Talarico Email Appears in Fling.com Data Leak Listing ‘Fetish’ and ‘Group Sex’ on Profile
Townhall
Amy Curtis
October 30, 2026
An email address that James Talarico’s attorneys confirmed belonged to and was at one time used by the Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate appears in a database search result associated with the adult dating website Fling.com’s 2011 data breach. A Fling.com account was created with Talarico’s email address just before Talarico began teaching sixth graders.
The result lists the username “mohawk787” and an account creation timestamp of December 26, 2010, at 20:56:49. The profile’s interests field lists “FETISH,” “GROUPSEX,” “SEXUAL RELATIONS,” “ONLINE FLIRTING,” and “OTHER.”
Townhall shared the information described in this article with the Talarico campaign and requested comment Friday morning, and in response, a mere 35 minutes later, received a four-page, detailed letter from legal counsel for Talarico that addressed some, but not all of the information described in this report. You can read the entire response from Talarico’s counsel, including their unsubstantiated claim that the Fling.com account was created by a hacker using Talarico’s email address, HERE.
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The Fling.com database record lists the email address as “validated,” marked with a “Y” for yes. According to the database structure published by cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt, the default setting was “N” for no. This means the email address was marked as verified rather than left at its default setting.
The record also shares an IP address with a separate database leak involving an email address associated with Talarico’s sister used in association with an account at a company called Neopets. An IP address can identify the internet connection used to establish the user account, which could indicate that the accounts reflected in the Fling.com and the Neopets data breaches originated from the same internet connection.
The same Talarico email address appears in the displayed Fling, Myspace, and Zynga records, connecting the database entries.
The commercial people-search report supplies the association with Talarico’s name. A page headed “Jimmy D Talarico” lists the same address. The domain name of the email account was commonplace for Austin, Texas, in 2010.
An IP-address search shown in another supplied screenshot from the database returns both the Fling record and a Neopets record bearing a different email address. Their displayed IP addresses match, and the search interface places the physical location of that IP address in Austin, Texas.
That match could indicate that the Fling account created using Talarico’s email address was created using the same network connection or computer used to create the Neopets account associated with an email used by Talarico’s sister. That is because the Texas-based IP address associated with James Talarico’s Fling.com account appears in another data breach involving Neopets. There, an email address associated with James’ sister, Madeline Talarico, was linked to the same IP address.
A shared or reassigned IP address can appear in records belonging to different users, but having an email address associated with James Talarico and another with Madeline Talarico with the same IP address may also indicate that both email accounts were created and/or accessed from the same location.
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Have I Been Pwned dates the Fling breach to March 2011 and says it was added to the service on May 28, 2016. Those dates concern the breach and its addition to the service, separately from the December 2010 account creation timestamp displayed in this record.
In a May 7, 2016 post, Hunt described examining Fling’s data structure and obtaining confirmations from affected subscribers and the site’s domain registrant. His work supports the authenticity of the breach. In their response to Townhall’s request for comment, Talarico’s attorneys did not dispute that the Fling.com data breach occurred or that the publicly available data from those breaches is not authentic.
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If the Fling.com account was created by Talarico, it would not be the first time he has been associated with adult content. Last November, Axios confirmed that Talarico follows porn stars and escorts on his personal Instagram account, noting that Talarico liked separate photos of an Austin-based Instagram account holder who has a page on EscortBook.com. The Talarico campaign said at the time that “James has never subscribed to OnlyFans or an escort service.”
But what we did know at that time was that in a 2019 interview, Talarico said he tried to keep his Instagram account limited to his personal friends. At roughly the 4:28 mark, host Trey Blocker asked, “What is the go-to platform for you? Is it Instagram, Twitter, Facebook?”
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Read more here.