During her successful recent campaign for Bexar County GOP chair, Cynthia Brehm defined herself as a “retired Army wife.”

She ran as a family values conservative and touted the military connection she shares with her husband, retired Army Lt. Col. Norman Brehm.

What she didn’t talk about — either this year or during her 2015 mayoral campaign or her 2017 race for City Council — was the scandal underlying that military connection.

Norman Brehm pleaded guilty to “indecent liberties with a child” in 1999, according to military court records. The child was Cynthia Brehm’s 14-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

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“Sadly, he got into pornography, and did something absolutely stupid,” Cynthia Brehm said Friday in an email response to questions from the San Antonio Express-News. “He flashed my 14-year-old daughter.”

Norman escaped prosecution on the indecency charge because the charge sheet for his case was not forwarded until October 2006, which provided him with a statute-of-limitations defense. On May 13, 2009, the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals set aside both the guilty findings and the sentence for his indecency charge.

At that time, Norman served as a Plans and Operations officer for the Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. A year later, he retired from the military and took a job with General Dynamics Corporation in Afghanistan.

Over the past seven years, he and Cynthia have maintained a long-distance marriage, with Cynthia living in the $674,000 Dominion home they co-own and Norman only occasionally finding time to visit her.

On March 28, Cynthia posted a photo on her Facebook page of Norman posing with one of her campaign signs.

“All the way from Afghanistan, my husband is rooting for me,” she wrote. “Isn’t this the cutest thing? Oh my gosh, he made me laugh so hard.... I absolutely love it.”

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Cynthia easily won her runoff battle for the party chairmanship last Tuesday, drawing nearly 70 percent of the vote against Jo Ann Ponce Gonzalez, a former professor and administrator at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.

The story of Norman Brehm’s flashing incident, however, started filtering out among local Republicans as the runoff election approached. Less than a week after Cynthia’s victory, there are signs of a budding mutiny within the party organization.

Patty Gibbons, like Brehm, is part of the hard-line conservative wing of the local GOP. This group drove the effort last December to censure outgoing Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, presumably because of Straus’s opposition to social wedge-issue legislation, such as a 2017 bill requiring transgender individuals to use public restrooms that conform to their birth sex.

Gibbons worked for Brehm’s campaign early in the primary race, but said she was appalled to learn last Monday about the Norman Brehm indecency case.

“Most of us who hear this are still trying to stomach it,” Gibbons said, adding that Brehm’s refusal to reveal the information to her supporters amounts to a betrayal of their trust.

Gibbons said party members and general-election candidates noticeably stayed away from the newly elected GOP chair at a party barbecue on Thursday night.

“She’s pretty isolated right now,” Gibbons said.

Brehm brushed back any suggestion that it’s hypocritical for her to espouse Christian values and personal morality, while remaining married to someone who admitted to predatory behavior with a child.

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“As Republicans, we take our commitments and platform seriously and strive to live them out and to help others do the same — including our spouses,” she said. “It would have been easy and selfish of me to walk away and destroy my family with these feelings, but I hung tough through prayer and God’s Grace to preserve my family.

“I don't like what happened. I stood up against the bad behavior, but I chose to take the high road and keep my vow to God — for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do we part.”

Gibbons and other party activists worry, however, that Brehm’s presence will alienate GOP donors and damage the campaigns of down-ballot Republicans in November.

“This doesn’t represent who we are,” Gibbons said. “But we’re all left with a scandal that no one asked for.”

Tylden Shaeffer, the Republican nominee for Bexar County district attorney, released a statement Saturday afternoon saying he was “extremely troubled” by the revelations about Norman Brehm. He called on Cynthia to step down as party chair.

“This is a clear-cut issue,” Shaeffer said. “She needs to go. Today.”

@gilgamesh470

Gilbert Garcia is a San Antonio Express-News columnist. Read more of his stories here. | ggarcia@express-news.net | @gilgamesh470