Reporters spent weeks asking why Ken Paxton wasn't campaigning enough.
While they typed that story, his office was closing down a hospital program that he found mutilated kids.
And he ensured the children's hospital that did it had to pay.
The Settlement Reporters Buried
Ken Paxton's office secured a landmark settlement with Texas Children's Hospital that ends its gender-affirming care procedures for good.
The hospital will pay $10 million and stand up the nation's first detransition clinic by October, funded for five years, to help kids who were pushed into transition and now need to walk it back.
Five doctors involved in the program will be fired and lose their hospital privileges entirely.
Texas banned these procedures on minors back in 2022, but Texas Children's kept finding ways around it until Paxton's investigators caught up with them.
That investigation started in May 2023, more than a year before the whistleblowers who blew it wide open ever came forward.
Whistleblowers Paid a Price the Media Never Covered
Nurse Vanessa Sivadage and Dr. Eithan Haim went to Paxton's office in June 2024 with what they knew.
Sivadage got fired and faced FBI threats for coming forward.
Haim faced four federal felony counts and a potential ten-year prison sentence – for exposing a hospital hiding what it was doing to children.
Those charges only got dropped once Trump's Department of Justice took over and stopped protecting the hospital instead of the whistleblowers.
Paxton's office worked directly with Trump's DOJ to close the case, which is exactly the kind of state-federal cooperation Texas voters sent him to Austin to deliver.
While all of that was happening, the political press corps ran story after story asking where Ken Paxton was.
They wanted to know why he skipped a July Fourth trip to Europe instead of shaking hands at a parade, and Fox News covered him brushing off a bad poll without breaking stride.
James Talarico's campaign and its allies have been pushing that same "missing in action" line for weeks, hoping voters wouldn't notice what Paxton's office was actually doing behind the scenes.
Paxton didn't need a press conference to answer them.
He needed a hospital to fold, and that's exactly what just happened.
This Is the Same Playbook Used On Boston Children's
Texas isn't the only state where a hospital tried to hide what it was doing to kids.
Federal prosecutors hit Boston Children's Hospital with subpoenas over the same kind of gender procedures, and the hospital fought back in court rather than come clean the way Texas Children's ultimately did.
Documents later surfaced showing Boston Children's own public denials about performing these procedures on minors didn't match its internal records.
It takes an attorney general willing to fight for years to force that kind of truth out from behind closed doors.
Paxton did that in Texas while reporters treated his schedule like the real scandal.
A ten-million-dollar settlement, five fired doctors, and a taxpayer-funded clinic to help kids who were failed by the system – that's not a man missing in action.
That's a man doing exactly the job Texans elected him to do, while the people covering the Senate race decided a vacation photo was more newsworthy than the hospital he just brought to heel.
Sources:
- Amy Denton, "Where Is Ken Paxton? Doing His Job.," PJ Media, August 11, 2026.
- "Attorney General Ken Paxton Continues to Deliver Major Wins for the People of Texas," Office of the Texas Attorney General, 2026.
- "Ken Paxton dismisses poll showing Talarico leading Texas Senate race," Fox News, 2026.
- "Boston Children's Hospital says it doesn't perform genital surgeries on minors, but documents complicate story," Fox News, 2026.
