Mayoral Candidate: Divorced, but married online?
A messy divorce that now dates back seven months, with the ex-wife alleging domestic verbal abuse, along with infidelity.
Say hello to the 2025 Edinburg mayoral election.
Sad to say, there is no shortage of domestic dysfunction in South Texas, and normally, a divorce wouldn’t make the news or an opinion column even if it involved a public figure. Not seven months after it was granted.
In the case of Edinburg mayoral candidate Richard Molina, however, it becomes a story because his mayoral website (richardmolinaformayor.com) still paints him as a happily married man.
I found that out over the weekend when I decided to Google his name, check out his campaign — 2025 Richard Molina for Mayor.
And there it is on his website — a family photo that dates back to his first mayoral candidacy in 2017.
A happy marriage from the looks of it. Nothing about his ex-wife, Dalia, claiming he was guilty of cheating, or a claim that he kicked the family dog, and yelled at his family in a bullying way.
For approximately five years, from 2017 to 2022 when his voter-fraud trial ended in acquittal, I let him bend my ear whenever he felt like it, telling me how he had run up against the city’s political machine and was a victim of it. He could literally talk for hours.
In 2021, he lost the reelection to Ramiro Garza, Jr., by only approximately 400 votes despite a grand jury indictment hanging over his head.
In 2022, during his trial, his attorney asked him if he thought the indictment cost him the 2021election.
“I do,” said Molina.
Now he’s back, and some city residents say they’re going to vote for him. At least the few I’ve spoken to. Sure, they know about the voting-fraud allegations, but despite that, they’ll still choose him as the city’s next mayor.
Whether this divorce story, allegations of being a bully at home, kicking the family pet, will change anyone’s mind, probably not.
The fact that Molina’s campaign website is a fraud and paints a false narrative — still happily married, a “family man,” vs. the divorced reality that is now his life — probably won’t change any minds either, who knows.
Point is, people should know who they’re really voting for.
Past Elections
For years, Edinburg was a sleeper when it came to elections. Typically, even in a mayoral election, only about 7 percent of the city’s registered voters would show up at the polls. They would show up for the political pachangas, free beer and tacos, but not when it came time to actually vote.
That said, Molina told the jury that he did everything he could to get more people to the polls in 2017. Based on his interpretation of state election law and legal opinions he ran across online at the websites belonging to the Secretary of State and the Texas Attorney General, he was of the opinion, he said, that voters had a choice where to vote as long as they didn’t vote in more than one municipal election. If they had some vested interest in the city – they shopped in Edinburg a lot, or their children went to a charter school in Edinburg, for example – they could vote for him in the upcoming city election, he told friends and family.
Legally speaking, in part, this is defined as a “Mistake of Law” defense. Meaning, Molina didn’t intentionally break the law when he encouraged friends and family who lived outside Edinburg city limits to vote for him in 2017. Rather, he was mistaken in that belief based on his own research.
In most criminal trials, it’s highly unusual to see a criminal defendant take the stand and expose themself to cross-examination by prosecutors biting at the bit to question them under oath. Yet, in the case of Richard Molina, after the state had called multiple witnesses to testify, mostly former friends and family, who said that they had voted for him only after being told it was okay to do so, even though they didn’t live in the city, the only chance the former mayor had for full acquittal was to put himself in front of the jury so he could tell his side of the story.
He painted himself as a victim — why come after me when this kind of voting irregularity has been going on for years — and the jury apparently bought it, thus nullifying any and all personal culpability.
Instead of replying to a question from the prosecution with a simple yes or no, as he was ordered to do multiple times by the judge, Molina would launch into a diatribe about how the then-DA's aunt was doing the same thing for which he was being accused, in part, using a wrong address to sign up voters, so why target him?
The Messy Divorce
Based on the affidavit that Richard Molina’s ex-wife, Dalia Molina, signed last December, seeking a temporary restraining order, which was granted by the 206th (Judge Rose Guerra-Reyna) state District Court, life inside the Molina home was anything but happy and hadn’t been for quite some time.
From the signed affidavit:
“In February 2024, I found out of my husband, Ricardo Rosendo Molina’s infidelity.
“When I confronted him about it, he denied it, yelled at me and tried to spin it around and accused me of cheating on him with a mutual friend. I have gone to multiple attorneys who are unwilling to take my case because of my husband’s political connections.”
The affidavit covers approximately two pages of Molina homelife, according to Dalia Molina:
“My husband has been abusive towards me throughout our relationship and has verbally damaged my character."
This signed affidavit, seeking a temporary restraining order last December, was granted three months before the March 2025 divorce:
“He is obsessed with his ‘public image,’ which is why he feels the need to post everything on Facebook. He is in constant need of approval from social media to the point where he will repost school events and not even attend the event. As well as show up to other school events when our children are not involved or affiliated with that program.”
Of course, no doubt Richard Molina would have his own side of the story to tell, which is why I’m not calling him. I no longer trust what he says, and I don't want to give him space to spin it.
More from the December 2014 signed affidavit by the wife who stood by him during his entire legal challenge. Together, they built and grew a home healthcare business, a family, until she discovered his (alleged) infidelity:
“On the date Dec. 7th of 2024 he yelled that the dog bit off the sofa, and out of anger he kicked the dog and shouted, ‘You don’t do that.’ However, he did not physically see the dog bite off the sofa. He only assumed (that), and when I decided to speak up because it was not the dog’s fault that the couch got damaged, but the wall’s from hitting against it, he yelled at (one of their children), as if she was responsible for it.”
Edinburg Politics
The current Edinburg mayor/former city manager, and the one credited with restoring respect to the city after Molina’s departure in 2021, at least on a regional basis, Ramiro Garza, Jr., isn’t seeking reelection this November.
He was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer about a year ago, wanted to give all of his attention to it, and so declared this past January that he wouldn’t seek reelection.
Today, Garza, Jr., said he’s doing fine. The surgery was successful, and he has hopes for a healthy future. Indeed, among cancers, early-stage prostate has a great outlook — the five-year survival rate is excellent, exceeding 99%. (Source: American Cancer Society.)
Besides Richard Molina, the three other candidates hoping to be the new mayor include Johnny Garcia, Jonathan Salinas, and Omar Ochoa.
Last week, Futuro RGV hosted a mayoral forum.
Garcia, Salinas, and Ochoa showed up, but Molina bowed out, taking to Facebook to explain that with him, family comes first, failing to mention the divorce:
“Family comes first,” Molina wrote on the Facebook post. “(Tuesday) night I will not be attending the Futuro RGV Forum because it is Parents Night at Edinburg North High School, where my daughter is a senior.”
Also, nothing is more important to Molina than family, he says, not counting the allegations of marital infidelity and loud verbal abuse inside the home:
“I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity, and I look forward to future public forums. But as a father, nothing is more important than being there for my family.”
From his ex-wife’s affidavit, dated December 2024:
“He will portray himself as a caring father but at home behind closed doors he will change his attitude and tone with a flip of a switch. When he is in a rage, I get this deep pit in my stomach and my body freezes up because no matter what words come out of my mouth, he yells back twice as louder, and his words come with intention to hurt. I feel as if I am always walking on eggshells because I never know what version of him I will be getting when I see him. He will get angry at the most minor things and when he does, he turns into this loud, belittling, and ruthless force.”
With his size, strength, yeah, he’d be a force to be reckoned with.