This article reports that Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales faces new allegations from a former 2020 campaign staffer who says he sent repeated sexual and harassing texts years before his admitted affair with a regional director who later died; the newly reported messages and corroborating details suggest a pattern of pursuing subordinates and pressuring them for nude photos, raising questions about fitness for office and how party leaders respond.
Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales (TX-23) admitted a 2024 affair with his regional district director, Regina Santos-Aviles, and later suspended his reelection campaign after her tragic death. Some assumed that confession and that suspension would close the book on misconduct allegations, but new material shows that this may not be an isolated incident. A former 2020 political director for Gonzales’ initial campaign provided alleged text messages that depict persistent sexual advances and explicit requests. The staffer asked to remain anonymous but went public to make clear she saw a broader pattern, not a single lapse.
The alleged exchanges date to June 2020, when the staffer had recently moved from volunteer to political director during Gonzales’ first successful House run. According to her account, the tone changed fast from professional to intimate late one night during a tense GOP primary runoff. She says Gonzales’ texts began with compliments and quickly escalated into explicit sexual requests that made her uncomfortable. She did not reciprocate those advances, and the messages stopped short of a physical relationship, but they left a lasting impression.
The previously-unreported messages — and hundreds of others obtained by the San Antonio Express-News — show the congressman pursued a sexual relationship with a subordinate years before his 2024 affair with a married congressional staffer who later committed suicide.
The texts reportedly include lines that shift from flattery to pressure: asking about bedtime routines, what she would wear to bed, and eventually asking “What kind of panties do you wear?” The messages allegedly progress to requests for nude photos and graphic descriptions of sexual acts, culminating in comments like, “47 nos is about my limit.” The staffer maintains she declined the requests; she says he persisted for days and even met with her twice to discuss work. Those encounters, she says, never crossed into a physical relationship.
Late on a June night in 2020, amid a nail-biter of a GOP primary runoff, then-congressional candidate Tony Gonzales quickly turned a conversation with his campaign’s political director from casual to intimate.
Gonzales texted that she was a “smart girl” in response to frustrations she had expressed about dating. He used a diamond emoji to convey that she was special and shouldn’t “settle.”
Then, he asked when she normally went to sleep. Next, he asked what she would wear to bed.
Soon, it was “What kind of panties do you wear?”
Within hours, the married Navy veteran from San Antonio was asking for nude photos and describing how he wanted to have sex with her and have her “squeeze my balls.”
At the end of the night, after she replied “Nope” to yet another request for a photo, he replied, “47 nos is about my limit.”
In one message dated June 15, 2020, Gonzales allegedly wrote, “I know what I want and won’t stop until I get it.” That phrase, if verified, underlines the staffer’s claim that the conduct was persistent rather than an isolated mistake. The same pattern of persistent requests also appears in the texts Gonzales sent to Regina Santos-Aviles in 2024, according to reporting: requests for “sexy pics,” descriptions of sexual positions, and invitations to meet in person. When pressed publicly, Gonzales called the later relationship a “mistake” and “a lapse in judgment,” language the 2020 staffer disputes as inadequate to describe repeated pressure on subordinates.
In the texts Gonzales sent Santos-Aviles in 2024, he repeatedly pushed her to send “sexy pics” and described his favorite sexual positions, then asked for an in-person meetup. He acknowledged the affair in a March 4 interview on “The Joe Pags Show,” a conservative talk show, calling the relationship a “mistake” and “a lapse in judgment.”
In the texts from 2020, Gonzales asked his campaign’s political director more than a dozen times to send nude photos over a period of three days, and persisted each time she declined. He pushed her to reveal more of herself after she sent two images that concealed most of her body.
Gonzales also attempted to initiate a sexual relationship over several weeks, the messages show. Though he twice met with the staffer at her home to discuss work, their relationship never became physical, according to the texts and an interview she gave to the Express-News.
The anonymous staffer says she came forward after learning Santos-Aviles died by self-immolation last September, and said the later tragedy changed how she viewed the earlier interactions. She told reporters, “He obviously pursued, pursued, pursued her like he did with me,” and added, “I never took him serious… It wasn’t until this poor girl died that I thought, ‘No, this guy is pure evil.’” She also stated, “This behavior needs to stop.” Those are strong words from someone who worked on Gonzales’ first campaign and then left once he took office in January 2021.
Records reviewed by reporters reportedly tied the texts to Gonzales’ phone and confirmed the staffer’s campaign role through filings, lending weight to her claims. After leaving Gonzales’ office, the former staffer says she began volunteering with another Republican candidate for the district, and she has urged party leaders to reckon with what she describes as a pattern of predatory conduct. For conservatives assessing candidates, the issue now is whether leadership will treat these allegations as disqualifying behavior or as a private matter the congressman has tried to frame as a one-time lapse.
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