An ethics complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission and the Office of Congressional Conduct alleges that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent more than $19,000 in campaign funds on sessions with a psychiatrist who specializes in ketamine therapy, not the "leadership training and consulting" her campaign reported to federal regulators.

The complaint, brought by the National Legal and Policy Center, targets four separate expenditures made in 2025 to Dr. Brian W. Boyle, the Chief Psychiatric Officer at Stella Mental Health in Boston. According to FEC records, each payment was designated as "leadership training and consulting."

According to the Daily Mail, Dr. Boyle does not list leadership training or consulting among his specialties on his website. He does, however, offer ketamine therapy and Spravato, an FDA-approved ketamine nasal spray.

The paper trail

The gap between what was reported and what was apparently purchased is the core of the complaint. Campaign funds are governed by strict federal rules: they exist to fund campaigns, not personal expenses. Psychiatric treatment, whatever its merits, is a personal expense. Labeling it "leadership training and consulting" on FEC filings would constitute misreporting.

The complaint makes this point directly: "Accordingly, those expenses were also misreported by the campaign committee with the FEC."

The NLPC is not asking for a slap on the wrist. Their filing requests that both the FEC and OCC "immediately investigate the facts and circumstances of these payments and impose appropriate penalties and disciplinary sanctions against AOC."

An investigation by the New York Post published earlier this month spurred the complaint.

Geography raises more questions

Stella Mental Health operates in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Utah. It does not appear to provide services in either New York or the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Ocasio-Cortez represents New York. She works in Washington. So how, exactly, was she receiving regular treatment from a Boston-based psychiatrist, and why was her campaign paying for it?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the kind of questions that FEC investigators are supposed to answer when a complaint lands on their desk.

The therapy backstory

Ocasio-Cortez has been open about seeking mental health treatment. After the January 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, she shared publicly that she was "in therapy" to process the trauma. In an interview with the public radio show Latino USA that same year, she described how Rep. Ayanna Pressley urged her to seek help.

"After the 6th, I took some time and it was really [Rep.] Ayanna Pressley when I explained to her what happened to me, like the day of, because I ran to her office and she was like, 'you need to recognize trauma.'"

She also told the show she had "slowed down" and connected her stress to the broader political environment: "I think the Trump administration had a lot of us, especially Latino communities, in a very reactive mode."

Nobody begrudges anyone therapy. That is not the issue. The issue is who paid for it. If Ocasio-Cortez wanted ketamine-assisted psychiatric treatment, she was free to spend her own money. Campaign donors did not write checks so their congresswoman could visit a psychiatrist in Boston and call it "leadership training."

A pattern worth noting

Ocasio-Cortez stormed into Congress in 2018 after ousting Joe Crowley, the former chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, in one of the most stunning primary upsets in modern political history. She built her brand on accountability, transparency, and fighting entrenched power. She made her name telling voters that the system was rigged by insiders who played by different rules than everyone else.

Spending campaign money on personal psychiatric services and disguising it as consulting is exactly the kind of insider maneuvering she once railed against. The progressive left loves to lecture about institutional accountability. They demand it from corporations, from police departments, from every power structure in American life. But when the spotlight turns inward, the standards get flexible.

Four payments. A psychiatrist who doesn't offer consulting. A clinic that doesn't operate where the congresswoman lives or works. FEC filings that describe the spending as something it apparently was not. The facts here are not ambiguous. They are an invitation for investigators to do their jobs.

What comes next

The complaint now sits with both the FEC and the Office of Congressional Conduct. Whether either body acts with any urgency is an open question. The FEC has a well-documented history of moving at glacial speed, and congressional ethics oversight has never been mistaken for aggressive. But the paper trail is clean, the allegations are specific, and the discrepancy between "ketamine therapy" and "leadership training" is not the kind of thing that resolves itself with creative accounting.

Ocasio-Cortez built a career telling Americans that powerful people should be held to the same rules as everyone else. The FEC filings suggest she didn't believe that applied to her.