Did Van Taylor REALLY have affair with an ISIS bride? GOP Rep rocked by Tania Joya scandal
Texas Republican representative Van Taylor dropped his bid for re-election, after apologizing for a nine-month affair with a former "ISIS bride". Taylor, who is married to Anne Coolidge, also shares three children with her. On Wednesday, March 2, he admitted his relationship with former Jihadist Tania Joya, and withdrew himself from the Congressional re-election campaign.
In an email to his supporters, Taylor wrote, "Today I am announcing I will not continue my campaign to seek reelection to Congress. About a year ago, I made a horrible mistake that has caused deep hurt and pain among those I love most in this world. I had an affair, it was wrong, and it was the greatest failure of my life."
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He further noted, "I want to apologize for the pain I have caused with my indiscretion, most of all to my wife Anne and our three daughters. For months, Anne and I have been working to repair the scars left by my actions."
Taylor's affair with Joya created a scandal after it was exposed by some conservative news outlets. He currently holds the position of GOP Rep from Texas' 3rd Congressional District, but he failed to secure the 50-per cent plus threshold for victory in Texas' GOP Primary. He was thus pitted to contest former Collin County Judge Keith Self for the position before he quit his re-election bid.
Meanwhile, Tania Joya happens to be a Londoner, who was born to a Muslim Bangladeshi family. She swayed towards radicalism during the 9/11 attack and opted for Jihadist ideology. She later married an American Muslim convert named John Georgelas aka Yahya al-Bahrumi in 2004, and had three kids with him.
In 2013, Georgelas decided to join ISIS and forcefully took Joya and their three children to the Jihadist terror organization in Syria. However, unable to survive in the ISIS camps, Joya planned to escape within just three weeks. She managed to report her husband to the US authorities and fled to the United States.
Since then, she has been a resident of Plano, Texas, which also happens to be the native state of her Jihadist husband Georgelas. Presently, she works for a rehabilitation and reprogramming initiative for those who had been brainwashed by radical ideologies.
In fact, it was her work that brought her closer to Van Taylor, with whom, she had an affair from October 2020 to June 2021. More shockingly, it was Joya herself who divulged their secret affair to Taylor's competitor GOP Rep Suzanne Harp. She was allegedly paid over $5,000 hush money by Taylor.
Initially, Joya had hoped that Harp would convince Taylor in secret to drop out of the race and resign from Congress. Joya told The Dallas Morning News, "All I wanted was for Suzanne Harp to just say, "Hey, I know your little scandal with Tania Joya. Would you like to resign before we embarrass you?" But it didn't happen like that."
However, things unfolded in a much different manner in reality. One of Harp's supporters interviewed Joya and published the "exclusive" scandal on the National File's Sunday edition. Harp described Taylor's affair with Joya as "shocking ... disturbing and unbecoming of a sitting U.S. Representative," adding that it would be "dangerous to have compromised and corrupt representation in Washington."