The Real Exploitation of a Child: James Talarico's Cynical Hit Job on Ken Paxton

Imagine you are handed a case that no one wanted. A man stands accused of the continuous sexual abuse of a 10-year-old boy. The local prosecutor, as it happens, is acquainted with the accused, and so he must step aside. The file lands on someone else’s desk by default, not by ambition. No one sought it. But now a child’s future runs through it. This is precisely the situation the Texas Attorney General’s office inherited in the matter of Adam Hoffman, a Waco lawyer. It is worth dwelling on that starting point, because nearly everything James Talarico now says about this case depends on the reader forgetting how it began.

Two veteran prosecutors took it up. Brenda Cantu brings 29 years of prosecution experience. Dorian Cotlar brings 25 years of criminal law experience and is Board Certified in Criminal Law. Between them they have worked thousands of child sexual-assault cases. These are not political appointees parachuted in to do a favor. They are line prosecutors, the kind of public servants who spend careers in rooms most of us would not enter, doing work most of us could not stomach. When two people with that combined background tell you what happened in their own courtroom, the reasonable response is to listen before you accuse.

So let us listen. The first claim Talarico has put into circulation is that Hoffman received a sweetheart deal. This is the opposite of the truth. The office charged Hoffman with Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Child, which is the most serious felony available to them and carries a mandatory life sentence. You do not reach for the gravest charge on the books when you are trying to do a friend a favor. You reach for it when you intend to put a man away for the rest of his natural life. The charge itself is the refutation of the slander built upon it.

Here a puzzled reader might ask the obvious question. If they charged him so aggressively, why is Hoffman not serving life? The answer is not corruption. The answer is a jury. In June 2025 the prosecution tried a four-day jury trial. The child, by every account from the people who were actually in the room, testified with extraordinary courage, facing down the man who had hurt him. However, under cross examination he admitted that he embellished or exaggerated some of his claims. As a result, the jury could not reach unanimity. It hung by a margin of 7 to 5, with 7 jurors voting to convict and 5 unwilling to do so. This is the inconvenient fact that no amount of campaign rhetoric can dissolve. A criminal conviction in this country requires all 12, not 7. Reasonable jurors, having heard the same evidence, disagreed about whether the state had met the formidable burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that our system rightly demands before it cages a human being for life. That is not a scandal. That is the jury system functioning exactly as the Founders designed it, with all the friction and frustration that design entails.

Now we arrive at the decision Talarico finds so damning, and here precision matters most. After the hung jury, the prosecutors were prepared to retry the case. They said so to the family. But the child, having endured the first trial, made clear that he would not voluntarily take the stand a second time. Consider what a retrial would actually have required. The Sixth Amendment guarantees every defendant the right to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against him. There is no asterisk in that clause exempting children. To retry Hoffman, the state would have had to compel this boy, by subpoena if necessary, to sit again in the same room as his abuser and submit again to hostile cross-examination. The only instrument the office held was force. Force applied to a child who had already spent his formative years enduring the abuse, and who had told the adults responsible for him that he wanted to heal rather than relive.

Pause on the moral structure of that choice, because it is the hinge of the entire matter. The prosecutors faced two paths. The first was to drag a traumatized 10-year-old, now a teenager, back onto the witness stand against his expressed wishes, in pursuit of a conviction that 5 jurors had already declined to render once, with no guarantee of a different result the second time. The second was to secure what could actually be secured without that child’s compelled testimony, namely an admission of guilt to a lesser offense and real jail time for the abuser. They chose the second. They chose the child over the spectacle.

I want to be careful here, because this is where reasonable people of good faith can feel torn. Is it not a defeat that Hoffman pleaded to less than the maximum? In a perfect world, yes. But prosecution does not occur in a perfect world. It occurs in the world of hung juries and reluctant witnesses and constitutional constraints. The relevant comparison is never the conviction we wish we could get. It is the realistic alternatives actually on the table. Had the office insisted on a second trial without its central witness, the most likely outcomes were a dismissal or an acquittal, either of which would have sent Hoffman home a free man with no record of guilt at all. Measured against that, an admission of guilt and time behind bars is not a failure of nerve. It is a floor, deliberately built, beneath a child the system could not in conscience force back into the breach. Sometimes the responsible choice is the one that secures the achievable good rather than gambling it away chasing the perfect one.

This brings us to the most cynical of Talarico’s insinuations, the suggestion that Paxton intervened because he is somehow friendly with Hoffman. The claim collapses on contact with the simplest facts about how a state attorney general’s office operates. That office employs more than 750 lawyers and handles upward of 20,000 cases a year. The Attorney General is not, and could not possibly be, briefed on the individual charging decisions of line prosecutors in the ordinary course of business. He does not micromanage thousands of files. By the prosecutors’ own account, this matter became known to him only when it was turned into a weapon against him. Paxton does not know Hoffman. He has never met him or spoken to him. The friendship is not a discovered fact. It is a manufactured premise, and a campaign has been built atop it.

So what is actually happening here? Strip away the moral posturing and the structure becomes plain. A US Senate candidate has located a genuine human tragedy, the abuse of a child, and recognized in it a serviceable instrument. He has taken a difficult prosecutorial judgment, one made by career professionals with 54 combined years of experience and made expressly to spare a child further harm, and he has recast it as a corrupt bargain. To do so he must talk about this child, publicly and repeatedly, against the express wishes of the child and the explicit plea of the prosecutors who know him. The prosecutors asked one thing of those taking an interest in the case. 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 to that request has been to make the boy a recurring character in a Senate campaign.

Here is the irony that ought to end the conversation. Talarico styles himself the defender of an exploited child. Yet it is his own conduct that re-exploits the child, pulling him back into public view as campaign material every time the story is useful, long after the boy asked to be left alone. The prosecutors used the law to shield him. Talarico uses him as leverage. One of these is the work of protecting a child. The other is the work of using one. They are not the same thing, and no quantity of indignation can make them the same thing.

There is a reason we entrust charging decisions to experienced prosecutors rather than to candidates polishing their talking points. The prosecutor’s duty is to justice, which sometimes looks like a life sentence and sometimes looks like the hard, unglamorous arithmetic of protecting a witness who cannot bear to testify again. The candidate’s incentive is to the next news cycle. When the two collide, as they have here, we should know which one to trust, and it is not the man treating a child’s worst experience as a prop. The public deserves the facts, and the facts do not flatter James Talarico.

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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.