At every place setting inside Cipriani Wall Street on Monday night sat a long, tapered candle. Before a single award was presented, Denise Rich asked her guests to light them, for her daughter Gabrielle and for everyone in treatment now. The chatter stopped. The room glowed.
By the end of the evening, the 28th Angel Ball had raised $3 million for Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation for Cancer Research, which pays for research into leukemia, lymphoma and related blood cancers. The foundation honored Dionne Warwick, Lynda Carter and Nicola Verses, founder of the jewelry house VERSÉ. Haute Living reported that the $3 million matched the total from last year’s ball, and the night kept returning, as this one always does, to the people the disease has already taken.
The Foundation Gabrielle Asked For
Denise Rich founded the organization in 1996 with her daughters, Daniella Rich Kilstock and Ilona Rich Schachter. Gabrielle Rich Aouad, their daughter and sister, died of acute myelogenous leukemia at 27. Her final wish, the family has said, was a foundation that would help other patients avoid the pain she went through.
The model has stayed narrow on purpose. The foundation funds early-career scientists and looks for treatments that are less toxic than the ones patients endure now. More than $47 million in grants has gone out since 1996, and in its 2026 research announcement the foundation named seven new Medical Research Awards totaling $1,575,000.
The Cost of the Cure
Kelly Leach, a New York mother, gave the room the sharpest reason for that word “toxic.” Her husband, Todd Day, was diagnosed with stage III diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, and Leach told the audience he died in October 2024 from complications related to his treatment for a secondary lymphoma. The couple had been pursuing fertility treatments when he was first diagnosed. Their daughter, Chloé, was born nearly a year after he died.
On the red carpet, Leach told The Knockturnal that raising money for research “that might not have seen the light of day” was reason enough to be there. She now advocates for safer therapies, which is the foundation’s founding argument stated by someone who paid for the current ones.
The Honorees
Carter, 75, was honored for her advocacy on blood cancer research. Her husband of 37 years, Robert A. Altman, died in 2021, and The Daily Front Row recorded what she told the room about the end of his illness. At the hospital, she said, the doctors told her: “We don’t know why some people die in 30 years, and some people die in seven months. We just don’t know.”
“Well, that isn’t good enough for me,” Carter said. She works with City of Hope and the Translational Genomics Research Institute alongside Dr. Jeffrey Trent, a friend since middle school, who answered her question with a promise: “We’ll find out.” Then the evening loosened. Carter opened her remarks with “Thank you for showing up. I think that’s most of life. Just showing up,” and took to the stage dancing to her own single, “Long Legged Woman.”
Warwick, 85, accepted her honor in the same month she released DWUETS, billed as her final album, a set of Diane Warren songs recorded as duets with singers including Cynthia Erivo and John Legend. Her history with a benefit record runs deeper than most. In 1985, Warwick gathered Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John to record “That’s What Friends Are For,” which raised more than $3 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. On Monday, a room raised $3 million again, this time with Warwick in the honoree’s seat.
Verses, known as Coco, founded the jewelry house VERSÉ. She was recognized for her charitable work and community impact, a record of giving the foundation chose to honor on the same stage.
Paddles, Lots and a Full Dance Floor
Deborah Cox emceed and sang Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.” Shaggy and Taylor Dayne performed, and DJ M.O.S. and DJ Kiss had the dance floor full by 11 p.m.
Star Jones led the paddle raise, which brought in more than $340,000. Donors who gave $1,000 or more took home Corazon de Fer canvases, and those who gave $10,000 or more received original heart sculptures by the artist Fer Da Silva. Seth Herzog of The Tonight Show ran the live auction: a 12-day Belmond journey through Peru, jewelry from Lorraine Schwartz, a stay for four at Four Seasons Naviva in Mexico and seven days at the Lucia Magnani Health Clinic in Italy. The online auction continued through October 22 with a table for four at Rao’s and a Bryan Adams meet-and-greet among the lots. Kathy Hilton served as dinner chair and Elizabeth Elting as honorary chair. The guests included Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, Carol Alt, Tiki Barber, Sandra Lee and Melissa and Joe Gorga.
What a 2007 Grant Became
From the stage, Cox told the guests where money like Monday’s actually lands. In 2007, the foundation funded a young Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researcher named Dr. Scott Armstrong, who was studying some of the most aggressive forms of leukemia. Nearly twenty years later, that early research helped lead to a leukemia treatment that recently received FDA approval.
“It’s already offering new hope to patients who previously had very few options,” Cox said.
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