Ken Paxton Lies Texas

Ken Paxton Called James Talarico 'Mentally Fragile' and Set Up a 'Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line.' His Senior Adviser Spread a False Claim He'd Been Committed.

While his opponent was home with the flu, Ken Paxton ran ads calling him 'mentally fragile,' led a 'Where is James Talarico?' chant, and opened a tip line. His senior adviser then posted that Talarico had 'definitely been admitted to a mental institution.' The Ohio facility says he was never a patient.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 14, 2026

Ken Paxton Called James Talarico 'Mentally Fragile' and Set Up a 'Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line.' His Senior Adviser Spread a False Claim He'd Been Committed. — Photo: Michael Gonzalez for The Texas Tribune

On September 30, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico appeared at a business event by video instead of in person. He said he had the flu and didn't want to make anyone's grandmother or baby sick.

Ken Paxton, the Republican running against him, saw an opening. Over the next two weeks, Paxton and the people around him turned a sick day into a story that Talarico had suffered a mental breakdown and been locked in a psychiatric hospital in Ohio.

None of it was true. The Ohio hospital itself said so. But by then, the claim had been shared millions of times, according to a Texas Tribune reconstruction published October 13.

What Paxton did himself

This wasn't something anonymous trolls cooked up and Paxton stayed above. The Tribune lays out what Paxton did in his own name:

October 7: Paxton released an ad claiming Talarico had been missing for 11 days. It had been seven since the video appearance.
That night, at a Trump rally, Paxton started a crowd chant of "Where is James Talarico?" and asked, "Where do you think they hid that little socialist?"
He released multiple ads calling Talarico "mentally fragile."
He posted that Talarico was "having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage."
He set up a "Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line" for people to report where Talarico was.

That is the sitting attorney general of Texas — the state's top lawyer — inviting the public to track down his opponent and selling the idea that he'd cracked.

What his senior adviser did

Then it went further. On Sunday, October 11, Paxton senior adviser Michelle Smith posted that a friend had told her a doctor confirmed Talarico "has definitely been admitted to a mental institution," the Tribune reports.

Sunday evening, the Lindner Center — the Ohio mental health facility at the center of the rumor — posted that Talarico had never been treated there.

Paxton's campaign didn't respond when the Tribune asked about his claims or Smith's.

How the lie was built

The Tribune walks through how the story was stitched together out of nothing:

Talarico reappeared in public on October 9, at the Austin City Limits music festival.
The next morning, a GOP fundraiser posted about a private plane she said flew from Austin to Ohio and back that day, noting that Ohio was where a Houston-area Democrat had once sought mental health treatment. "So many coincidences!" she wrote. The post got almost two million views.
That night, a right-wing influencer released audio of a call to the Lindner Center in which he posed as Talarico's cousin and made up a patient ID number. A woman on the line said someone named James Talarico had been "just discharged this evening."

That would have meant Talarico was discharged from an Ohio hospital on Saturday evening — a day after he was seen at a festival in Austin. It didn't matter. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted about it more than a dozen times in four days. Elon Musk reposted the audio.

Talarico had to publicly deny ever being treated there — or ever having been to Ohio. He gave home security footage to the New York Times to prove where he'd been.

Paxton himself didn't share the audio. He didn't have to. He'd built the frame it fit into, and his adviser carried it the rest of the way.

The oldest trick in Texas

The Tribune opens with a Texas legend: a young Lyndon Johnson spreading a rumor so absurd that his own campaign manager objected nobody would believe it. "I know," Johnson supposedly replied. "But let's make the sonofabitch deny it."

That's the point of a smear like this. Paxton is trailing in the polls. He doesn't need voters to believe Talarico was in a mental hospital. He needs them talking about Talarico's mental health instead of Paxton's record — like the two indicted fugitives he partied with in Dubai, or the donors who paid him while his office wrote opinions they cared about.

It also isn't the first time Paxton's campaign has reached for this kind of attack. We've written about the AI-generated ad that put words in Talarico's mouth.

Notably, the Tribune found that Texas's top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — stayed out of it entirely. The candidate for U.S. Senate did not.

What we know

Ken Paxton ran ads calling his opponent "mentally fragile," claimed in an ad that he'd been missing for 11 days when it had been seven, led a "Where is James Talarico?" chant and opened a "Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line" while Talarico was home with the flu. His senior adviser then posted that Talarico had "definitely been admitted to a mental institution." The Ohio facility says Talarico was never its patient, and Paxton's campaign has not answered for any of it.