Graham Planter, a Democratic candidate for US Senate from Maine, has admitted to and apologized for posting antigay slurs on Reddit, while serving in the National Guard overseas from 2016 to ’21, according to a report in The Hill and an interview with Planter in The Advocate.

Reports The Hill:

The Advocate this week obtained the past Reddit comments, posted under the handle P-Hustle from 2016-21, in which Platner used antigay slurs and frequently used the word “gay” as an insult.

In the Wednesday interview with the Advocate, Platner apologized for using that language, saying he no longer does so and finds the slurs he used in his posts “abhorrent.”

“These were words that I used for a long time in ways that I did not take seriously,” he said in the interview. “Because of personal relationships that I’ve developed over the years, I do not use [them] now and find [them] to be quite offensive. I stopped using that specific kind of language a while ago … and today I find that stuff abhorrent. And I am sorry that I ever used it.”

Platner said he “had a number of very close gay friends” when he lived in Washington, D.C. and became friends with “a number of trans people” when he moved back to Maine, which “really opened my eyes.”

“Even though I thought I was open-minded,” Platner said, “there were elements to their existence that I had been entirely unaware of. That was when I began to really take far more seriously the damaging nature of language, the damaging nature of even just discussing whether people exist or not.”

Platner’s campaign referred The Hill to his interview with the Advocate when asked for further comment.

The military veteran has come under fire recently for reports exposing years-old Reddit posts in which he called police officers “bastards,” described himself as a “communist” and used an ableist slur to refer to some other Reddit users.

“I don’t want people to see me for who I was in my worst internet comment — or even frankly who I was in my best internet comment. … I don’t think any of that is indicative of who I am today, really,” Platner told CNN’s KFile in an interview published last week.

Platner also faced fresh scrutiny this week after the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm on Tuesday accused him of donning a “Nazi tattoo.” The tattoo resembled a Totenkopf, which is German for “death’s head” and was a symbol adopted by Adolf Hitler’s troops in Nazi Germany, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s website.

Platner defended himself in an interview on the liberal “Pod Save America” podcast, saying he didn’t know of the Nazi link when he got the tattoo: “I’m not a secret Nazi.”

Read the complete story in The Hill.

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