Reality TV Actor Cites Sources with Claim
Talarico in Treatment for Mental Breakdown
Texas General Election Polls
General Election Rankings
Capitol Inside
October 9, 2026
Television personality Spencer Pratt claimed on Friday that Texas Democrat James Talarico had been admitted to a psychiatric facility after suffering a mental breakdown that has sidelined his U.S. Senate campaign for the critical final weeks before the midterm election.
Pratt - an ardent President Donald Trump supporter who lost a race for Los Angeles mayor this year - revealed that he'd learned sources he declined to identify that Talarico had been hiding out for nearly two weeks in a sanitorium for mental patients. Pratt, who married The Hills co-star Heidi Montag and became the male half of the reality TV couple known as Speidi, was seizing on a rumor that Texas Senate hopeful Ken Paxton's camp cooked up and spread throughout the week.
Pratt declined to offer any evidence to support the accusations about the Democrat's mental condition or express concern that the Paxton campaign might be playing him in an attempt to get the baseless claims on Talarico out to the voting public amid the fear of a backlash if the Texas attorney general lodged them publicly himself.
"My sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility," Pratt said in a post on X. "His campaign has stopped actively planning events in the vital homestretch of the campaign."
Pratt did not mention that Talarico appeared eager to set a time and place for a debate that Trump said Paxton was willing and ready to attend after refusing to face off with the Democrat on a stage in a public setting until now. Trump raised the specter at a rally in San Antonio on Wednesday night that something was wrong with Talarico and demanded that he show up for a debate if he isn't mentally incapacitated like Pratt and the Paxton camp want the voters in Texas to believe.
Pratt made some claims as a mayoral candidate that proved to be untrue. Pratt, as an example, vowed that he would move away from LA if he lost the local race. But Pratt said after the defeat that he had no plans to leave the City of Angels like he'd promised to do as a candidate.
Pratt also declined to point out that Talarico says he came down with the flu and decided to take off from the campaign trail until he was no longer contagious. The flu has been spreading like wildfire in the Texas cities where political candidates are the most likely to catch or to spread the illness - especially those who've held more rallies and other public events in the past year than any candidate in the Lone Star State ever had before him.
But Paxton and his allies are grasping on the possibility that something serious could be wrong with the Democrat as their last real hope for derailing Talarico as the consensus favorite in the Texas Senate race for the past three months in the polls and the prediction market forecasts.
Paxton, Pratt and Trump would be destined for substantial embarrassment, however, if Talarico is back on the campaign trail in no time and pressing the AG for a time and place to debate. But Paxton knows how it feels when people keep asking where he is like he and the president have been doing in the case of the Democratic Senate nominee the past few days while Talarico recovers from the flu.
Paxton seized the lead in the polls for the first time in June after defeating veteran Senator John Cornyn in a primary runoff election in the spring. But Paxton put his campaign on hold during a peak week for campaign so he could go on a trip to Europe where he spent the Fourth of July in London with a girlfriend. The AG has been trailing Talarico in almost every poll that has been taken on the Senate race since Paxton returned from the trip across the ocean to resume his campaign.
Paxton has been missing in action at every debate that was scheduled for the Senate race up to now. But it will be a much bigger story now if he continues to dodge public confrontations with Talarico as a result of Trump's comments in the Alamo City this week on the need for a debate.
more to come ...
| 
