“Please send help. It hurts so bad,” Regina Santos-Aviles told a police dispatcher the night she set herself on fire. On September 13, 2025, she doused herself with gasoline in the garden of her home and then used a lighter to ignite the flames, according to a fire department report. The 35-year-old mother was flown by helicopter to a hospital in San Antonio, where she was pronounced dead.
In the four years before her death, Santos-Aviles had worked as a regional director in Congressman Tony Gonzales’ district office in Uvalde, Texas. In the spring of 2024, text messages recently released by her family show, the Republican repeatedly pressured his employee to send him “sexy” photos and questioned her about her sexual preferences – even though Santos-Aviles rejected his advances and told him he was going “too far.”
The fallout from the subsequent affair was immediate and complete for Santos-Aviles. Her husband found out about it and made his knowledge public in a text message he sent to Gonzales and seven of her colleagues. She was ostracized in the workplace; her husband ended their 21-year relationship and moved out of their house. Santos-Aviles’ mental health deteriorated, people close to her reported, even though she remained in her job for a year and a half before her death.
Investigation in camera
In November, the Office of Congressional Conduct opened an investigation into Gonzales’ conduct – an investigation in which the Texas congressman reportedly refused to cooperate. According to House protocol, the results of this investigation remain secret, even if they are deemed serious enough to be referred to the House Ethics Committee.
Last week’s release of Gonzales’ text messages to Santos-Aviles has sparked a wave of calls — not just for Gonzales to forgo reelection and give up his seat in Congress, but also for a complete reform of a system that protects members of Congress accused of harassing their staff while keeping the details of that harassment hidden from public scrutiny — even if the incidents are deemed serious enough to warrant a taxpayer-funded payout.
These demands are led by Gonzales’ female colleagues, including Congresswomen Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who say his behavior is symptomatic of a widespread problem of sexual harassment on Capitol Hill.
Mace’s resolution in the House of Representatives
Mace introduced a resolution last week that would force the Ethics Committee to make publicly available “all reports, conclusions, draft reports, recommendations and supporting materials” on lawmakers accused of violating the House harassment ban. Luna and Boebert are co-sponsors of the resolution that Mace wants to force a vote on this week.
“These people need to be held accountable for their behavior. I don’t care if they have an R or a D next to their name. They need to face the consequences,” Mace tells Rolling Stone. “Women are not second-class citizens. We have rights, and we have the right to be respected by our colleagues. Women on Capitol Hill have the right to work in a safe work environment and not to be harassed in any way.”
“One of the problems — and this is a bipartisan problem — is that when something like this happens, people don’t want to call out the crap in their own party,” Luna adds.
Johnson’s silence on Gonzales
Gonzales’ text messages to Santos-Aviles were, Mace says, “deeply offensive, shameful, worthy of resignation – and it warrants questioning why this wasn’t resolved months ago when leadership knew about it.” It is unclear when House Speaker Mike Johnson, who supported Gonzales’ re-election bid in August before Santos-Aviles’ death, first learned of the congressman’s alleged harassment of his staffer or their alleged affair. However, Johnson has declined to join his caucus members’ calls for Gonzales’ resignation.
Gonzales is currently running for a fourth term representing a portion of southwest Texas that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso. The Republican primary for this seat took place on Tuesday, March 3rd. Republicans currently hold 218 seats in the House of Representatives, Democrats 214, and three seats are vacant. The GOP’s slim majority is further threatened by the potential loss of Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), who Johnson reportedly told donors Friday is suffering from a potentially fatal illness.
Mace doesn’t share the view of her colleagues like Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), who have said politics – and protecting the Republican majority – trumps any concerns about Gonzales’ behavior.
“No words for this behavior”
“This woman set herself on fire – died in the most horrific way – and you walk out of the Speaker’s office and say unmoved, ‘I’m not resigning’? That’s disgusting,” Mace says. “There are no words for this behavior.”
Johnson’s tolerance of Gonzales’ behavior is, in Mace’s view, symptomatic of a broader attitude toward sexual harassment in Congress. “I don’t think harassment of any kind is taken seriously by anyone on Capitol Hill,” Mace said. “I think the way women are treated on Capitol Hill reflects the way women are treated across our country. It’s cultural. Look at the Epstein files. An accomplice went to prison with over a thousand victims, and we still can’t learn the names of the co-conspirators because our government has covered it up – and has done so for two decades.”
Johnson’s reluctance to release the Epstein files has been a point of contention between the speaker and the women in his caucus over the past year. But Mace, Luna and Boebert remain steadfast supporters of President Donald Trump, who also opposed the release of the Epstein files in which he appears and who has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment and has been held liable for sexual assault. Asked whether the DOJ was protecting Trump by withholding interviews with a woman who accused the president of sexually assaulting her, Luna said, “He’s been completely exonerated, and you can see that in the files.”
$19 million from taxpayer money
There is next to no public transparency in sexual harassment lawsuits filed by congressional staffers — even though the public foots the bill for settlements paid out. “If members of Congress behave in ways that are illegal, why should taxpayers have to pay for it? They should be required to pay for it themselves,” Luna said.
Since 1997, a dedicated Treasury account has paid out more than $19 million in lawsuits filed by Capitol Hill employees under the Congressional Accountability Act, a ROLLING STONE investigation found – a law aimed at giving congressional staffers the same workplace protections enjoyed by private sector workers.
But when that money is paid out, only the sparsest details are made public: the name of the office involved, the amount and the section of the CAA that was allegedly violated. For example, a report from the Office of Congressional Worker Rights last year showed that the Treasury account paid out a $98,650 settlement to an employee in the office of former Congresswoman Lori Chavez De Remer. The lawsuit was filed under Section 201 – a provision that outlines protections against discrimination and harassment – but as per established protocol, no further details of the allegation will be released.
Pattern of cover-up and protection
This case illustrates the failings of a system that keeps details of alleged offenses secret. Taxpayers are billed for the payout while the details of the allegation, including the identity of the perpetrator, remain sealed. It’s not clear who was accused of misconduct in Chavez De Remer’s congressional office — but allegations of misconduct have followed her into her new job. Since being named Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Chavez De Remer has been accused of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a member of her security detail (who was placed on leave pending an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General), while her husband has been banned from Labor Department headquarters following allegations of sexual assault by several employees.
“I think there are probably a lot of cases like that,” Mace says. “All of this should be disclosed. It is hugely damaging to women when it isn’t, and when it is swept under the rug with a ‘not that bad.’ This behavior continues and continues because no one is ever held accountable.”
