Leaked photos were supposed to end Chris Gallant’s campaign. Instead, they bankrolled it. After the New York Post published archived images of the Democrat modeling bondage gear for a San Francisco leather retailer, his fundraising took off.
In the quarter the photos surfaced, Gallant raised more than the incumbent. His October quarterly FEC report shows $929,825 in receipts for July through September. Rep. Nick LaLota reported about $609,000 for the same period.
The money bought a close loss, not a win. LaLota won a third term in New York’s 1st Congressional District last Tuesday, 51.1% to 48.9%, a margin of nearly 7,000 votes with 560 of 561 election districts reporting. Gallant first held out for absentee ballots, then conceded Wednesday. LaLota’s margin shrank from about 11 points in 2024 to about two, in a year Democrats swept to control of Congress.
Nor was the money especially local. A Fortune review of both campaigns’ raw 2026 FEC filings through Oct. 14 found that in-district donors accounted for about 16% of LaLota’s money from named individuals and just over a third of Gallant’s.
The post-leak surge followed the same pattern. In the 32 days after the Post story ran on Sept. 13, Gallant reported $276,055 in itemized contributions. Only $65,997 of it, about 24%, came from individuals inside NY-1, and almost half of that came from 62 donors in the Hamptons. Donors in Manhattan and California gave $73,606 combined, more than every donor inside NY-1 put together.
In NY-1, the people who funded the race and the people who voted in it were often different. Both campaigns were bankrolled mostly by donors outside the district, including major Wall Street, Hollywood and tech names. Even the men on the ballot live beyond its lines: both reside near Amityville, on Long Island’s South Shore, which means neither could vote for himself.
A district with a summer address
NY-1 runs from Suffolk County’s North Shore villages to the East End, with vineyards and farms on the North Fork and the Hamptons on the South Fork. In between lie Smithtown and Brookhaven, where suburban neighborhoods give way to woods and residents are largely commuters, law enforcement and small-business owners.
Each summer, the South Fork fills with the people who run Wall Street and corporate America. That makes the district one of the country’s busiest political ATMs, where financiers and industry titans host fundraisers for both parties. Suffolk County donors gave more than $45 million to campaigns in the 2020 cycle alone, according to OpenSecrets data CNBC cited.
In August, Vice President JD Vance raised more than $5 million from young Republican donors at the Southampton home of Omeed Malik, president of 1789 Capital and a prominent Trump donor.
Two candidates, one shrinking margin
LaLota, a Navy veteran and former Suffolk County elections commissioner, was first elected in 2022 to succeed Lee Zeldin and was re-elected in 2024, defeating former CNN anchor John Avlon by about 11 points. In that race, LaLota criticized Avlon for his dual residency between Sag Harbor and Manhattan.
Gallant, 37, is an Army National Guard Black Hawk pilot, a former FAA air traffic controller at JFK, a former union leader and a volunteer firefighter. He won the June primary with about 63% of the vote against Lukas Ventouras, a 25-year-old law student who lives in the district and had raised about $124,000, most of it in unnamed small-dollar gifts. Gallant later picked up endorsements from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
After the Post story, Gallant’s attorney, Sara Azari, who previously represented former Rep. Eric Swalwell after misconduct allegations, confirmed the photos were authentic and consensual. Gallant told the New York Times he hoped it could be his “Kim Kardashian moment,” and the campaign began selling “Make Politics Sexy Again” merchandise. LaLota stuck to calling Gallant “weak and woke” and needling him for declining to debate.
Asked by Fortune about the surge, Gallant answered through Slingshot Strategies, a consulting firm that promises “a proven track record of shifting the conversation” for candidates facing “overwhelming odds” and “difficult fights.”
He said the Post story “backfired on them” and that the Times interview let voters see “a proud gay man who refused to be ashamed of his identity, and it resonated.” On LaLota’s outside money, he said, “I never had to rely on outside interests to try and buy this seat.” About a third of his own money from named donors came from inside the district.
LaLota cast the surge as a product of the controversy itself. “On the same days my opponent was backing out of debates, he was monetizing his BDSM and pornographic modeling past,” he said in a statement to Fortune. “Instead of boasting how kinky he is, as he did to the Times, he owes Long Islanders an explanation for choosing vanity and fundraising over debates and accountability.”
Where the money came from
Fortune analyzed itemized contributions dated in 2026 in both campaigns’ raw FEC filings through Oct. 14, so the comparison covers the same stretch of the race for both candidates. Repeat donors were counted once, refunds subtracted and conduit entries adjusted so no gift was counted twice. The FEC does not require campaigns to name individuals who give $200 or less in a cycle, so those donors are excluded. Fortune placed donors inside or outside NY-1 based on the mailing city they listed, which may differ from where they vote. Individuals may give $3,500 per election this cycle, or $7,000 for the primary and general combined. Fortune tallied the filings by hand, then used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to clean the raw files and check the calculations.
LaLota had the bigger war chest. Through Oct. 14, he had raised $4.5 million and had $2.31 million in cash on hand. Gallant had raised $1.7 million and had $426,000 on hand.
The sharper contrast was where the money came from. Of the 785 named donors in LaLota’s 2026 filings, 29% listed mailing addresses in the district. Together they gave $207,161, only 17% of what he raised from named individuals. PACs and other committees supplied $1.18 million, about a quarter of his total for the cycle.
Gallant’s support was more local, but not by much. Of his 1,031 named donors in the 2026 raw file, 390 (38%) listed addresses in NY-1 and nearly $300,000, about a third of the roughly $876,000 he raised from named individuals this year. Counting gifts from 2025, his itemized individual total for the cycle is $1.15 million.
Half of that in-district money, about $159,000, came from the Hamptons and Shelter Island, the East End enclaves where wealthy New Yorkers have long kept second homes. In East Hampton Town, half of the 22,562 housing units are no one’s usual residence, according to the Census Bureau’s 2020-2024 American Community Survey, which counts second homes as vacant. In Brookhaven, the figure is only about 9%.
Outside the district, 218 Manhattan donors gave Gallant $215,600 and 85 Californians gave about $93,000. Thirteen listed San Francisco.
What the leak raised
The photos worked as a fundraiser, just not a local one. Between Sept. 13 and Oct. 14, Gallant reported 677 itemized contributions totaling $276,055: $229,050 from 484 individual donors and $47,005 from PACs, party committees and other sources.
That haul, all in the campaign’s final month of reporting, is about 16% of the $1.7 million he raised this cycle and nearly a third of the roughly $876,000 he raised from named individuals in 2026. About a third of it arrived in the first four days after the leak.
On Sept. 15, two days after the leak, the New York State Democratic Committee transferred $25,025 to the campaign. That same day, the campaign paid Azari, a celebrity attorney who specializes in crisis and media strategy.
Among the contributions that followed: $500 on Sept. 15 from Howard Sacarob, head of U.S. tax at Royal Bank of Canada, and $3,500 on Oct. 4 from Ryan Fitzpatrick, Corcoran’s regional vice president for Downtown Manhattan.
On Oct. 7, the New York Times published its analysis of the photo scandal. That day, Robert Saum, the World Bank Group’s regional country director for Eastern Europe, a role based in Kyiv, gave $1,000. He lists an Arlington, Va., address.
Steven Holley, COO of the New York investment manager Select Equity Group and a former Sullivan & Cromwell partner, gave $1,000 on Oct. 9. Sacarob, Fitzpatrick and Holley all list New York City addresses, outside the district.
The San Francisco-based CEO of Mr. S Leather, the retailer behind the photos, gave $1,000 on Oct. 10.
Who paid for Gallant after the leak?
Not all of Gallant’s best-known donors gave after the Post story. Fortune checked the names below against the dates in his filings.
Wall Street: Stephen Mandel, who founded the Greenwich hedge fund Lone Pine Capital, gave the $3,500 maximum on Sept. 14, the day after the story ran. Susan Mandel of Greenwich, listed as not employed, gave $3,500 the same day.
Old money and real estate: Katharine Rayner, the Cox Enterprises heiress whose fortune of about $4.9 billion (Forbes) rests on her estimated 17% stake in the family company, gave $3,500 on Sept. 15. She had also given $2,000 in July, and her cycle total is listed at the $3,500 limit.
Another maximum gift came on Sept. 26 from Michael Raynes, a developer who restores architecturally significant properties in Miami. In late 2022, he sold a historic estate in Southampton for $20 million. He lists a Miami Beach mailing address.
Before the leak
Wall Street: Charles Myers gave the $3,500 maximum at the end of 2025, when Gallant was still facing a primary. He is founder and chairman of Signum Global Advisors, a geopolitical research firm that advises financial institutions and touts “representation across the political spectrum.” He previously served as vice chairman at Evercore ISI and advised Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Jason Carroll, co-founder of the high-frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading, gave $3,500 on Sept. 8, five days before the leak. Eric Knight, a senior trader at Jane Street, gave $7,000, covering both the primary and the general.
Hollywood and media: Kevin Huvane, co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency, gave $3,500 on June 30. Jeffrey Bewkes, the former Time Warner chairman and CEO who sold the company to AT&T in 2018, gave $3,500 on Aug. 12.
Local: Nancy Goroff, an organic chemist and former chair of Stony Brook University’s chemistry department, gave the maximum on June 29, days after Gallant’s primary win. Goroff lives in a modest New England saltbox overlooking Stony Brook Harbor, valued at about $1.1 million. She ran for a similarly drawn seat in 2020 and lost to Zeldin, now the Trump administration’s EPA administrator.
Goroff also backed “Team KCQ,” North Fork educator Kathryn Casey Quigley’s progressive bid to oust Suffolk County Democratic Chairman Rich Schaffer. Casey Quigley won about 43% of the weighted county committee vote on Sept. 22. Her campaign accused Schaffer of “backroom deals” with the local Conservative Party, which had harshly condemned Gallant’s photos.
Who paid for LaLota
Wall Street: Charles Schwab, founder of the brokerage bearing his name, a Fortune 500 company, gave LaLota $13,600 over the past two cycles, the maximum allowed. His mailing city: Palm Beach, Fla.
Crypto and defense: Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer and a deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, gave $3,500 from a Washington, D.C., address. Palmer Luckey of Newport Beach, Calif., who founded defense contractor Anduril after selling Oculus to Facebook for about $2 billion, gave $7,000.
Global money: Leonard Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born British American billionaire behind Access Industries, gave LaLota $3,500 in March. FEC reports list another $7,000 in aggregate from his wife, Emily.
“Though I have never met him, I appreciate his support,” LaLota said. His spokeswoman suggested Blavatnik may be drawn to LaLota because Russia’s Foreign Ministry put LaLota on a May 2023 list of 500 Americans barred from the country, a distinction the congressman “wears as a badge of honor.”
Blavatnik’s recent contributions also include Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham and the Equality PAC, which backs LGBTQ+ candidates.
His contribution forms give an address of 40 W. 57th St. in Manhattan, about 105 miles from the estate the press calls his.
The $115 million deed
The July 2025 sale of 408 Further Lane in Amagansett, which Behind the Hedges reported as the most expensive residential sale in Hamptons history, lists Brise Lointaine LLC as the new owner.
The seller, Terry Semel, ran Warner Bros. when Stanley Kubrick filmed his masked Long Island society for the studio. Semel had bought the property from Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman in 2005 for $43 million.
Property records from the real estate data service PropertyShark, reviewed by Fortune, list the arm’s-length price as $115,000, three zeros shy of the reported $115 million. East Hampton’s 2026 tax roll still billed Semel’s Windsor Digital Studio LLC. The town assessor’s office said it did not update the roll until July 2026.
The East Hampton Town Clerk’s office confirmed Brise Lointaine LLC’s ownership to Fortune and said deed updates take “very long” to process, along with the Suffolk County Clerk’s office.
Press accounts, though not the paperwork, identify the buyer as LaLota donor Len Blavatnik: Behind the Hedges, citing a source, and The Real Deal. Blavatnik owns Warner Music and holds a stake in A24, the studio behind Lady Bird (2017), Queer (2024), the gay BDSM romance Pillion (2026) and Backrooms (2026).
Eyes wide open
The tabloid framing of the race borrowed from Eyes Wide Shut (1999), but the sex and the masks were bait. Kubrick’s real horror was a gated order where wealth and power circulate in a closed circle, insulated from consequences.
In his year, the guest list was paper: electronic filing stayed voluntary for most committees until 2000, so a donor was a scanned page, not a spreadsheet. In NY-1, the circle is no secret.
In an age of metadata, AI-scanned social feeds and Flock cameras, nobody wears a mask for long. The leather shoot was archived, authenticated by an attorney and sold back to voters as merchandise. Every FEC filing is a digital fossil Kubrick’s guests would never have left behind.
The economics were another matter. LaLota raised about 84 cents of every named dollar from outside the district; Gallant, nearly two-thirds. What stayed masked on Election Day was not Gallant’s leather photos but the money, and how much of it came from outside NY-1.
The post A tabloid scandal bankrolled a Long Island Democrat, mostly with out-of-district money. A Hollywood-linked tycoon backed a Republican who beat him. appeared first on Fortune.
