Texas Rep. Drops Reelection Bid After 'ISIS Bride' Ex-Lover Gets Tired Of Seeing His Face On Campaign Billboards & Outs Affair

Kate3/04/2022 8:40 PM

Politician cheating on their spouse? Boring, expected.

Politician cheating on their spouse with a woman who newspapers once referred to as "The First Lady Of ISIS"? Okay, you have my attention.

Giphy Images.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Rep. Van Taylor apologized Wednesday for an affair with an ex-jihadist dubbed the “ISIS bride” by British tabloids and abruptly dropped his bid for a third term, conceding the GOP runoff to rival Keith Self, a former Collin County judge.
“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,” he said in an email to supporters.
The infidelity surfaced just before Tuesday’s primary with help from a third candidate, Suzanne Harp.
A Plano resident named Tania Joya — widow of the most infamous American to join the Islamic State — contacted Harp last Thursday, hoping she would confront Taylor privately and persuade him to drop out and resign from Congress.

Obviously a quiet, under-the-rug reckoning didn't happen.

Instead Harp, who probably felt like she'd just won the info lottery, got reporters involved. (There's much more political messiness to this but that's another story.) Thus, two days before the primary Joya's interview about the affair dropped & went viral, complete with receipts showing sexts & the $5K in apparent hush money he paid her.

I'm no politician, but I'm gonna go out on a limb & say that if you're hooking up with the ex-wife of a prominent (though now dead) American jihadist who helped ISIS declare a caliphate, you're gonna need to cough up more than $5K. If that was me I wouldn't be able to get my paranoid anxiety under control unless I'd doled out at least $10K and several Whataburger gift cards.

Apparently they'd met while she was working to help de-radicalize other former extremists and the on-again/off-again affair lasted about seven months before it crashed & burned. I'm summarizing here, but she essentially told The Post he was a two-faced womanizer who made her believe they'd be married someday but kept backing out 'because of his daughters'.

The excuse irked Joya, she said.
“If it’s just about your child, well guess what, divorce is pretty normal today. We’re not living in the 18th century. But he wouldn’t because he was afraid of his reputation as a Republican conservative. He didn’t want people to say that his marriage wasn’t perfect,” she said.

Joya was obviously angry with the whole relationship, felt he took advantage of her and had even alerted Taylor's wife that past November, but what was the breaking point that compelled her to go to Taylor's opponent Harp in the first place? Having to see his dang face everywhere she went day after day…

Joya said she didn’t intend to inject herself into the election and didn’t even realize the primary was five days away when she contacted Harp. She was just annoyed at having to see her ex-lover’s face on billboards as she drove around Plano.
“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,” Joya told The News.

Generally I lament no one for getting called out for being a shady cheater, and he sure does sound like one… But the blackmailing on that end feels pretty gross as well. A nasty situation all around.

The final insult to injury in this tangled web? Taylor was the representative for Joya's own ex husband, Craig Burma, who she was still married to at the time.

“What really ticked me off is that he is my congressman,” he told The Post. “I live in the 3rd District, and it’s insane to me that it’s enough for him to just give up his bid for re-election and that’s somehow enough.”