Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) on Tuesday confessed to having an affair with his staffer who died by suicide, calling it a “lapse in judgment.”
The admission comes as Gonzales is under investigation by the House ethics committee for engaging in sexual misconduct with Regina Santos-Aviles, his married former staffer who died after setting herself on fire in September 2025.
“I made a mistake and I had a lapse in judgment,” Gonzales said in an interview. “I take full responsibility for those actions.”
Gonzales said he has made amends with his wife and asked God to forgive him, “which He has.”
When sexually explicit text messages were released by Adrian Aviles, the widower of Santos-Aviles, Gonzales said they did not reflect the full picture and called it blackmail.
In his Wednesday interview, Gonzales alleged that when Santos-Aviles died, her widow reached out to the representative’s offices to ask about death benefits and retirement funds.
“It was eerie, it was creepy, but that was the beginning of this was about money,” Gonzales said.
Gonzales said he had cut ties with Santos-Aviles in June 2024, over a year before her death, and denied having anything to do with her death.
In defending his innocence in relation to his staffer’s passing, Gonzales said, according to police reports, Santos-Aviles stated that “her husband is gay and having an affair with her best friend” to first responders on the scene.
“I wonder if that had something to do with her tragic passing,” Gonzales said.
The scandal arose as early voting began in Texas, with Gonzales vying for the Republican candidacy for his district in the primaries.
The embattled congressman is now headed to a runoff election, as neither he nor his opponent received more than 50% of the vote.
Several members of Congress have called for Gonzales to resign over the affair, but he said he was committed to serving his district effectively.
HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO TONY GONZALES OVER AFFAIR ALLEGATIONS
Prior to Gonzales’s admission, an effort spearheaded by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) to release all the records regarding congressional sexual harassment investigations failed in the House.
Gonzales’s affair was a boiling point for Mace, as she announced her plans to introduce the resolution after text messages between the congressman from Texas and his staffer surfaced.
