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Breaking News: Ohio Mental Health Facility Employee Says Talarico Was a Patient!! An employee at an Ohio mental health hospital told two independent journalists on Sunday that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico had recently been discharged from the facility. The journalists, Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher, released a recording of the call. Talarico's campaign has said for almost two weeks that the Democrat was home in Austin with the flu. The facility is the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, near Cincinnati. It provides around-the-clock inpatient mental health treatment. On the recording, Amacher asks whether the facility has anything for James Talarico. After a long pause, a woman who answered the phone says, "It looks like he was just discharged this evening." She then confirms that Amacher has reached the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason. The recording does not identify her by name. Amacher wrote on X that the employee told him Talarico was no longer a patient and had been discharged within the previous 24 to 48 hours. He said his first call failed because he could not give the facility a required verification code. He posted screenshots showing three calls to the center. Talarico campaign spokesman JT Ennis rejected the report on Sunday. "This is a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory," Ennis wrote. He said Talarico spent last week at home in Austin recovering from the flu. The Lindner Center has not made a public statement about Talarico. Another X user later posted his own call to the center, in which staff declined to share any patient information. Sortor and Amacher released the recording after setting a 1 p.m. Eastern deadline on Sunday morning for Talarico to explain where he had been. When the deadline passed with no answer, they posted the audio. Sortor said he spoke with one of his attorneys before publishing to make sure the reporting did not break federal health privacy law. Sortor credited earlier reporting by BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales and Republican strategist Caroline Wren. On Saturday, Wren posted flight-tracking screenshots she said showed a private plane flying from Austin to the small airport in Hamilton, Ohio, about 20 minutes from the Lindner Center. She said the plane then flew back and landed in Austin at 10:24 a.m. on Friday. Talarico appeared that same afternoon at the Austin City Limits music festival. Wren had raised the claim days earlier. In an interview on Real America's Voice, she said she had heard Talarico checked himself into a mental health facility around September 29 or 30. On Friday, former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt posted on X that his own sources placed Talarico in a mental health facility. The campaign answered both claims by repeating that Talarico had the flu. Talarico's last in-person campaign event in Texas was a September 26 news conference in Carrollton. He then traveled to New York City for fundraising events. On September 30, he joined a business forum by video and said he had gone to an urgent care clinic in Dallas, where he was diagnosed with the flu. Over the next week, the campaign canceled several planned appearances, according to Townhall. Those included an October 5 civic engagement symposium in Central Texas and an October 6 grassroots fundraiser in Austin. On October 2, the campaign posted rally footage that Townhall reported had been filmed in February, before Talarico won the Democratic nomination. On October 8, Ennis told CNN that Talarico looked forward to returning to the trail over the weekend after recovering from the flu. The next day, Talarico made an unannounced stop at Austin City Limits, where he shook hands and posed for photos with festivalgoers. He told a New York Times reporter that he had a "nasty case of the flu" and had been "home in bed." The campaign disputed reports that Talarico had been gone for nearly two weeks. A spokesman said his September 30 video call meant the gap was closer to nine days. Republicans turned the absence into a line of attack. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee, led a rally crowd in asking, "Where is James Talarico?" The Paxton campaign also put out a release demanding proof of life from its opponent.