An X account posted two videos on 20 October, the day after Texas opened early voting, in which a man posing as James Talarico's former student accused the Democratic Senate candidate of sexually assaulting him in 2012. Graphika, Clemson University and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue attribute the videos to Storm-1516, a Russian operation that ran the same fabrication against Tim Walz in 2024, and the real student says the man in them is not him.

A man calling himself Zyon Lewis said in two videos posted on X on 20 October that James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas, sexually assaulted him in 2012 at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, where Talarico taught. Texas had opened early voting the day before, 15 days ahead of the 3 November election. The videos had more than 850,000 views within 24 hours, the threat intelligence company Alethea told the New York Times. Graphika, a firm that tracks influence operations, assessed with high confidence on 21 October that Storm-1516, a Russian operation, made the videos and that they are very likely deepfakes. The real Zyon Lewis told Lead Stories on 21 October: "I've looked at it, and it's not me."

Storm-1516 posted a video in October 2024 of a man posing as a former student of Tim Walz, then the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accusing Walz of sexual abuse, and that video reached almost 5 million views on X within 24 hours. US intelligence officials attributed it to Russia within days. The Talarico videos are the second Russian operation aimed at him this autumn: in September, a network researchers call Matryoshka circulated fake CNN-style television reports about Talarico and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia.

A US official familiar with classified intelligence assessments told the Times that Russia had stepped up its influence operations against the midterms in recent weeks, with most of the content aimed at Democrats in close Senate races. JT Ennis, a spokesman for the Talarico campaign, said Talarico's opponents were "slandering him with AI deepfakes, foreign bots, and conspiracy theories".

The videos

In two face-to-camera clips, the man says that in January 2012, when he was 12, Talarico kissed him on the lips and placed his hand on Talarico's crotch after class. He says Talarico singled him out because other teachers had given up on him as a difficult pupil, Graphika found, and that a "happy birthday" message from Talarico had brought the memory back, according to AFP. "I was sexually assaulted by my language arts teacher James Talarico," the post read.

Talarico taught sixth-grade English and language arts at Rhodes from 2011 to 2013 through Teach For America. The San Antonio Independent School District closed the school earlier in 2026. A San Antonio Police Department spokesperson told AFP the department held no report matching the allegation.

Lead Stories ran both clips through the Hive Moderation detector, which scored them 99.1 and 99.8 per cent likely to be AI-generated. The man's lips move out of step with the audio, his body and the background stay still and his voice is flat and synthetic. AFP ran the audio through Hiya, a voice-cloning detector, which also flagged it as likely AI-generated.

The man's teeth differ from the real Lewis's in photographs, he speaks with an African accent and an on-screen caption spells "behaviour" the British way, NewsGuard found. Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, told AFP that Storm-1516 often uses an actor of West African heritage and covers the actor's face with AI or face-swapping software. "Almost no question this is Storm," he said.

The real Zyon Lewis

The X account's profile picture and its four earlier posts came from the Facebook page of the real Lewis, who attended Rhodes and now lives in Converse, outside San Antonio, AFP found. In 2021 he shared one of Talarico's posts with the comment: "My middle school teacher has come a long way." On 14 February 2026 he wrote that he felt honoured and proud to have been taught by Talarico every time he saw him in a commercial.

Lewis told Lead Stories the videos were "very much AI, very bad AI" and that someone had taken pictures and posts from his Facebook account to make them. Asked whether Talarico had ever abused him, he said: "No, not at all. Not even close." "He was a great teacher. Never messed with me," he said.

On 21 October the fake account posted again: "To people saying I'm AI. You're crazy."

How it spread

X lists the account as created in September with Romania as its signup country, NewsGuard reported. Linvill told Straight Arrow News that 15 marketing bots shared the post immediately, before paid influencers picked it up. The first post had 33,000 views after a day. Three verified X accounts with large followings reposted it 12 hours after it went up, and Alethea and the Clemson hub had seen Storm-1516 use all three before, the Times reported.

Liberal Tear Creator, an account with more than 185,000 followers, and Garbage Human, both of which have shared earlier Storm-1516 videos, posted the clips, Graphika found. Conservative accounts posted them as replies to people who said they had voted for Talarico. SGAnon, an account with 125,400 followers that has spread Storm-1516 material before, posted the videos, deleted them and wrote that its own analysis showed they were "artificially generated". The right-wing host David Nino Rodriguez wrote under the original post: "Let's get you on the show."

"We believe they are paid to do this," Linvill told PolitiFact of the influencers who first shared the claim. "In the same way marketing companies pay influencers to share products, the Russians pay influencers to share lies." Russia hoped to "encourage people to get off the couch and vote for Ken Paxton", he said. Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is Talarico's Republican opponent.

Google's AI Overview, Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot all repeated the accusation as fact when NewsGuard asked them about Lewis and Talarico on 21 October. AI Overview cited an ABC News article from May and a KTAL article from 15 October, and neither mentions the allegation. X suspended the originating account by 22 October, after other accounts had copied the videos.

The September campaign

Fake television reports about Talarico and Ossoff began circulating on social media on 10 September, La Voce di New York reported, alongside videos in which the voices of the actors Alyson Hannigan, Emma Caulfield and Sarah Jessica Parker were cloned to attack Democrats under the hashtag #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. Researchers linked the videos to the Russian networks known as Matryoshka and Operation Overload, which dress fabricated stories in the logos of Western broadcasters. CNN said it had neither produced nor distributed the reports carrying its graphics.

Storm-1516

Clemson's Media Forensics Hub identified Storm-1516 in 2023 and Microsoft gave it its name. Clemson linked it to the Foundation to Battle Injustice, a group Yevgeny Prigozhin founded in 2021. In the weeks before the 2024 election, Clemson and Microsoft tied it to the Walz video, a staged video falsely accusing Kamala Harris of a 2011 hit-and-run and a fake video of ballots for Trump being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Bloomberg identified more than 190 fabricated Storm-1516 stories between August 2023 and March 2026, more than 40 per cent of them aimed at Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Western officials attribute the operation to Unit 29155 of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, which they say paid for its servers and AI tools. John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach County deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016 after being indicted for extortion and wiretapping, is linked to websites that pass Storm-1516 stories off as news; the European Union sanctioned him in December 2025, and he denies a central role.

Before Hungary's April election, Storm-1516 built six websites in two weeks and impersonated Euronews and Sky News with fabricated stories about the opposition leader Péter Magyar, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found. The Talarico video is "one of the few" Storm-1516 campaigns aimed at the US midterms so far, the anonymous research group antibot4navalny wrote.

"The narrative is nearly identical to the one they ran against Walz," Joseph Bodnar, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told AFP. "I'd expect to see more of the same as the election approaches." Linvill told the Times that Storm-1516 had reused its 2024 method and that Russia was expanding its operations before 3 November. "Now that they've started," he said, "there will be other opportunities."

Witkoff in St Petersburg

Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's special envoy, met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on 21 October, the day after the videos appeared. Putin opened the meeting by freeing Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired teacher whom Russian troops seized from his home in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. "You are a humanitarian also, sir," Witkoff told Putin on camera.

The US official told the Times that the intelligence assessments do not specify that Russia seeks to harm one party more than the other. The paper had reported on 16 October that Russia and other governments were working to influence US voters, mostly against Democrats. Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Russia's efforts "same old, same old" and said it was going after politicians who had supported Ukraine "in a bipartisan way".

Earlier attacks on Talarico

On 11 October the conservative influencer Nick Sortor posted a 47-second audio clip that he said proved Talarico had been discharged from the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric clinic in Mason, Ohio. The clinic wrote that Talarico "has never received treatment" there, and Talarico wrote: "I've never even been to Ohio." His campaign said he had been at home in Austin with the flu. Paxton wrote that Talarico "owes Texans answers" about his absence.

Paxton's campaign posted an ad on 8 September in which an AI-generated Talarico reads from a fictional "King James Talarico Bible", with a disclaimer that some of the video was made with AI. A New York Times and Siena College poll published on 3 October put Talarico on 51 per cent to Paxton's 45 among likely voters.

Federal monitoring cut

Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI task force that investigated foreign influence operations against US elections in February 2025. In August 2025 Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced cuts of more than US$700 million a year to her office and changes to its Foreign Malign Influence Center, which Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab said she was ending "in all but name". Intelligence officials said in 2024 that the office notified candidates, political organisations and local election offices of influence operations it could attribute to foreign sources. Graphika, Alethea, NewsGuard, the Clemson hub, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the anonymous Gnida Project, which flagged the videos on 21 October, published the attributions of the Talarico videos.

The law

Federal election law bars a foreign national from making, directly or indirectly, an expenditure or a contribution of money or any other thing of value in connection with a federal, state or local election. The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires anyone acting as an agent of a foreign principal to register with the attorney general within 10 days. In September 2024 the Justice Department charged two employees of RT, the Russian state broadcaster, with funnelling nearly US$10 million to a Tennessee content company whose influencers produced Russia-friendly videos.

Payment and monetisation statements for Liberal Tear Creator, Garbage Human, SGAnon and the three verified accounts Alethea identified would show whether anyone was paid to spread the Talarico videos, as Linvill believes. X's account-creation and login logs for @Zyon_Lewis_5 would show who opened the account and from where. The classified assessments the US official described, or a briefing on them to the House and Senate intelligence committees, would show whether US intelligence agencies have traced the videos to Russia as they traced the Walz video in 2024.

Early voting in Texas runs to 30 October. On 3 November voters choose all 435 members of the House and 35 of the 100 senators, Talarico or Paxton among them.