Ken Paxton’s Texas Senate Bid Hit by Scandal After Damaging Video Emerges

Fireworks explode above Dubai’s towering Burj Khalifa as crowds gather to mark the arrival of 2025.

Among the select guests watching from a luxury balcony inside the world’s tallest building are Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his girlfriend, Christian influencer Tracy Duhon.

The Lone Star State’s top law enforcement official—and US Senate candidate—was not the only American at the celebration. Two other attendees, Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, were fugitives from justice. Both had been indicted months earlier on federal healthcare fraud charges and had failed to return to the United States.

Campaign finance records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which revealed details of the New Year’s gathering this week, show that Ahmed, a healthcare executive, donated $190,000 to Paxton. That included a $25,000 contribution made just days after his indictment. After the Journal published its report, the two men appeared in a Chicago court and pleaded not guilty.

Critics say a state attorney general seeking higher office might normally be expected to avoid such questionable company. But Paxton, they argue, has never been known to let political propriety stand in the way of a good party.

Everything is said to be bigger in Texas—including, apparently, its political scandals.

The scandals surrounding Paxton, some of them dating back decades, have accumulated as he campaigns for the US Senate in next month’s midterms. Taken together, his critics suggest, they could almost climb as high as the Burj Khalifa.

“A party with multiple fugitives and Ken Paxton is still the sketchiest guy in the room,” Democratic rival James Talarico mocked on X, sharing a video of Paxton at the New Year’s celebration.

A spokesman defended Paxton’s attendance, saying: “Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas.”

Texans have, for whatever reason, repeatedly chosen to look past much of the controversy surrounding their attorney general—who opponents have branded “Crooked Ken.”

It remains difficult for many observers to understand how Paxton is still the Republican candidate for the US Senate after years of controversy. Yet he is locked in a close race with Talarico. The latest polling shows the contest effectively tied, with a CBS News/YouGov survey giving Talarico 51 percent and Paxton 49 percent.

Some of Paxton’s supporters suggest his resilience may reflect another familiar Texas stereotype: that the heirs of the Alamo’s defenders do not like being pushed around.

The 63-year-old lawyer and staunch Christian conservative appears to be counting on voters to disregard his long list of detractors and follow President Donald Trump’s lead. Trump endorsed Paxton during his runoff against Republican Senator John Cornyn, describing him as “someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT.”

Trump added that “Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN.”

Paxton has certainly endured years of controversy, but whether it was “very unfair” is ultimately a question for the courts—not a president determined to prevent Texas from turning blue and to demonstrate that his endorsement can still carry a candidate across the finish line.

Paxton has consistently denied wrongdoing. His opponents, however, accuse him of being deeply corrupt, shamelessly hypocritical and among the clearest examples of Trump placing personal loyalty above all else in his political patronage.

Paxton has not gone so far as to wear a Stetson to win over Texas voters, perhaps because he is not a native Texan. He was born in North Dakota while his father was stationed there as a US Air Force pilot, and spent much of his childhood in Oklahoma before moving to Texas for college. His permanently half-closed right eye can give him a villainous appearance, a feature detractors might consider fitting but which resulted from a childhood accident during a game of hide-and-seek.

Paxton married Angela Allen, whom he met while they were studying at Texas’s Baylor University, in 1986 and they had four children together, living near the Dallas law firm where he went to work after college.

The self-proclaimed devout Christian and his wife helped found an evangelical church in Frisco, Texas, in the 1990s and, as a state senator herself from 2019, she would prove crucial in connecting him with Christian nationalist leaders.

She would become one of his most fervent cheerleaders when he ran for public office, telling crowds they had a ‘sacred covenant’ and ‘I’m a pistol-packing mama, and my husband sues Obama.’

Paxton’s political career began in 2002 when, aged 39, he won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, becoming a state senator ten years later.

He became the state’s attorney general in 2015, riding into office on the back of the Tea Party movement, after the previous incumbent, Greg Abbott, became governor.

Within months of starting the job, Paxton was indicted on securities fraud and other charges over an alleged scheme to mislead investors.

It was claimed he solicited investors for a tech company, Servergy, without revealing he was being paid commission. (Paxton denied the charges and, after the trial was delayed repeatedly, he agreed in 2024 to a plea deal which saw him paying nearly $300,000 in restitution, performing 100 hours of community service and taking 15 hours of legal ethics courses – but not making any admission of guilt.)

He also faced other inquiries, state and federal, including one for bribery over claims he accepted $100,000 from a former client under investigation by his office. The case was closed with no finding of wrongdoing – indeed Paxton has always denied any.

Critics also questioned the source of his wealth: before he first ran for public office in 2002, his only assets were worth less than $175,000, according to a state disclosure. By 2018, he reportedly told a lender he was worth some $5.5 million and this didn’t include millions of dollars in assets he and his wife had moved into a blind trust. According to the Wall Street Journal, they now own at least a dozen residential properties.

His Democrat opponents have also highlighted Paxton’s extensive globe-hopping while he is attorney general. Between 2022 and 2025, Paxton – accompanied by bodyguards paid for by the state – went on 19 foreign trips to countries including Greece, Italy, South Africa and Mexico, according to records cited by the Wall Street Journal.

In office, Paxton has always been a staunch ally of Trump, rushing to his aid when the latter tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.

Paxton filed the Texas v Pennsylvania case in the Supreme Court, which attempted unsuccessfully to contest the election result in four states where Joe Biden won. During the Biden presidency, Paxton sued the administration 106 times.

He pushed for stricter border controls and headed an alliance of 16 states to foil a Democrat attempt to provide citizenship for the undocumented spouses of US citizens. Paxton challenged vaccine mandates and fought to overturn environmental regulations.

On January 6, 2021, he was among the speakers at the Trump ‘Save America’ rally in Washington that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

Such dogged loyalty to the Trump cause has long been reciprocated. The president endorsed Paxton when he ran for re-election as attorney general in 2018. His Democrat opponent, Justin Nelson, provided what supporters insisted was an early indication of Paxton’s untrustworthiness with a campaign ad featuring CCTV footage of Paxton taking a $1,000 Montblanc pen which another lawyer had accidentally left behind in a courthouse metal detector. A spokesman for Paxton said the pen was subsequently returned when ‘the error was realized.’

If only a wandering pen had been the final controversy. In 2020, eight of his most senior staff went to the FBI accusing Paxton of bribery and abuse of office in connection with a struggling Austin property developer, Nate Paul.

They alleged Paxton had issued legal opinions that favored Paul’s interests – including interfering with a federal inquiry into allegations of financial fraud by Paul involving $172 million in loans – and opened investigations into Paul’s business rivals.

In exchange, it was claimed, Paul paid for renovations to the attorney general’s home and gave a job to a woman, Laura Olson, with whom Paxton was having an affair so she could move to Austin. It was further alleged that Paul helped Paxton meet his mistress clandestinely through a secret Uber account the two men shared.

In April 2025, he dealt with the allegations – which he denied – by agreeing to another plea deal, this time accepting four months of home confinement, five years of supervised release and a $1 fine. His accusers later won a $6.6 million whistleblowers lawsuit after claiming they’d lost their jobs for reporting him.

Paxton’s infidelity was not exactly news. In 2018, while clutching his wife’s hand, he gathered his attorney general’s office staff and admitted he’d had an extramarital affair. Paxton insisted it was over and promised to recommit to his marriage. But he didn’t recommit to his marriage, and this particular scandal wasn’t over.

In 2023, his reportedly repeated adultery and the allegations surrounding Paul prompted the state’s Republican-led House General Investigating Committee to unanimously recommend to impeach Paxton. The committee filed 20 articles that included bribery, abuse of public trust, obstruction of justice and securities law violations.

Paxton’s own defense lawyers shared details of his relationship with Olson in legal motions filed during the impeachment hearing, which alleged improprieties great and small, the latter memorably including a $45 coconut cake which a grocery chain sent to the attorney general’s office each year. Much to the annoyance of staff, the tradition changed as soon as Paxton arrived, as he insisted they couldn’t touch it because it was for his birthday.

The House voted to impeach Paxton and he was suspended. The Republican-controlled Texas Senate tried 16 of the articles after dismissing four and acquitted him on every count in September 2023. He was reinstated as attorney general the following day.

In July 2025, Angela Paxton, who had attended the impeachment hearing but was not allowed to vote, filed for divorce on ‘biblical grounds,’ explicitly alleging adultery, seeking a disproportionate share of the estate and stating they had stopped living together in June 2024.

‘I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation,’ she announced. ‘But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.’

Paxton denied her allegations and publicly blamed the demise of his marriage on ‘countless political attacks.’ The divorce has yet to be resolved but he was seen with influencer Duhon, 58, sightseeing in London in July.

Voters were reminded of his ongoing divorce only this month when Angela appeared in an advert released by a PAC funded by Senate Republicans.

In the commercial, without mentioning her estranged husband by name, she urged voters to look past the merits of individual candidates and vote for the Republican Party. ‘In a general election it’s not as much about the individual players on the team,’ she says. ‘It’s about getting the whole team across the finish line. Either we hold every Republican seat, or we hand the future of Texas to the other team.’

As cynics have observed of Mrs Paxton’s intervention, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Trump has called Paxton a ‘pain in the ass.’ Some observers believe it has been in jest, but if the scandal-plagued law man loses a seat in the Senate as crucial as Texas to the Democrats, then the next insult hurled Paxton’s way by the president is unlikely to be a joke.