If you pay attention to politics, you probably had your eyes on the primary held in Illinois’s safe-blue 9th Congressional District this week. Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, emerged victorious in a high-profile Democratic congressional primary, beating out more than a dozen contenders, including Kat Abughazaleh, a young, uber-left-wing social media influencer currently under federal indictment for obstructing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The 48-year-old candidate’s big win came just hours after he was accused of being a groomer by a woman online.
Had Biss pursued a relationship with a minor? No. Had he used his position to coerce someone into a sexual relationship? No. Had he raped someone? No. Had he even had sex with this supposed “victim” at all? No.
Was this an opportunistic political hit job? The allegation, posted on Bluesky by a Stanford Law School instructor named Megan Wachspress, certainly makes it look like that.
“If he’s going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman’s campaign,” Wachspress wrote, seemingly referring to Abughazaleh, “I’m going to come out and say it: During his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.”
How was the relationship inappropriate? In a Substack post, Wachspress elaborates. In 2004, Wachspress was a 20-year-old University of Chicago undergraduate who attended one of Biss’s math classes. After the term ended, Biss, who was 26, asked her out on a date.
She agreed.
