Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) told CNN reporter Manu Raju on Tuesday that he is "not going to resign" from Congress, even as newly released text messages detail sexually charged exchanges between him and a former congressional aide who later died by self-immolation at her home in Uvalde, Texas.
Regina Santos-Aviles, 35, a mother of one who served as Gonzales' regional director since 2021, died on Sept. 14, 2025, the day after she set herself on fire. Her death was ruled a suicide.
The texts, released Monday by her estranged husband Adrian Aviles, show Gonzales pressured Santos-Aviles to discuss her preferred sexual positions and, shortly after midnight on May 9, 2024, asked her to "send me a sexy pic." She protested that the conversation had gone "too far." Gonzales dodged questions about whether the texts were real or the extent of the alleged affair.
His only public response to Raju:
What you've seen is not all the facts.
That's not a denial. It's not even close to one.
According to the New York Post, Police reports made public Monday paint a grim picture. Officers responding to Santos-Aviles' home documented her final words, in which she blamed her estranged husband for what she'd done. According to the officer's report:
She discovered her husband was cheating on her with her best friend, and as a result, she poured gasoline on herself and set herself on fire.
Adrian Aviles has forcefully rejected that account. Speaking to The Post on Monday, he called the allegations "completely false," adding that the woman Santos-Aviles referred to as her "best friend" was also his childhood friend, and that there was no sexual relationship between them.
The reports also revealed that Santos-Aviles had been taking antidepressants and consuming alcohol regularly, sometimes mixing the two. Separate police files noted she had possibly been to a mental health hospital in her teenage years.
Adrian Aviles has previously insisted that his wife "was a completely stable … mentally sane person before all of this." He also stated that she was not pregnant, countering unspecified rumors.
The personal and the political are fully entangled here. Adrian Aviles and his attorney, Bobby Barrera, had been quietly seeking an up to $300,000 settlement with Gonzales for alleged sexual harassment and workplace retaliation Santos-Aviles suffered during her employment in his congressional office.
Gonzales has characterized the husband's actions as blackmail. Adrian Aviles rejected that framing as well, denying any ulterior political motives behind going public with the affair allegations.
Whether or not the settlement effort amounts to blackmail is a legal question. What isn't a legal question is whether a sitting congressman should be sending sexually explicit text messages to a subordinate staffer. That answer is straightforward, and no settlement amount changes it.
Nearly half a dozen House Republicans have called for Gonzales to either resign or drop out of his reelection bid for a fourth term representing Texas' 23rd Congressional District. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the allegations "serious" but stopped short of calling for Gonzales to step aside, indicating that congressional ethics investigations should play out first.
The Office of Congressional Conduct has already opened a probe, roughly one month after the Daily Mail first reported the scandal.
Johnson's restraint is understandable from a procedural standpoint. But "let the process play out" starts to sound hollow when the texts are already public, the woman is already dead, and the congressman's most detailed response is that we haven't seen "all the facts."
Facts like what, exactly? The bar for context that would make those text exchanges with a subordinate look acceptable is not just high. It doesn't exist.
Voters in Texas' 23rd Congressional District head to the polls on March 3 for the Republican primary. Gonzales' primary opponent is Brandon Herrera, the YouTuber and firearms enthusiast endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus.
Gonzales was already a complicated figure within the Republican conference before any of this surfaced. He has clashed with the party's conservative wing on multiple occasions. The Freedom Caucus endorsement of Herrera was not an accident; it reflected a real ideological gap. Now the scandal gives primary voters something beyond policy disagreements to weigh.
The calculus for Texas Republicans is no longer abstract. A woman who worked in this man's office is dead. The congressman who sent her sexually charged messages won't say whether they're real. He won't explain the relationship. He won't resign. He'll only say you don't have the full picture.
There is a woman at the center of this story who cannot speak for herself. Regina Santos-Aviles worked in Gonzales' office for four years. She separated from her husband in August 2024 after months of marital counseling. According to her husband and an ex-colleague, she had purported trysts with Gonzales at a rental cabin in Concan, Texas. A year later, she was dead.
The political fallout matters. The ethics probe matters. The primary matters. But none of it matters as much as the fundamental question that conservatives, of all people, should be willing to ask plainly: What obligations does a man in power owe to the people who work for him?
Conservatives have spent years arguing, correctly, that the left applies its standards of conduct selectively. That powerful Democrats skate on behavior that would end a Republican's career. That argument only holds if we refuse to make the same exceptions for ourselves.
Tony Gonzales says he won't resign. Voters on March 3 may not give him the choice.
