Bobby Pulido

Introduction

Bobby Pulido is a Latin Grammy-winning Tejano singer and the Democratic nominee for Congress in Texas’s 15th District, whose campaign against Republican incumbent Rep. Monica De La Cruz has been repeatedly rocked by the resurfacing of his own social-media history. A New York Post report of October 5, 2026 unearthed further posts — many since scrubbed from his confirmed accounts — including a 2019 exchange in which a user joked about being raped in his dressing room and Pulido replied, “Shhh… it was our secret,” and a January 2020 reply telling a woman, “You’d better shave your p—y.” The report landed days before early voting in a toss-up race rated among House Democrats’ best pickup opportunities, and followed months of earlier disclosures: homophobic and racist slurs in decade-old posts, and his years of touring with an accordionist later revealed to be a convicted child sex offender. Pulido says the posts are “old jokes between me and my personal friends” and decried the “woke right” for focusing on them.

Background Information

Pulido, 55, is the son of Tejano musician Roberto Pulido and rose to fame in the 1990s with hits including “Desvelado,” becoming one of the genre’s biggest stars; he is a married father of four sons. His candidacy in the 15th District — a majority-Hispanic seat running from McAllen to rural counties east of San Antonio that Donald Trump carried by 18 points in 2024 — made him one of House Democrats’ prized battleground recruits, and polling through late September 2026 showed the race within the margin of error or Pulido slightly ahead, helped by his near-universal name identification in the district. Before politics, his three-decade career included constant fan engagement on Twitter, where he was active long before he thought about running for office — the record that now generates his campaign’s recurring crises.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Allegations and offensive conduct, unadjudicated. The posts described in this section are quoted from reporting by the New York Post, Politico and NBC News, which reviewed the messages; several have since been deleted. Nothing in the record shows Pulido was charged with or sued over any of these posts, and no allegation of actual misconduct with the women quoted has been made by anyone — both parties described the exchanges as jokes. The conduct at issue is the posts themselves, and Pulido’s response to them, which he defends as humor between friends.

The October 5 New York Post report detailed newly surfaced exchanges. In a 2019 X thread in Spanish, a user wrote, “I remember when @bobbypulido425 wanted me and even raped me in his DRESSING ROOOOM—holy sh—, that dude is a legend,” and Pulido answered, “Shhh… it was our secret.” The Post noted both individuals appeared to be joking. In January 2020, replying to a woman who posted a selfie and asked whether she should cut her hair, Pulido wrote, “You’d better shave your p—y.” Months later he responded to a since-deleted post with, “Help us find that goth big-ass chick,” adding, “This dude is suffering a ton.” The report followed earlier disclosures: in Twitter posts between 2013 and 2018 Pulido used Spanish-language slurs translated as “f-g,” “f—-t” and “p—y,” and used “prieto,” a pejorative for dark-skinned people; he told an Asian person to “open your Asian eyes” and suggested that molesting children is “not necessarily rape”; he once likened a woman’s anatomy to his coffee foam and posted a sexual cartoon in a thread; and in a 2016 selfie from his couch he wrote, “Casting anybody??” — an apparent reference to the Hollywood casting couch.

A parallel controversy concerns his longtime accordionist Frankie Caballero, who was convicted in 2014 of indecent contact with an eight-year-old girl and is a registered sex offender. Caballero played on Pulido’s 1995 hit “Desvelado” and performed with him numerous times, including after the conviction — Axios reported he appeared at a 2018 middle-school benefit concert with children present after his release. Pulido says he first learned of the sex conviction from the New York Post’s April 2026 report, believing Caballero’s “transferring illegal aliens” explanation for his imprisonment; his campaign says management fired Caballero in 2021 upon learning of a domestic abuse charge. In a 2019 YouTube appearance Pulido said he went to Caballero “out of jail,” which he later called “hyperbolic” and a misspeaking, and he acknowledged regret about the school appearance: “Me, that I know now, yes. I wish I wouldn’t have taken him there.”

Public Reaction and Consequences

Republican opponents and conservative media made the posts a sustained campaign theme. Rep. De La Cruz said Pulido is “morally corrupt” over the Caballero association, and her campaign manager James Shook accused him of walking “a man convicted of molesting an eight-year-old girl onto a middle school event in this community, and hid[ing] his sex offender status from parents.” The NRCC’s Christian Martinez called him “misogynistic” with “bad judgment, worse excuses, and zero accountability.” Responding to the October 5 report, Pulido posted a video calling the posts “old jokes between me and my personal friends,” saying “This was Mexican humor. Our humor is sarcastic, brutal, and full of slang that doesn’t survive Google Translate,” and decrying the “woke right”; earlier he had swiped at the New York Post’s “recycled tabloid nonsense” and, in Spanish, told persistent reporters “que no mamen.” In an August interview he offered a blanket apology — “I apologize for everything that I’ve ever joked about that offended anybody. But I can’t continue to revisit every single one” — while defending the slurs as jokes among friends who were never offended.

Current Status

As of October 5, 2026, Pulido remained the Democratic nominee in the November 3 general election, with the race rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report and recent polling showing him at 52 percent to De La Cruz’s 43 percent in an average of surveys. No charges, lawsuits or regulatory actions have arisen from the posts; the consequences are political. The drip of revelations continued through the fall — the Post alone has reported on his posts repeatedly since October 2025 — and Pulido told Politico in August that he expects opponents to “keep dripping, dripping, dripping” old material through Election Day.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The scandals have defined a congressional bid that polling suggests remains competitive despite them, making Pulido a test case for voter desensitization to old posts: Politico reported in August that a significant share of voters of both parties say they would stick with their preferred candidate through most scandal categories. For Pulido personally, the coverage has forced a re-litigation of his three-decade public persona — the fan-facing swagger of his Twitter years is now campaign opposition research — and the Caballero revelation severed a decades-long musical partnership that produced his signature hit. Whatever the election’s outcome, the final chapter of his performing career has been overlaid with the scandal archive, and the music-and-politics celebrity identity he rode to the brink of Congress now shares billing with the phrase “Shhh… it was our secret.”

Sources

• New York Post, “Shocking sleazy new details surface about Grammy-winning Texas Dem candidate: ‘Shhhh… it was our secret,’” October 5, 2026 — source
• Politico, “Bobby Pulido is sick and tired of apologizing,” August 6, 2026 — source
• The Texas Tribune, “Democratic candidate Bobby Pulido toured with child sex criminal,” April 2, 2026 — source