WASHINGTON — Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) said Tuesday he’s “not going to resign” despite revelations about his “sexual” text messages with a congressional aide who fatally lit herself on fire in September 2025.
The Texas Republican’s primary campaign has been roiled by allegations that he had an extramarital affair with the staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, in May 2024 — before her husband discovered the messages between Gonzales and his spouse.
“What you’ve seen is not all the facts,” Gonzales told CNN reporter Manu Raju, dodging questions about whether the texts were real or the extent of the alleged affair.
Santos-Aviles, 35, died on Sept. 14, 2025, the day after she self-immolated at her Uvalde, Texas, home.
Text messages released by her husband, Adrian Aviles, on Monday show that Gonzales had asked for Santos-Aviles to “send me a sexy pic” shortly after midnight on May 9, 2024.
The congressman also pressured her to discuss her preferred sexual positions and shared his own before she protested that the conversation had gone “too far.”
Nearly half a dozen House Republicans have called for Gonzales to either resign from office or drop out of his re-election bid for a fourth term in Congress in the wake of the disclosures.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called the allegations “serious” but has not said Gonzales should exit his race or resign from office, indicating that congressional ethics investigations should play out first.
The National Republican Congressional Committee is still backing him as an incumbent, but the House Freedom Caucus has endorsed his primary opponent, the YouTuber and firearms enthusiast Brandon Herrera.
Voters in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District will cast their ballots for their preferred Republican candidate on March 3.
According to her husband and an ex-colleague, Santos-Aviles had purported trysts with Gonzales that same month in a rental cabin in Concan, Texas during the 2024 election cycle.
Aviles has rejected Gonzales’ accusations that he was seeking to “blackmail” the congresssman — or had ulterior political motives — by going public with the affair allegations.
He and Santos-Aviles separated in August 2024 after attending marital counseling for several months.
The mother of one served as Gonzales’ regional director in the state and had been employed by the congressional office since 2021.
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 she suffered.
Additionally, Gonzales was probed by the Office of Congressional Conduct one month after the Daily Mail broke news of the sex scandal.
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Police reports made public Monday show that Santos-Aviles blamed her estranged husband in her final words to officers who arrived at the scene of her fiery death, which was ruled a suicide — but Aviles has rejected the accusations.
A report authored by one of the officers stated “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.”
“Those allegations are completely false,” Adrian told The Post on Monday, noting that the “best friend,” who is a female, “is also my childhood friend, and there was no sexual relation between the two of us.”
The reports also revealed that Santos-Aviles “had been taking antidepressants and consuming alcohol regularly, sometimes mixing the two,” her husband told Uvalde cops.
Aviles has previously insisted that “Regina was not pregnant” and “was a completely stable … mentally sane person before all of this,” though other pages in the police files noted Santos-Aviles had “possibly been to a mental health hospital in her teenage years.”
