Rep. Tony Gonzales
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.”
The next day, the father of six again asked for a picture. And again the day after.
“I know what I want and won’t stop until I get it,” he said in a text on June 15, 2020.
She responded with a facepalm emoji. “You better do that in Congress,” she said. “And take me with you.”
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.
See here and here for some background. In the year of our Lord 2026, none of us should be surprised to learn that a dude we already knew was a creep has in fact been a creep for longer than we originally thought. Some of these guys, I don’t know how they have the time to do anything else, with all of the sexting and other gross things they seem to be able to do whenever they feel like it. I’m sorry this unnamed woman, who I hope is able to maintain her anonymity, had to go through this. There were already some calls for Rep. Gonzales to resign. I wonder if there will now be more. The Current has more.
I don’t want to go back to strict puritanical standards and kink-shame things that happen between consenting adults, but I wholeheartedly support bringing back some of the old culture of public shaming to apply to the creeps and pervs who can’t accept no as an answer.