The Mysterious Death of a Hamptons Fashion Star
It was originally going to be a three-person lunch meeting on a Saturday — and maybe Martha Nolan would be alive today if it had been. Nolan and her business partner, Dylan Grace, had been invited to discuss their start-up beachwear company by its only outside investor, Christopher Durnan.
A Long Island widower who’d made a fortune selling his insurance firm a few years earlier, Durnan had put $250,000 into Nolan and Grace’s nascent Hamptons-themed swimwear and sunglasses brand, East x East. Nolan, a 33-year-old Irish immigrant, was betting everything on this start-up and had pitched Durnan on a grand vision for the company: East x East would one day be sold on Revolve and in upscale department stores like Saks. “It’s a long-term game,” she liked to say. In the past three summers, East x East had unveiled pop-up stores at some of Montauk’s most exclusive spots, and Nolan looked the part of a Hamptons entrepreneur. “She’s very pretty, and I just know that the people she surrounded herself with are ultrawealthy people that don’t give a shit about money,” said a club promoter who met Nolan around that time. “The crowd they hang out with is, like, an upper-echelon–y Hamptons crowd. It’s like the jet-set-type people.” Simon Cascante, the founder of Montaukila, a local tequila brand, saw the same thing: “She was engaging in high society, you know, atmosphere.”
But East x East was still struggling to break out of the seasonal Montauk tourist economy, and Durnan, who owned a roughly 13 percent stake, seemed to be growing frustrated. Why aren’t you guys everywhere already? he would ask Nolan and Grace. Finally, the duo admitted they were stuck: In order to expand, they needed to branch out into Miami and Los Angeles, and that would require investing more in advertising. Durnan, 60, was happy to play the benefactor. “If you guys are looking for more money, let’s sit down and talk about it,” he suggested.
But Saturday wasn’t good for Nolan. She wanted to personally oversee her East x East shop on the beach at Gurney’s resort down the road during one of the busiest weekends of the summer — even though, Grace assured her, they had other people to staff it. Nolan insisted on meeting Monday, although that meant she would face Durnan alone, as Grace was leaving for a trip to Greece on Sunday. “Martha does what Martha wants … or did,” Grace, 30, told me.
After losing his wife to suicide in 2018, Durnan, a Dead Head and Irish-rugby superfan, had become a loud and boisterous, but largely welcome, presence at a number of local Hamptons watering holes — someone who would run up a tab but also tip generously. He liked helping people and often invited them to go out on his boat, sometimes when he wasn’t even there. His reputation for rowdiness occasionally got him in trouble: In 2021, Durnan was arrested at a benefit concert at Webster Hall on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 after allegedly punching and biting a ground-zero first responder. Durnan had bitten the man “about the face, back, and thumb, causing lacerations,” according to the charging documents. The arresting officer allegedly found a plastic bag filled with cocaine in Durnan’s wallet. (Durnan, whose lawyer says he was defending the honor of one of the band members’ wives and denies possessing the drug, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct.) Nolan had not seen Durnan for about a year, but she enjoyed his company and wanted to boost his confidence level in East x East. Monday, August 4, was set as the day of the meeting, and Nolan agreed to meet Durnan on his boat — a fishing vessel, Hell in a Bucket, named for the Grateful Dead song— at the Montauk Yacht Club. Durnan pushed back the time: 4 p.m. became 7:30 p.m.
They took the boat out for a tour and drank Champagne as the sun set. After a couple hours, some of Nolan’s friends began to wonder what was going on. Nolan had told her boyfriend, Nick DiRubio, who was out of town, that she planned to take an Uber home by 1 a.m. But she hadn’t been responding to messages in a group chat, and some friends were growing concerned — as seemingly was DiRubio. On their phones’ Find My app, Nolan’s dot appeared to be floating alone in the ocean. “lmao. I’m sure her phone died. Or maybe she’s dead,” someone wrote in the chat at 9:20 p.m. It seemed like a joke at the time.
Ten minutes later, Nolan resurfaced. “Lol i’m at the yacht club now, my phone is on,” she wrote. She and Durnan had returned to the dock.
What happened next is still under investigation by the Suffolk County Police, but an hour or so later, Nolan really was dead. By midnight, Durnan had taken off all his clothes and dashed frantically down the dock, throwing sunscreen at a neighboring vessel and calling for help. When police arrived, it was too late. The following week, the New York Post put a striking photo of Nolan on the front page. “MONTAUK MYSTERY,” the headline screamed. Tabloids and magazines jumped in to cover what, at first, looked like it might be a murder.
Three months later, as facts have slowly emerged — and no one has been arrested — Martha Nolan’s death looks like a more complicated story. At the center of it is the business she was working so hard to build. In her adopted home of the Hamptons, creating a glamorous brand can be an alluring pathway to the good life for someone who doesn’t have money. What doesn’t show up on Instagram or TikTok, though, is that this entrepreneurial scene is often gritty and harsh, full of questionable characters and messy choices, and the prize can always seem both tantalizingly close and frustratingly far away.
Martha Nolan arrived in New York in 2015 from Carlow, Ireland, a rural farming community. Her mother taught science at a local school and her father, who lived separately and saw his daughter only rarely, helped run a family business producing livestock feed. Her first job in the city was at a fintech start-up called Street Diligence. In an interview with the Irish Independent years later, she reflected on being taken aback by her New York peers’ free-spending, hard-partying ways. “I honestly think people in New York drink more than Ireland, that was one of the culture shocks I got,” she said. “Back home no one has money to go out — people here drop $150 without a thought.” She showed off her new life on Facebook and Instagram: In one shot, she poses poolside on the rooftop at Mr. Purple against a sweeping view of the city skyline, wineglass in hand and Prada bag slung over her shoulder. She lived successively in Astoria, Hudson Yards, and the Upper East Side. In 2019, she managed to land a competitive job working with clients at Ogilvy. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, her team was furloughed and she was let go because of her visa status.
That’s when she began spending a lot of time with Dylan Grace, a fellow Irish native who lived in her building and worked as a summertime doorman at Montauk hot spots, including Gurney’s, Ruschmeyers, and the Surf Lodge. In July 2020, Grace was living in a share house with Jeremy Valeda, who described himself as a Harvard business school alum who had worked at Goldman Sachs. Valeda suggested to Grace and Nolan that they join him to start a company in the Hamptons, one that would sell sunglasses. This was not the stuff of Silicon Valley venture-capital investments — it was the kind of often disorganized and informal affair where raising seed capital just meant asking friends and family to put in a few thousand bucks. But it marked an initiation for both Nolan and Grace to the entrepreneurial scene in the Hamptons, the beginning of a road that within two years would lead them to start their own fashion brand.
Valeda’s company was called Out East Eyewear and offered customers cheap replacements for lost or broken sunglasses. He was the founder and CEO. Nolan, a natural at marketing and design, selected many of the frame styles, and Grace worked on getting Out East sunglasses into Montauk boutiques.
What neither Nolan nor Grace knew then was that Valeda’s credentials were not what they appeared to be. The Harvard degree he referenced often was actually the Program for Leadership Development at Harvard — a part-time course that does not bestow an M.B.A. While Valeda bragged to multiple people about getting his socks dry-cleaned at Goldman headquarters, friends said he was actually a consultant in the IT department of a New Jersey satellite office. “He didn’t work for Goldman. He’d work at Goldman,” said a person who worked with him. (Valeda, 44, said he didn’t actually dry-clean his socks.)
In 2015, two of Valeda’s closest friends sued him for allegedly not returning hundreds of thousands of dollars they had invested in an Ohio real-estate venture; Valeda had allegedly offered to set up the company under his own LLC, which meant that he owned the whole thing — a technicality that became a problem when, according to the lawsuit, one of the friends found himself “effectively locked out of the business.” (Following the friend’s death, Valeda accused him of “breach of the implied covenant of good faith” before settling with his widow as well as the other friend.) The following year, ahead of the 2016 election, Valeda was indicted for voter fraud in Ohio; he pleaded not guilty. “That charge was canned and sealed. It was an honest mistake,” he said.
In 2021, Nolan and Grace’s relationship with Valeda went sour too. Valeda had been paying them $2,500 a month, but they were asking to be treated like co-founders and awarded large ownership stakes. Various attempts to patch up the rift fell through, and Nolan and Grace decided to launch what amounted to a corporate coup. They allegedly locked out Valeda and two other members of the management team from their email accounts and Out East’s social-media platforms, emptied the bank account into what they described as their lawyer’s escrow fund, and deleted all the company’s marketing materials. (Grace said he and Nolan were acting on the advice of their lawyer as part of a “dispute resolution process.” “We were under the impression that we were founders,” he added.)
Nolan and Grace had instantly seized control of the sunglasses brand in all the ways that mattered. “The company went from being very healthy to being insolvent overnight,” said Jeff Aborn, a financier with a hedge-fund background who had just invested $100,000 in Out East at the time and was brought in to help run it. Out East cut ties with Nolan and Grace, and in April 2022, the company sued them for allegedly stealing the money along with Out East’s entire sunglasses inventory. But others who’d done business with Valeda sympathized with Nolan and Grace: “You don’t want to be in business with Jeremy — in some way you’re going to get screwed,” said one. (Valeda disagrees with the characterization.) “I could see somebody trying to make that right by doing maybe crazy things to try and remedy it.”
On paper, the experience at Out East might have looked like a disaster for Nolan: It was messy and ethically questionable, and everyone seems to have walked away no richer, and likely poorer, than they were before. But Nolan learned some important lessons. First, she and Grace had a blueprint for their own start-up. Second, she now knew that the only way to succeed was to be in charge of her own fate — no more depending on the likes of Valeda to bestow a co-founder title or some equity points. But more than anything, she understood that the route to success in Montauk involved controlling her own brand.
A brand in the Hamptons — many of which are launched by Manhattanites with banker résumés — can be a ticket in: Product giveaways and party sponsorships are a kind of currency that lets you skip the line at places like the Surf Lodge and grants entrée to the actually influential and powerful people. Nolan seemed to understand a central axiom about the Hamptons: Getting in is more important than how you get there. Once you’ve been accepted, people often don’t know — or even care — how wealthy you actually are. If you’re drinking a cocktail at Gurney’s or Ruschmeyers or eating the $100 lobster Cobb at Duryea’s, whether you might be falling behind on your rent in Manhattan is beside the point. What matters is you are there.
Many Hamptons brands are money losers. Nolan seemed to believe that she could make one that was buzzy and actually profitable. “I’m almost grateful for what happened with Jeremy and Out East because it taught me so much about business,” said Grace. “It was a massive, massive learning experience that has set me up for entrepreneurship, and Martha would say the same.”
In the summer of 2022, the case with Out East was settled on confidential terms — and Nolan and Grace were getting ready to launch their own Hamptons start-up. “We had been building East x East during this dispute period on the DL,” said Grace. “We thought, Let’s not directly copy Out East. Martha really wanted to do bikinis.” They came up with a tagline for what would be a resortwear brand: “Built in the City x Made for the Sun.”
On her TikTok, Nolan seemed to be living the resort life she wanted her brand to embody, posting videos of herself riding in a private jet with Grace and pulling up in a Bentley convertible with him at the Breakers in Palm Beach. “She loves luxury items — she liked boats, she liked private planes. She always loved the nice hotels,” said Grace. “She kind of liked the lifestyle, and I think it motivated her to keep grinding. She was manifesting a beautiful and luxurious life.”
The pair also figured out how to spend their summers in Montauk when, on paper, they could never afford it: One of Grace’s friends owned a home and allowed Grace to run it as a share house, renting out rooms and often using it themselves. “She would have been able to stay out there for a few years for next to nothing, and same with me,” said Grace. “It was such a hustle.”
Both endured some financial and job insecurity. Grace, who had moved to New York in 2019 with $1,200 to his name, was forced to plead “severe financial hardship brought on by my loss of employment due to COVID-19” to his landlord in the city. When Nolan lost her job at Ogilvy, it had imperiled her H1-B visa. In September 2020 — with the visa issues pressing — she had married Sam Ryan, an Irishman she’d been dating for years, in an online ceremony with an officiant from Utah, which had recently begun offering legally binding online weddings. It was a temporary fix: Ryan, who didn’t even have a green card, could only add Nolan to his own visa.
As they built East x East, they did everything they could to make money on the side. “We put money into crypto when it was a thing,” said Grace. They briefly launched and ran an Amazon store called Duper selling $20 replicas of trending sunglass styles from brands like Prada. At its peak, it did about $30,000 a month in sales.
Launching a Hamptons-branded e-commerce company seemed particularly appealing at the time. During the pandemic and after, e-commerce brands on Instagram were blowing up. Montauk, which saw an influx of mostly wealthy newcomers fleeing COVID-era New York City, was blowing up too. “Now you look at it and you see ‘Montauk everything,’” said Simon Cascante, an East Hampton native who launched his local tequila company, Montaukila, in 2019. “The large percentage of these brands are from people that aren’t even from Montauk, right? ‘Oh, I vacationed in Montauk.’ ‘Montauk is special to me.’” One such company, Montauk Style, which sells bedding, furniture, and loungewear, is based in Australia. Johnny Hampton, another sunglasses company that touted its “Hamptons style,” was founded by a Texan with a background in finance.
When Nolan and Grace officially launched East x East in August 2022, they priced their sunglasses much lower than Out East’s. That meant her company would presumably make a much smaller profit on each sale, given their manufacturing costs were almost identical.
But the size of her profit margin didn’t always appear to be Nolan’s top priority. “They seemed to be happy with just being in Montauk all the time. She was always on the ground there, and she seemed kind of content to just have the Montauk market for herself,” Aborn said. Nolan was a regular at the local clubs and appeared to know everyone who mattered in Montauk. “She loved to just, like, be in the social scene. And she really just immersed herself in it completely,” Aborn said. But Aborn wondered whether the small market was enough to sustain even a niche brand.
Shortly after East x East launched, Nolan scored something of a holy grail for local retailers: a place on the shelf at the Surf Lodge, the bar and music venue that has become perhaps the most exclusive spot in town. The Surf Lodge’s on-site merch shop sells mostly its own $200 logo sweatshirts but also a few other high-end brands. “People come in and buy, you know, ten sweatshirts for the table. And it’s like $3,000,” said a person who worked at the Surf Lodge. Companies frequently inquired about getting their product stocked at the store but were nearly always turned away. “A lot of brands literally came in just to be at the Surf Lodge or just to show that their stuff was at the Surf Lodge,” the person said. East x East swimwear managed to make the cut. “Martha wanted every influencer wearing our swimsuits,” said Grace.
It was around this time that Durnan, the insurance executive, came into the picture. Grace knew Durnan through mutual connections in Ireland and introduced him to Nolan. At one point, Durnan asked whether they were looking for investors. They formally pitched him over lunch at the Montauk Yacht Club at the end of the summer in 2022, and Durnan wired them the money in November. “He really liked Martha, and he wanted to help her succeed. She was a good friend,” said Robert Holdman, Durnan’s lawyer. “He was hopeful, and he liked her energy and liked the way she presented it to him.” (A person close to Nolan’s family, however, said there is no signed documentation of the investment.)
As Nolan focused on building her company, her marriage with Ryan fell apart. She was spending more and more time in the Hamptons, leaving him behind in the city. “She was kind of like getting into the scene, looking at it as a way to network for investment, or grow the company, mixing with Hamptons people and NYC people, and he didn’t love that,” said Grace. (Ryan and his lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.) She also didn’t need him anymore: In 2023, she was granted an O-1 visa, a special work permit for people of extraordinary ability.
In business, Nolan was a straight shooter — notoriously blunt, unhesitating in saying when she “hated” something, and so terse during negotiations that Grace sometimes found himself trying to smooth things over afterward. “She didn’t sugarcoat anything,” Grace said. When it came to her personal life, Nolan was very private, unlikely to confide details of her relationships even to close friends and family.
She liked talking about the future and the successes she was sure lay ahead. “We were always having conversations about dreams and aspirations and where we’re going to be in five, ten years, when she’s going to have her own Hamptons house,” said Grace. “She was excited to start a family, and have a successful business, to own multiple houses.” As she’d said in an interview with The Currency in May 2021, “When you start to say your goals out loud you start to believe them, and people believe that this is what you want to do.”
With Durnan’s money, Nolan opened an East x East pop-up shop at Montauk Beach House in the summer of 2023 and handed out custom tote bags. On July 3, the company threw what Nolan called East x East’s “annual pool party” at the exclusive hotel, complete with branded beach balls and DJs Oli Benz and Beau Cruz. It was the sort of partnership that typically costs as much as $50,000, according to other Hamptons entrepreneurs. (Grace said they negotiated an agreement to pay significantly less than other brands would have to rent the space but didn’t remember the exact sum.)
The pay-to-play arrangements often fail as a strategy, other entrepreneurs say. “If you look at Montauk, during Memorial Day to Labor Day, how many brands actually market in Montauk, and how much money is spent in Montauk, and then they don’t come back the next year. They spend all this money, and they don’t get the return on investment,” said Cascante, who now runs a brand consultancy on the side. “So you see a lot of brands that are flash in the pan.”
Grace said East x East’s Montauk Beach House shop made more money than they spent on it, but when summer ended, Nolan had to confront the cold-weather sales cliff. In late September, she posted a video of herself closing up the Montauk Beach House shop, full of bare hangers, the empty pool reflecting off the locked doors. To make matters worse, a major East x East photo shoot in Mallorca was hit with delays resulting from canceled flights and lost luggage, requiring Nolan to pay the models for extra days. By the fall of 2023, the Duper replica store on Amazon was failing, as were many algorithm-dependent e-commerce brands at the time. “We went from making a lot of money to making nothing in the blink of an eye,” Grace said.
Nolan kept up appearances on social media. She posted videos from Europe and Miami, captioning them “#digitalnomad.” East x East had racked up 54,000 Instagram followers, but its posts suffered from low engagement, often getting few or no comments— a sign, e-commerce experts told me, that the followers were likely bought; an analysis by Modash, an Instagram auditing tool, concluded East x East’s followers were 63 percent “fake.” Grace said Nolan had bought followers for Out East but that he’d be “very surprised” if she’d done the same for East x East because she’d previously regretted the decision. “Martha was like, Fuck, I wish I didn’t do that, because it was affecting the growth of that Instagram page.”
Nolan took on a lot of the gruntwork herself. “Martha was such a grinder — she always got things done for the scrappiest amount. She loved a deal and getting things for cheap,” said Grace. East x East’s website was created from a template built by someone on Upwork for $20 an hour. Its PR strategy was even cheaper: “She said, ‘Why don’t we have the PR firms pitch us, and then take all the info, and we do that ourselves?’” recalls Grace. In early 2024, she was picking up extra work where she could. She started a brand-consulting sidelight and took on Kathleen Fee, a country-music singer with an Irish band, as a client.
Then one of her hustles landed her in court. In April 2024, the landlord of an apartment she had leased on East 25th Street sued Nolan for allegedly renting it out on Airbnb under the name “Maddie” from Miami, Florida. Nolan initially denied the allegations, noting that was not her name. The landlord submitted screenshots of her Airbnb host profile to the court, along with a copy of Nolan’s passport, claiming, “The pictures of ‘Maddie’ and ‘Martha’ depict a similar person.” (The case was eventually withdrawn.)
Grace, meanwhile, had just opened Chelsea Living Room, a Manhattan restaurant and lounge that sells a $49 mozzarella stick sprinkled with caviar. But construction delays had postponed the opening several months, resulting in nearly $1 million in losses for Grace and his partners.
Still, Nolan, by all outward appearances, was living her dream life. By 2024, her East x East bikinis were being sold in a couple of shops in St. Barts, and she was set to open a second pop-up shop at Gurney’s, the Montauk resort known for its beach parties. Gurney’s was also hosting summer pop-ups for blue-chip brands like Dolce & Gabbana and LoveShackFancy, and East x East’s placement, on the beach among the resort’s $2,000-a-day cabanas, seemed like a feat. “It’s Dolce and Gabbana and East x East — that’s crazy,” said Brianna McEnroe, VP of brand and innovation for Discover Long Island, which promotes tourism in the region. At one point, the actress Emma Roberts stopped by Gurney’s and bought a bikini. “She walks over, and Martha’s there and, like, almost passes out when she sees that it’s Emma Roberts,” said Grace. Aaron Nesmith, an NBA starter for the Indiana Pacers, was photographed in East x East, along with “a ton of influencers,” Grace added. East x East had achieved a level of brand recognition, at least among a certain set of locals. “It’s a flex when you wear it,” said McEnroe. “Whenever you’re just in Montauk, in the Hamptons, it’s like, If you know, you know.”
The less flashy reality was that Nolan and Grace had convinced Gurney’s to let them build and install the shed on the beach themselves at a cost of $30,000. “It was just a combo of different deals we made,” said Grace. And they didn’t secure a spot at the Surf Lodge that year. “She tried to sell her product, but unfortunately we were fully committed,” said Jayma Cardoso, the Surf Lodge’s founder and creative director.
Nolan and Grace felt like they were always on the edge of failing. “I was like, Oh my God, we’re not making enough money to keep doing this, to keep not paying ourselves,” said Grace. “This isn’t paying our bills.” But Nolan didn’t want to stop. In fashion, she told him, the most important thing was longevity. “If you can just stay around long enough, people know your brand,” she said. “We’ve just got to keep going, we’ve got to keep pushing.”
By then, Nolan had a new boyfriend. She’d met Nick DiRubio, a Connecticut native who’d worked in sales for various software companies, on the rooftop of a Brooklyn hotel earlier in 2024. (DiRubio declined to speak for this story.) On Halloween, Nolan posted a TikTok video flying with DiRubio in a helicopter over the Hamptons, glass of bubbly next to her.
To Nolan, 2025 was supposed to be the year when her goals would start to become reality. In March, after years of separation, her husband, Sam Ryan, filed for an uncontested divorce, and Nolan rented a Montauk cottage with DiRubio for the summer. She’d also resolved to get East x East into the Miami market for the upcoming winter: She didn’t want to just be a seasonal Hamptons brand anymore, she had told Grace.
“It’s definitely an example of pursuing the American Dream,” said Grace. “The saddest part is we’d gotten through the hardest part of it, figuring out the visas, becoming financially stable, and then it ended, for her.”
The night of August 4 was warm and humid at the eastern end of Long Island. Nolan arrived at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Yacht Club, a resort on Star Island with a private beach on Lake Montauk, which opens into the ocean. After cruising around on Hell in a Bucket, the pair had switched to Durnan’s other boat, Ripple, moored in Slip 311 at the marina adjacent to the hotel, by 9:30 p.m. Monday evenings at the marina are typically quiet; the Yacht Club’s restaurants and pools are closed, and the dock is fairly secluded, especially when it gets late enough that most of the neighboring boat crews have gone to bed. Ripple was a relatively modest yacht by local standards: a 54-foot Sea Ray that could sleep six passengers in its tight quarters below deck, with a small cabin that included a kitchenette. For the next hour or so, Nolan and Durnan sat on the deck of Ripple in the dark, in shouting distance of the hotel’s pool, discussing business, according to Holdman, the lawyer representing Durnan.
The East Hampton and Suffolk County police, which declined to release their reports from the Montauk Yacht Club on that date, are looking into the events that followed. Media reports suggest that around midnight an unclothed Durnan raised the alarm in the quiet marina. “We heard someone shouting, stuff bouncing off the side of the boat. He threw sunscreen at our boat trying to wake us up,” an eyewitness told the New York Post. “He was running up and down, naked, screaming, ‘Do something!’”
According to Holdman, Durnan told the police that around 10:30 or 11 p.m., Nolan suddenly went limp, and he thought she was having a heart attack. He tried to perform CPR. “She was gone almost immediately. She was nonresponsive,” Holdman said. The investor never called 911; police got the call from a bystander. That was received around midnight, according to a Suffolk County PD spokesperson.
Durnan’s nudity is a detail that many of Nolan’s friends have fixated on in the wake of her death. “I think for me, it’s like, Why is the man naked, right?” said a person who knew Nolan. “That’s the part where it’s like, Did something happen to this girl?”
Durnan had to strip his clothes off, Holdman said, because they were “soaked” with Nolan’s vomit. “Chris is distraught,” the lawyer said, adding that Durnan has cooperated with police. “He watched his friend die in trauma. He’s absolutely destroyed.” The only potential clue Durnan could think to give detectives, according to the lawyer, were the two occasions Nolan had excused herself to the head that night. “It could be an indication of someone going to the bathroom, it could be an indication of someone doing drugs, or it could be both,” Holdman said.
The timeline that Durnan laid out via Holdman seemingly leaves a gap of at least an hour between when Nolan lost consciousness and when police say they were called. Holdman, when asked about this, denied it. “It all happened immediately. She passed away, and everything went down from there. He went running to go look for help. He tried CPR — like it all happened, one right after another. There was no pause,” he said. Durnan, he added, “doesn’t remember how long he did CPR.”
Shortly after Nolan’s death, Durnan revealed more about his and Nolan’s relationship, at least to his lawyer. “They actually dated,” Holdman said. “He had told me, after it happened, that he loved her and that he had met her family,” even visiting her hometown in Ireland. “They did care for each other, but it wasn’t a super-commitment.”
When asked to clarify when exactly Durnan had dated Nolan, Holdman later walked back some of his comments, saying he’d “assumed” Durnan had dated Nolan but that the investor seemed to see things differently. “He goes, ‘We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend,’” Holdman said. “And he goes, ‘Yeah, I loved her, as a friend. We didn’t have, like, a hard relationship.’” I asked Holdman whether Durnan denied ever having a romantic, physical, or sexual relationship with Nolan. “Chris is not interested in sharing anything like that, whether it’s an absolute ‘no’ or an absolute ‘yes.’ I don’t think he thinks it’s fair to her memory,” Holdman said. “He just didn’t want to talk about it.”
Nolan never mentioned anything about a relationship with the investor to her family or even to her business partner Grace. A source close to Nolan’s family said none of them had ever met Durnan. “That’s a complete lie,” the person said. A couple of days after Nolan’s death, one of the family members texted Durnan, asking him to give them a call. Durnan never responded. (Holdman said he advised Durnan not to speak to anyone while the investigation was ongoing, which “quite frankly pains him not to be able to do that.” He said that while he believed Durnan had met members of Nolan’s family, it was possible they were other “people in her town.”)
Meanwhile, Durnan is facing accusations of negligence in a separate case involving another man’s death. In March, the man’s wife claimed that in 2023 Durnan’s Jeep, while being driven by his adult daughter, hit her husband’s vehicle, severely injuring him and allegedly causing his death. (The case is ongoing, and the Durnans have denied being at fault; Durnan’s lawyer, Robert Holdman, said the man died months later in a surgery unrelated to the accident.)
Nolan’s death became tabloid news from Montauk to Dublin. “I don’t know what happened to my daughter,” Nolan’s mother Elma told the Irish Independent shortly after. “We weren’t told anything about the circumstances.” Although the police have opened a homicide investigation, an initial autopsy did not show evidence of “violence”; neither did a second autopsy that Nolan’s family commissioned independently after continuing to wonder whether foul play had been involved. A medical examiner concluded she’d been physically healthy, according to a person close to the family. The Suffolk County authorities are now working on a final autopsy complete with a toxicology report, which could confirm whether a drug overdose played a role in Nolan’s death — though the process can take several months. Photos taken of Durnan’s boat in the days after Nolan’s death show a white substance strewn on the seat cushions, near where her body was found, but Durnan’s lawyer said it was dust left from the police fingerprinting the scene.
Those close to Nolan are still trying to make sense of her death. At her funeral, attendees placed symbols of her life next to her coffin, including her passport (representing her love for travel and adventure); her makeup bag and brushes (for “her love of fashion and beauty”); and an item from East x East, “a symbol of her legacy.”
“Martha had a way of putting people she loved first,” an emotional DiRubio said at the funeral. “Whether it was telling you to ‘cop on and focus on the good in this life’ or just being a shoulder to lean on.” Grace describes the tabloid frenzy around her death — including coverage of the funeral — as an unexpected source of comfort. “She loved press, and loved media. I just knew that she’d be so happy that’s how she went out.”
While the investigation continues, the local entrepreneurial scene grinds on. Out East, having clawed its way back to viability, is raising funding for the first time since its lawsuit against Nolan and Grace and trying to expand nationally. Montaukila this summer launched its first canned cocktail. As the Surf Lodge wound down for the season after Nolan’s death, it put out some of its past season merchandise for sale, including the last of its East x East bikinis.