Exclusive: Political operative behind Graham Platner's rise accused of sexual assault

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Daniel Moraff is a political operative who works in the shadows of campaigns. For the past decade, he has hopscotched the country, casting progressive working-class political candidates to run for competitive seats. He himself had rarely made headlines—until one of his candidates blew up national politics. Moraff and his fiancée Leanne Fan are credited with plucking an oyster farmer in Maine named Graham Platner out of obscurity and urging him to run for United States Senate against incumbent Republican Susan Collins. Despite zero political experience, Moraff was convinced Platner was the new golden boy, writing in an email to friends in August 2025 reviewed by The Handbasket, “I think he’s going to be president one day.” 

But once Politico reported on July 6th that a former partner of Platner’s named Jenny Racicot alleged he sexually assaulted her in 2021, the campaign was doomed. The allegations—that Platner “entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop”—were too disturbing for even the most stringent Platner apologist to ignore. On July 10th, Platner officially withdrew from the race. And in the wake of these credible allegations, Moraff’s role in Platner’s story has become an object of fascination.

Now The Handbasket can exclusively report that much like his candidate, Moraff has a credible sexual assault allegation against him, too, adding fuel to the conversation already prompted by Platner about how progressive spaces continue to harbor regressive men. When reached for comment, Moraff’s spokesperson denied any allegations of sexual assault. “Any suggestion that he committed a criminal offence is false and without foundation,” they said.

Before he was known as Platner's guy, Moraff served as the Massachusetts Field Director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and helped run labor leader Dan Obsorn’s 2024 senate campaign in Nebraska. (Moraff was also working on Osborn’s current campaign for senate until he reportedly stepped away in June.) And prior to those experiences, Moraff spent a number of years in Pittsburgh working on local campaigns and building his reputation—for better and for worse.

Moraff, 34, recently became a more widely-recognized name when a video interview he and Fan did with the Wall Street Journal in June just after Platner won the Democratic primary went viral. In the interview, Moraff admitted that they skimped on the vetting process for Platner as a candidate. “Did the vetting process turn up the tattoo that became so controversial?” journalist Aaron Zitner asked Moraff about Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo. After a pause and a head shake, he replied, “No.” Then Zitner asked if the Reddit posts came up in the vetting. “It had some of the posts,” he said, “but it didn’t have all of them,” his voice going up an octave at the end, conveying uncertainty. Moraff told Zitner that he felt nothing he learned about Platner in the light background check “should prevent him from becoming a US Senator.” He said voters didn’t want people “grown in vats.”

Moraff himself came from a particular mold, though. He grew up in a suburb of Boston and graduated from Commonwealth, an elite private high school where annual tuition costs around $60k. He then attended Brown University in Providence for undergrad. One former classmate said he was known “to have faux-left wrecker politics” and to “behave bizarrely,” while another said he was “one of those aggressively sociable guys who always has to be the funniest person in the room.” 

He had his first viral on-camera moment back in 2012 while standing near Fox Point Hurricane Barrier as Hurricane Sandy hit Providence. “I don’t really believe there is a hurricane,” Moraff, then a student and writer for a Brown satire magazine, told the local NBC News reporter who had engaged him in conversation. After she interjected, “Well, there is.” Moraff continued, “I know the government wants us to think that. I mean think about it: The Earth rotates very quickly.” He then pretended to partly concede by saying, “It’s definitely windy.” (You can watch the clip here.)

Moraff has come a long way from a college kid making a dumb joke to being partly responsible for one of the fastest rises and falls in recent political history. He had a brief stint in New York City after graduating from Brown where he worked on the failed state senate campaign of democratic socialist Debbie Medina. While the Medina campaign showed some promise, it was ultimately derailed by testimony she gave at sentencing for her son’s 2010 trial in which he was found guilty of murdering his then-girlfriend’s three-year-old son. Medina admitted to beating her son repeatedly when he was a child, context that she thought might help him avoid the death penalty. Her son is currently serving life in prison.

In 2017, he moved to Pittsburgh. Upon arriving, Moraff helped found the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter and quickly got to work recruiting candidates to run for office. In 2018, he recruited Turahn Jenkins for his ill-fated Allegheny County District Attorney campaign, which came under fire when it was revealed that Jenkins belonged to a socially conservative church with anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion views.

“Moraff came to him representing DSA and assured him he would have an easy endorsement,” a person who was an early DSA Pittsburgh member along with Moraff told me. “But Turahn's politics were quite conservative socially when it came to sexuality, so that was a big problem for the chapter because we had, and do have, a lot of queer representation. So Jenkins lost the endorsement.”

(This fellow DSA member also said a former partner of his who had also previously dated Moraff told him that he once locked her in a room while they were dating.)

Moraff also had a major success in Pittsburgh, helping recruit a local community organizer named Summer Lee to run for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and beating an entrenched incumbent. This victory set the stage for Lee to run for Congress four years later.

It was in Pittsburgh where Natalie briefly dated Moraff during the winter of 2019. According to Natalie—a pseudonym used by The Handbasket to protect her privacy—the two met on a dating app and hung out a handful of times over two months. Natalie had joined local progressive politics as a way to reconnect with the community after moving back to her hometown. Moraff’s deep ties in the progressive community—most notably with the local chapter of the DSA—intrigued her, and she was impressed when he said he was a headline writer for the humor site Clickhole. (The Handbasket reached out to Clickhole to confirm Moraff’s past employment but did not receive a response.)

But her first in-person impression of him didn’t match her expectations. “It just seemed like the way that he was speaking was very erratic,” Natalie told The Handbasket, the first time she’s spoken to the press about her experience with Moraff. “The way that he moves is very quick. It's hard to keep him focused. And so that was a little jarring.”

“I'd heard from people that he was not liked by a lot of people in Pittsburgh politics,” Natalie said. “I don't know if they were just trying to protect me. None of them really divulged a lot until we had already broken up. Nothing I knew at the time we were dating was enough of a red flag for me to cut things off.”

Their relationship was casually moving along when, one evening at her apartment, Natalie said Moraff locked her in her bedroom for 10 or so minutes by holding the door shut from the outside. When he finally let her out, Natalie said Moraff was laughing and claimed he did it as a joke; but to Natalie, it was anything but funny. Though Natalie said no sexual violence occurred that evening, it left her shaken and made her regard Moraff with caution moving forward. (Natalie confirmed she was the partner the Pittsburgh DSA member had anonymously referenced about being locked in a room. I connected with this person and with Natalie independently of one another. ) 

Despite the disturbing incident on their previous date, Natalie agreed to see Moraff again. This time, they were at his apartment, and as things got intimate, she grew increasingly uncomfortable. They’d had sex before, she said, but in previous encounters she had “started feeling concerned that the things he was becoming interested in were escalating to things that I wasn't comfortable doing. And I wasn't sure when or if I was going to be able to stop that.” Despite her telling him no multiple times, Moraff proceeded to have sex with her without her consent.

“It was the most disconnected from my body I had ever felt,” Natalie recalled. Her fears had become reality. 

A few weeks later, she confided in a close friend. “I remember the exact city block and neighborhood where she shared with me that she'd been assaulted by Dan,” the friend told me.

He recalled her being upset and telling him that when she started dating Moraff, she’d heard warnings about him. Even though the warnings were vague and did not include assault allegations, she wished she’d stopped seeing him sooner. “I remember being like, no, it's not your fault,” he recalled.

The friend said he didn’t realize Moraff’s position within the Platner campaign until a friend sent him a screenshot from the WSJ video interview Moraff and Fan had done in June. He thought: “Why is a campaign manager who is lacking in self-awareness doing a feature-length interview?” But, he said, given Moraff’s behavior over the past decade, “it lined up.”

Natalie told others what had happened. She showed me Facebook messages from 2021 in which she, a friend, and another person who had questions about Moraff’s past were talking about him. In the messages, Natalie’s friend refers to Moraff engaging in "non-consensual sexual actions” with Natalie.

The Pittsburgh DSA member who dated Natalie after Moraff confirmed she had told him about being locked in a room by Moraff—and about the nonconsensual sex. “I could tell it was clearly traumatic for her,” he recalled.

In his/their statement to The Handbasket, Moraff’s spokesperson did not address the specifics of Natalie’s claims, just that “Daniel categorically denies each and every claim set out in your email.” 

Multiple people I spoke to who were in or around Pittsburgh DSA between 2017 and 2020 described hearing about “plans” for what to do if Moraff showed up at one of his past partners’ homes. Natalie confirmed she was one former partner, though her friends never filled her in on the exact details of the plans. 

A report earlier this month alleged that Moraff was “barred” from Congresswoman Lee’s 2022 primary campaign after her team learned of at least three allegations of “sexual misconduct.” A subsequent story in Semafor then claimed a person close to Lee’s campaign said he was barred “over concerns he was disrespectful to others, rather than allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct.” (A Moraff spokesman denied the sexual assault allegations to Semafor.)

But according to Annie Weinberg, Lee’s campaign manager at the time, the allegations of sexual misconduct were the reason Moraff was told to stay away.

In late January 2022, Weinberg tells The Handbasket, a member of the community came forward to relay six allegations of sexual misconduct by Moraff that had happened prior to the campaign—three more than previously reported. Weinberg confirmed that at least one of the allegations she was told about was sexual assault. “These alarming allegations involved six different people who did not want to be named directly, and none of whom were on our staff team, to the best of our knowledge. This community members’ concerns were then backed up by another one,” Weinberg said. 

Though none of these incidents were alleged to have happened during Lee’s 2022 campaign, Weinberg understood it was important to take them seriously and evaluate how this history would impact their current staffers and volunteers. “Campaigns, I think, have a responsibility to build cultures that keep everybody as safe as possible,” Weinberg said.

Despite being Lee’s campaign manager for her 2018 State House run, Moraff had no role in her 2022 campaign. As far as Weinberg and others knew, he was a full-time Yale Law student no longer living in Pittsburgh. Still, that didn’t stop him from having a presence, she said. 

“He still wanted to try to involve himself in lots of decisions, even though he had no formal role in the campaign,” Weinberg said. “He wasn't involved in the day-to-day of understanding what the campaign plans were. For a while I would listen when he would aggressively call and text me or other senior folks on the team to offer input.” 

Soon after she was made aware of the sexual misconduct allegations, however, she banned Moraff from attending or participating in any campaign events or actions. 

But according to Weinberg, Moraff flouted the ban. Sometime after his dismissal, he reportedly sent out an unauthorized mass email, per Weinberg, that was meant to look like it was an official campaign message for recruiting volunteers. She said it sparked confusion among people who believed he was persona non grata. According to another person familiar with the campaign, when Lee won her May 2022 primary, Moraff showed up at her victory party only to be kicked out. Weinberg confirmed this series of events. Lee’s current team did not respond to a request for comment.

When I reached out to Moraff with allegations that he was barred from Lee’s campaign after six allegations of sexual assault and/or misconduct and flouted it by sending an unauthorized email and showing up at the primary victory party (and was then told to leave), his spokesperson replied:

"With respect to the matters concerning Summer Lee's campaign, when those issues first surfaced, Daniel unequivocally asserted his innocence and called for a full investigation. No investigation was ever conducted."

I followed up with Weinberg to see if this characterization was accurate. She had this to say: “Daniel had been a valued part of Pittsburgh politics; he was also an out-of-state volunteer [at the time] who had already repeatedly engaged in toxic, bullying, line-stepping behavior. I’m not surprised he was upset about the boundary we set — he pushed back on it and attempted to get around it. But we did not owe Daniel any more follow-up information about our decisions or process, and he would have no knowledge of any steps we took.”

After not hearing much about him for a few years, Weinberg started seeing Moraff’s name floating around again this year. “I have seen him pop up, and I find it kind of haunting and frustrating,” she said. “It is a worthwhile vision to try to circumvent gatekeepers and encourage non-traditional emerging leaders to run for office and then build the sort of engaged people-powered operation that it will take to actually elect them. And it does not have to be a packaged deal with harmful behaviors and misogyny. It just does not have to be like that.”

Not everyone I spoke to for this story had negative experiences with Moraff. A Pittsburgh political operative told me she worked with Moraff on a local magistrate campaign in 2020. “Daniel was just incredible,” she said. “Highly skilled in the technical things I needed to be able to use, super sharp, and infinitely generous with his time. I really couldn’t have done it without him.”

She added, “He taught me to think more about campaign workers, for instance, and what motivates them. People like to feel useful.” 

A woman who met Moraff in Pittsburgh in 2017 told me she worked on various campaigns with him, briefly dated him and still considers him a friend. She described being “inspired” by Moraff to continue doing political work. “He was the one that helped me really believe that politics can make a difference, and now I'm doing that work every day. And he's inspired a ton of people, and without him, Pittsburgh would not be in the place that it was. Without him, we wouldn't be having conversations about working-class candidates.”

When I shared with her that there was a credible allegation of sexual assault against him, she seemed stunned. “I could never see Daniel doing something like that,” she said. “And I say that as someone that has now been friends with him for 10 years and someone that has been with him through his highs and his lows in his life.” 

Though she was defensive of Moraff, she seemed conflicted. So I asked her if that was the case. “Well, yeah, I mean, because I'm a woman and so I want to believe women,” she said. “And I also have a friend here, so it's kind of difficult.”