently in Maine, the Kik app has been directly implicated in helping child predators connect with victims.

In September 2025, a Maine man was arrested after he was caught snapping pictures of kids at soccer games, then using AI to turn those innocent shots into sexually explicit images and sending them around in Kik chats.

In June 2025, a Maine man was hit with a 30-to-60-year prison sentence for producing videos of children being raped and then distributing that horrific material inside a dedicated Kik chatroom that existed for exactly that purpose.

In October 2024, another Maine man pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual abuse material after he was caught sending and seeking child pornography through Kik.

In February 2023, a 31-year-old Maine man was sentenced for pretending to be a 19-year-old online so he could solicit nude pictures from underage girls on Kik.

Nationally, the numbers are staggering.

Advocacy reports cite over 2,000 federal criminal cases linked to Kik between 2014 and 2020 alone, with hundreds more in the years since — including ongoing 2025–2026 prosecutions. In the UK, a 2018 BBC investigation found 1,147 police probes involving Kik for child sexual exploitation, grooming, and image offenses across nearly every major force. NCMEC’s CyberTipline receives thousands of automated reports from Kik annually via hash-matching for known CSAM.

The revelation that Platner has spent ten years using the Kik app to arrange sexual encounters — with adults, according to his campaign’s statements to the WSJ — is the latest sex-tinged scandal to rock the Democrat’s campaign.

Platner has spent recent weeks facing mockery over an old Reddit post in which he described his overpowering desire to masturbate whenever he uses a Portapotty as well as his various strategies for using prostitutes.

In the same week he announced his candidacy, reports began circulating in Facebook groups among Maine-based users who told tales of encountering Platner on various dating apps.

Screenshots from the Maine-based Facebook group “Are We Dating The Same Guy? | Maine / Portland / Lewiston / Bangor” show multiple women discussed “Graham Sullivan” (widely understood to be Platner) as a serial ghoster who popped up on dating apps despite being married.

Jessica Oram noted he “got married 2 weeks ago possibly.”

Shelly and Jenny Racicot recalled him bullying classmates and spending time “on and off” with one woman as recently as 2.5 years ago.

Tracy Wright described matching in early 2020, daily texting, planned meetups that never happened, and assuming he had a significant other who “just came back into the picture.”

Sara Stowe added he’d been “up to the same nonsense for at least 8 years.”

One woman posted his photo with another man outdoors and warned: “I would definitely not recommend on any level.”

Beyond the sexually deviant content tied to Platner, his Reddit account has also made national headlines and become fodder for political ads because of his criticism of rape victims, black people, rural white people in Maine, and U.S. military veterans.

He viciously mocked Purple Heart recipient and veteran Ted Daniels in a 2019 post about Daniels’ helmet-cam footage from a 2012 Taliban firefight in which Daniels was shot four times protecting his squad. Platner wrote: “Dumb motherf----- didn’t deserve to live... Poor marksmanship on the Taliban’s part is the only reason this mouthbreather made it home.” He has refused multiple times to apologize, even as Daniels — who ran toward gunfire while Platner ran to a keyboard — publicly called him out.

Some national Democrats are circling the wagons in classic fashion, but it’s unclear how many prominent left-wing influencers are actually being paid by the campaign to post positively about Platner.

The Democrat’s most recent Federal Election Commission filings show large payments to a consulting firm called Good Influence, which allows candidates for office to buy favorable social media posts from large social media accounts without anyone having to disclose the pay-to-post relationship.

An investigation by the Washington Free Beacon found at least a few of the contractors known to work with Good Influence began posting glowing praise of Platner almost immediately after he entered the race.

A full list of social media users who are being paid to praise Platner is not available, as neither Good Influence nor Platner are required to disclose such arrangements.

As of Monday morning, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Hannah Pingree — all of whom happily campaigned with Platner and coveted his support — had not commented on the news that Platner’s hobbies extend well beyond farming the occasional oyster.

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