I am angry, and I am not going to dress that up. This September, James Talarico is still running television ads that treat a Waco child’s sexual abuse case as inventory for a US Senate race. The boy lives in that market, but even worse, the ads have found their way onto social media sites like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and 𝕏. His family has already said they're tired of being used. Talarico has ignored their pleas to leave their child alone.
On Friday, his campaign aired a new spot. The pictures are of Adam Hoffman leaving jail. The text on screen says he is leaving after sexually abusing a child, that Ken Paxton offered him one day in jail, and that Hoffman’s lawyer represented one of Paxton’s biggest donors. It closes with the line Talarico has been workshopping since summer. “We don’t need any more pedophile protectors in Washington.” A second Talarico ad still circulating this month accuses Paxton of “giving an Epstein-style sweetheart deal to an admitted child predator.” The ads, running nonstop, are on televisions in the hometown of the child whose abuse Talarico has turned into a campaign product. The “one day” line is the first offer a visiting judge threw out. Judge Roy Sparkman raised the term to 60 days. Hoffman served 29. Talarico knows that the claims have been debunked and that Paxton had nothing to do with the case. The ad does not trouble itself with those facts.
I keep coming back to that fact because the rest of the argument hangs on it. A Senate candidate can dislike a plea. He can demand records. He can stand on a courthouse lawn and give a speech. What he does not get to do is keep dragging the same boy back onto the screen after the family has begged and pleaded with him to stop revictimizing their child day after day.
In July, Melissa Dieterich, speaking for the victim’s family, posted the note the campaign has spent two months pretending not to hear. “We have not given any statement to Talarico. We have not spoken to him. We are tired of being used in this election.” Talarico had told reporters his team had been in contact. The family said that was not true. They are tired of Talarico’s lies, tired of watching their son revisit his two-year ordeal, and just tired. That was midsummer. The ads are still running, and they’ve found their way to social media, where the boy and his friends see them constantly in their feeds.
The file Talarico is selling did not begin as a favor. It began as a conflict. Adam Hoffman, a Waco lawyer, was arrested in 2022 and charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony that carries 25 years to life. McLennan County District Attorney Josh Tetens recused his office because Hoffman had sought legal advice from him before Tetens took office. The case didn’t land on a political desk out of ambition. It landed at the Office of the Attorney General because the local prosecutor could not touch it. Nobody in Austin went looking for this file. It arrived because someone had to take it.
Two line prosecutors took it up. Brenda Cantu has 29 years of prosecution behind her. Dorian Cotlar has 25 years of criminal law practice and is Board Certified in Criminal Law. Between them they have handled thousands of child sexual-assault cases. They are not political appointees dropped into Waco to do a friend a kindness. They are the people who spend careers in rooms most of us would not enter. In May, they wrote a letter to state Rep. Jeff Leach laying out, in their own names, what happened in their own courtroom. That letter is the record Talarico has to beat. He has not beaten it. He has talked over it.
They charged Hoffman with the gravest offense available. Continuous sexual abuse of a child is not a courtesy count. You do not reach for a mandatory life statute if you are trying to walk a defendant out the side door. You reach for it if you mean to put him away. In June 2025, they tried the case for four days. The child testified. People who were in the room described that testimony as an act of courage. Under cross-examination, he admitted that he had embellished or exaggerated some of his claims. The jury could not agree to convict Hoffman. It hung 7 to 5, seven for conviction, five unwilling to get there. A Texas felony conviction requires all twelve. Five jurors who heard the same evidence declined to say the state had met its burden. That is not a scandal cooked in Austin. That is a hung jury in Waco.
The office was ready to try it again. Cantu and Cotlar told the family so and later said so in writing. The child, having already endured the first trial, made clear he would not take the stand a second time of his own will. A retrial without his voluntary testimony would have required the state to compel him, by subpoena, to sit again in the same room as the man who had abused him and submit again to hostile questioning. The prosecutors judged that they would not do that to him. I think they were right. A person can hate the outcome and still see why two career child-abuse prosecutors refused to drag a traumatized teenager back into the box against his wishes for a second roll of the same dice.
Without that forced testimony, they could have secured an admission of guilt and jail time. On April 16, 2026, Hoffman pleaded guilty to two Class A misdemeanors, indecent assault and displaying harmful material to a minor. Visiting Judge Roy Sparkman rejected the first, thinner version of the deal. He raised the jail term from 30 days to 60 after the boy’s mother told the court it was not enough. Hoffman also surrendered his law license, took a lifetime protective order barring contact with the victim, and left the state. He served 29 days in the McLennan County Jail and was released on good-behavior credit, which is how that jail routinely credits time. The misdemeanor offenses did not trigger Texas sex-offender registration because the written admission did not specify the victim’s age. That last fact is ugly. It is also the product of a plea entered after a hung jury and a witness who would not return, not a whispered friendship in the Attorney General’s private office.
Talarico’s answer to all of this has been to collapse the file into a slogan. He stood on the steps of the McLennan County Courthouse in June under a sign that read “Release the Hoffman Files” and called the plea an Epstein-style sweetheart deal. He has repeated the phrase until it sounds like a finding. It is not a finding. Hoffman’s own defense lawyer, Gerry Morris, a man who told reporters he cannot stand Ken Paxton and called himself a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, said Paxton “had absolutely nothing to do with the plea deal in this case.” Morris is not a Paxton spokesman. He is the last person with a motive to cover for him. If the friendship theory were true, the defense lawyer who cut the deal would be an odd place to find such a clean denial.
The Attorney General’s office employs more than 750 lawyers and handles upward of 20,000 cases a year. Ordinary charging decisions in a Waco file do not travel to the elected official’s desk. Cantu and Cotlar have said Paxton learned of the matter when it became a campaign weapon. He does not know Hoffman. He has not met him or spoken to him. The friendship is the premise of Talarico’s ad, not a fact in any pleading.
Some people will still call the plea a defeat, and I understand why. If the child takes the stand again and twelve jurors agree, Hoffman belongs in prison for the rest of his life. That is not the case the office actually had. It had a 7-5 hung jury, a witness who had asked to be left alone, and a second trial that would have required force against a child. The live choices were a plea with an admission and jail, or a retrial that would most likely end in dismissal or acquittal and send Hoffman home with no finding of guilt at all. The plea is a floor. Nobody wanted it. It is what the evidence and the witness could still support.
Cantu and Cotlar closed their letter with one request. They asked that the boy’s privacy be respected and that his decision about how to move forward with his own life be honored. Talarico’s answer has been to make the boy and his attacker recurring figures in a statewide race. He did it at the Waco courthouse in June. He did it again in July after the family said they had never spoken to him. He is doing it this week on television and social media. I find that contemptible. I find it worse than a bad plea, because a bad plea at least pretends to be about the case. These ads are about a candidate who has discovered that a child’s worst years will move numbers if you say “Epstein” often enough. Don’t forget that the largest donor to Talarico’s election effort is Epstein-pal Reid Hoffman, who gave $11.5 million to fund these deplorable ads.
Talarico keeps calling himself the boy’s defender. The prosecutors who sat with that boy through a four-day trial asked the public to stop using him. The family has repeatedly asked Talarico and his campaign to stop. The ads kept running. I have run out of polite ways to describe that. A prosecutor who accepts a lesser plea after a hung jury is doing ugly, constrained work. A candidate who keeps the same child on television in September, after being told to stop, is doing something else. He is mining a wound because it polls.
Prosecutors who have spent decades in those rooms for a reason make charging decisions. Their job is to get what the evidence and the witness will still bear. Talarico’s job, as he has defined it this fall, is to keep the story warm until November. The public can tell which of those jobs has been listening to the child, it is not the man who recieved a family’s plea to stop and answered it with another flight of commercials in the boy’s own hometown spots that keep the abuse alive on the evening news so a Senate race can have its monster, and I am done pretending this is what concern for a child looks like.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
Talarico is the poster child for defective demonic dog crap. Pays himself $80,000 a year to put his name on an NGO, preaches blasphemy, lies, and shares his only checking account with his mother. What a piece of crap.
Bravo, Muse. This needs a wider airing. And it would be fair to call him the Epstein friend-funded candidate. Talarico is beneath contempt.