Gainesville, Fl- Donations from pornographic businesses and allegations of illegal reporting ignited an angry exchange between the two leading Republican candidates for governor Thursday.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher’s campaign said Thursday it will return seven checks given by the owner of Penthouse Magazine. The checks, each for the maximum $500 limit, were given in the final week of June.

Two of the donations listed “Penthouse Media Group” and “Penthouse Images Acquisitions” as donors. Five others came from affiliated companies or directly from the owner Marc Bell on June 30.

Penthouse, a titan in the pornographic magazine and video industry through the 1970s and 1980s, filed for bankruptcy in 2003. It is now owned by Bell, a Boca Raton businessman. Bell did not return a call requesting comment late Thursday afternoon.

Gallagher spokesman Albert Martinez said Thursday that Penthouse’s business of selling videos and pictures of nude women in provocative poses does not match Gallagher’s values, and the checks will be returned.

“As soon as they were recognized for what they were, they were refunded fully,” Martinez said.

While the campaign is returning the checks given to them by Marc Bell along with the six other Penthouse-affiliated donations, they will keep 18 other checks given on June 23 that came from real estate companies and other businesses either listing Bell as the owner or listing the same address as his Boca Raton headquarters.

“The other checks that are affiliated with legitimate business interests, those won’t be returned,” Martinez said, adding that the campaign will investigate those donations and all others on a “case-by-case” basis to ensure they came from sources that aren’t contrary with Gallagher’s values.

Gallagher’s not alone in refunding money from adult businesses. State Sen. Rod Smith, D-Alachua, returned checks to an Alachua County strip club earlier this year.

And Crist is refunding $1,000 to the Peek-A-Boo Lounge in Bradenton and its owner, Dean Bowley. The adult club gained fame for winning a court battle with Manatee County over an ordinance prohibiting, in part, women from showing more than one-fourth of their breast.

Both campaigns blame an overwhelming number of donations for their failure to immediately notice and refund the checks from adult businesses.

The Peek-A-Boo checks were among 33 returned by Crist after his campaign discovered they had accepted donations from individuals that were more than the $500 limit. Crist will refund more than $15,000 in donations that exceed the limit.

Additionally, the Crist campaign will have to refile a corrected report since it failed to list occupations and/or addresses for nearly 2,000 donors in its campaign finance report filed earlier this week.

Martinez said failing to list those items is illegal, and is ironic given Crist’s job as the state’s top law enforcement officer.

“Republican voters hold their elected officials and people running for office to higher standards and expect that the candidates would hold themselves to that standard,” Martinez said, adding that such widespread mistakes betray a “systematic” problem with Crist’s ability to account for his donations.

Crist supporter J.M. “Mac” Stipanovich fired back, saying the Gallagher campaign was acting like “rookies” who need to “grow up.”

“Either the Penthouse checks say something about Tom’s devotion to family values or it’s the kind of error you can expect at the end of campaign quarter when there are a lot of checks coming in,” he said. “I would hope it’s the latter,” adding that that was the reason for Crist’s mistakes.

Even without the Penthouse money, Gallagher raised more than $3 million in the most recent quarter. That’s the second highest amount in state history, behind the $3.8 million Crist collected in the last quarter.