Platner still has active account on anonymous app dubbed ‘predator’s paradise’ amid cheating scandal
Adam Pack
Fox News
June 1, 2026
Senate candidate Graham Platner has not deactivated his account on a private messaging app associated with casual sex and anonymous encounters — despite facing mounting questions over infidelity and the platform’s ties to sexual exploitation.
Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine’s 2026 Senate race, has an active profile on Kik, an anonymous chatting platform notorious for lax identification methods that have enabled the proliferation of child sexual abuse material.
The profile, reviewed by Fox News Digital, contains a sexually suggestive picture of Platner showing the candidate’s naked torso with a towel draped around his waist. It is unclear when the image was taken, but Platner created the account in 2016.
Platner’s presence on Kik was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which reported that he sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women while married to his wife Amy Gertner, who wedded Platner in 2023. According to the outlet, Platner’s wife first discovered the adulterous messages in the spring of 2025 and later divulged them to a since-departed campaign official.
Multiple child safety groups have criticized Kik due to its anonymous structure and public group chats that allow strangers to contact each other with little effort.
Users only need an email address to create an account, and there is no enforceable age-verification mechanism.
Roughly 70% of the platform’s users are estimated to be between 13 and 24 years old, according to multiple industry reports.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation designated Kik as a “predator’s paradise” in 2023 for being rampant with “predatory behavior and child sexual exploitation.”
The watchdog also placed the platform on its “Dirty Dozen” list for facilitating and profiting from sexual exploitation.
In 2024, Kik was rated the worst app for severe sexual content, according to Bark, a parental control and online safety platform.
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.
It is unclear who Platner messaged on the clandestine platform, but there is no evidence he communicated with minors.
The Platner campaign said over the weekend that he deleted the app from his phone long before The Wall Street Journal’s reporting.
Gertner released a video slamming the media for reporting on Platner’s alleged cheating, which she labeled “gossip” while insisting she has a “great” marriage with the candidate.
“It makes me really angry, disappointed,” Gertner said in the video posted Saturday evening. “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 plays a visible role in Platner’s campaign and is financially compensated in a volunteer coordinator role.
Platner’s alleged infidelity is the latest incident in a string of controversies that has dogged his insurgent campaign.
The far-left Senate hopeful has previously sparked backlash for posting vulgar messages on a since-deleted Reddit account in which he joked about masturbating in public portable toilets, discussed using satellite phones on an overseas deployment to “cyber f–k” his girlfriend and appeared to defend military personnel who cheat on their spouses.
“You don’t have much experience with Latin American hookers, do you?” Platner wrote in response to a user concerned about the exploitation of female prostitutes in Colombia.
“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?’” he wrote in a separate post in response to an article reporting on Secret Service agents paying prostitutes. “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.”
“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,” he went on.
Platner also called himself a communist, denigrated rural White people as “racist” and “stupid” and singled out Black people for not tipping well, in since-deleted posts.
He has also faced mounting scrutiny over a Nazi-linked chest tattoo that he has since covered up. Platner said last year he got the black skull-and-crossbones tattoo while out drinking with fellow Marines in 2007 during a period of leave in Croatia and denied knowing the symbol’s Nazi origins.
Platner’s hand placement notably shields the heavily scrutinized tattoo from view in his Kik account profile.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Platner campaign for comment but did not hear back.
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