GOP Rep. Van Taylor DROPS bid for reelection after admitting to affair with the ‘ISIS bride’

Married Republican Rep. Van Taylor dropped his bid for reelection on Wednesday after apologizing for having a nine-month affair with a reformed ISIS bride.

‘Today I am announcing I will not continue my campaign to seek reelection to Congress,’ Taylor emailed supporters, according to the Dallas Morning News.

‘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.’

Taylor won just shy of 50 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s GOP primary, days after conservative outlets exposed the story of his affair with Tania Joya over the weekend. He was headed for a runoff against former Collin County judge Keith Self before he abruptly announced he was leaving the race.

A pregnant Joya was taken to Syria by her ex-husband John Georgelas – an American Muslim convert -  in 2013. She escaped with their three children after three weeks, and she now lives in Texas, where she works to reprogram those who’ve been radicalized. 

She once described Georgelas and herself as having been ‘so thirsty for an Islamic state,’ and says she was first radicalized during her time living in London as a teenager.

Married Republican Rep. Van Taylor dropped his bid for reelection Wednesday after apologizing for having a nine-month affair with a so-called ‘ISIS bride’

Tania Joya was born in London to a Muslim Bangladeshi family and became radicalized at the age of 17, after the September 11 terror attacks

Tania Joya’s ex-husband John Georgelas was from Texas, but traveled to Syria with his wife and three children to fight for the Islamic State. Joya went to Syria with him in 2013, but escaped 

Rep. Van Taylor (right) and his wife Anne (left) on their wedding day. The Republican congressman publicly apologized to his wife and three daughters in a statement to supporters Wednesday as he withdrew from the race 

Their affair lasted from October 2020 to June 2021, and saw Taylor – a hardline conservative – send Joya extremely explicit texts which saw him request that she perform multiple sex acts on him. 

Last week, Joya reached out to Suzanne Harp, who was running against Taylor and Self in the Republican primary, hoping the rival would privately tell Taylor she knew of the affair – and push him to drop out of the race and resign from Congress. 

The Dallas Morning News said Joya was annoyed by seeing her ex-lover’s face on billboards around town. 

‘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?”‘ Joya told the paper. ‘But it didn’t happen like that.’  

Instead, Harp sent a supporter to interview Joya, with the story popping up on the National File’s website on Sunday, and Breitbart running an exclusive of it on Monday – one day before the election.  

Taylor allegedly paid Joya $5,000 in hush money. 

‘I needed help. I was like, just help me out because that’s the least – the very least – he could do,’ she told the Dallas Morning News. ‘For him, it was like, “OK, on the condition you don’t tell anyone.” … I didn’t want to tell anybody anything.’ 

Taylor also agreed to buy Joya’s home for $600,000, along with $150,000 for utilities and other expenses, National File reports. 

Taylor, 49, is a former Marine and Iraq War combat veteran who is widely considered to be one of the most conservative members of the Texas delegation, with high marks from the National Rifle Association, Heritage and other conservative groups. 

He has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List for standing up ‘against the pro-abortion agenda of the Biden-Harris administration and Pelosi Democrats.’

The two allegedly met while Joya was working with a program called Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), according to the National File. Taylor took interest in Joya’s story and extended the meeting from 15 to 30 minutes. The two then exchanged cell phone numbers.

Joya says she started the affair when she told Taylor she found him attractive, the National File reports. The two began exchanging messages, with Taylor describing in detail the sex acts he wanted Joya to perform on him.

Taylor, 49, (above on November 4) is a former Marine and Iraq War combat veteran who is widely considered to be one of the most conservative members of the Texas delegation

Tania Joya said she met the GOP congressman through the work she does to rehabilitating jihadists in Plano, Texas 

A 2018 tweet from Rep. Van Taylor says that his wife Anne sent him a letter every day that he served in Iraq 

Joya says Taylor began messaging her nonstop in October 2020, after she admitted that her marriage to her second husband was falling apart and she needed help with her children.

Joya, born in Harrow, London to a Muslim Bangladeshi family, became radicalized at age 17 after the September 11 terror attacks. 

Her family had moved to Barking, east London, where  she encountered schoolgirls who ‘slut-shamed’ her for dressing in Western clothes. Soon, she was wearing the full veil and being told by a friend to celebrate the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. 

By her own admission, she became ‘a hardcore jihadist’. 

Joya said: ‘We believed in jihad but the jihad we were thinking of was very rosy pictured.’ Islam had become ‘the solution to everything.’  

A 19-year-old Joya joined a Muslim matrimonial website and by February 2003 had met John Georgelas, from Plano near Dallas. 

He was the son of Colonel Timothy Georgelas and his wife Martha and had spent part of his childhood in Cambridgeshire. 

‘I want to apologize for the pain I have caused with my indiscretion, most of all to my wife Anne and our three daughters,’ Taylor said Wednesday 

They were married within a month in a sharia ceremony that was made official at Rochdale Register Officer in England in October 2004. 

Joya had the ‘escape’ she craved, moving with her new husband first to an upmarket suburb where she was overawed by the Georgelas family’s four-bedroom, five-bathroom home with a pool.

The couple travelled to England and Syria, initially funded by money from their marriage, then settled in California, where Georgelas got a job as a data technician.

He was caught illegally accessing passwords for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, however, and was sentenced to 34 months in jail. He served his sentence, and Joya stuck by him, and again during three years’ further probation in Texas. 

By 2011, she had given birth to the couple’s third son and they were free to leave. They moved to Cairo where, according to Mr Wood, Georgelas met other jihadists and was a vocal supporter of ‘pre-IS pro-caliphate voices’.

By 2013, Georgelas was determined to go to Syria and in August took his wife, who was five months pregnant, and three sons over the border to the city of Azaz in north-western Syria.

‘John and I were so thirsty for an Islamic state. I was so young and naive, I painted this rosy picture in my mind. I was picturing a utopia,’ she told Texas Monthly. 

They were drawn to Syria because of ‘the prophecies told by Muhammad said that the Messiah, Jesus, was going to return to Damascus with an army of believers, and there would be an apocalyptic showdown.’ 

Joya insists that she was tricked, and in any case did not have a choice because of the control her husband exerted over her – a theme that she says is reflected in the ‘brainwashing’ of Shamima Begum, another British jihadi bride now trapped in Syria after fleeing there aged 15. 

‘He controlled me, he owned me,’ she said. ‘He was like my master and I was his slave. If I disobeyed him, I was disobeying god. Any woman who has been in an abusive relationship would understand.’

Locked at home like a ‘house cat,’ she was repeatedly raped while her husband courted the Islamic militia. ‘I used to cut myself just to keep him away from me, to stop him having sex with me,’ she said.

From her time in Syria, she remembers a place filled with once luxurious abandoned homes, limited food and no electricity.

Tania Joya moved to Plano, Texas after fleeing Syria and her ex-husband who joined ISIS 

She would be heckled for going outside without being fully covered up. ‘Regular Syrian people would be hospitable and friendly, the local Syrians,’ she said. ‘It was the foreign fighters and their wives. They would say, “Mujahideen’s wives to not dress like that”.’

She continued: ‘All I wanted to do was die. I couldn’t kill myself because I had children. I was in such a dark place. John thought it was just me being pathetic and weak.’

After they’d been in Syria for three weeks, Georgelas said, ‘I’m not going back,’ according to the Texas Monthly profile. 

‘I was on my hands and knees, begging him. I was pregnant, just begging him to take us to the airport. He didn’t listen. I told him, “F*** off.” He said, “No, you f*** off.” I said, “Can I? Can I go?” He said, “Yeah, just go.”‘

Georgelas, who was going by the name Yahya al-Bahrumi at this point, packed his family into a van, where they were driven as close to the border as possible. 

So pregnant she was ‘leaking amniotic fluid,’ she says she ran for the border with her three children, the youngest in a pushchair.

In an extraordinary denouement to her ‘jihadi bride’ escape story, Joya says she came under sniper fire and was forced to put her three boys alone on a stranger’s motorbike to a bus station in Turkey. Her husband, she says, did not say goodbye.

‘He never said goodbye to me or the kids,’ she said. ‘I was in utter shock.’

From there, she met a contact arranged by her husband, who got them on a plane to Istanbul. She travelled with the children to London, then to Texas where she moved in with Georgelas’s parents. 

Joya is a mother of four. She told the Dallas Morning News that she had hoped a political rival would convince her ex-lover to drop out of the race and resign from Congress 

Today, she shares custody of the four children with them.

She remained in touch with her husband for several years after she had fled Syria, she says, but said they lost contact in 2015.

IS expert Graeme Wood, author of The Way of Strangers: Encounters with Islamic State, claimed that Joya ‘was no victim’ and had passed up a decade of opportunities to leave her husband John Georgelas.

The picture Joya paints is very different – one of a ‘lonely and isolated’ girl bullied at school who turned to extremism at her lowest ebb. Any radical group could have sucked her in, she said. 

And of the 150 women and girls who have travelled to Syria as ‘jihadi brides’, she is almost unique in publicly abandoning her beliefs – offering some insight into how or if these women can ever be re-integrated into western life. 

Joya says her late ex-husband was the ‘highest-ranking American’ in the Islamic State. 

After three weeks, she reported him to US authorities and fled Syria to the United States.

She’s since lived in Plano, Texas – her now ex-husband’s home state – and works to reprogram those who’ve been radicalized.  

This work, according to the Morning News, is how she was introduced to Taylor. 

‘We were very close,’ she told the Morning News on Monday night.   

Harp called the affair ‘shocking … disturbing and unbecoming of a sitting US Representative’ on election day eve, adding it would be ‘dangerous to have compromised and corrupt representation in Washington.’ 

Taylor, the incumbent, still received 48.7 per cent of the vote with 95 per cent of precincts reporting Wednesday. 

Self got 26.5 per cent and Harp got 20.8 per cent. 

He had, however, been leading in early voting, taking 51.8 per cent of the vote share in a five-way race – which suggested the affair coming out right before election day did do some damage. 

Taylor also didn’t receive an endorsement from former President Donald Trump as he was one of four Texas Republicans who voted in favor of certifying the 2020 presidential election for President Joe Biden. 

‘I want to apologize for the pain I have caused with my indiscretion, most of all to my wife Anne and our three daughters,’ Taylor said in the note to supporters. ‘For months, Anne and I have been working to repair the scars left by my actions.’ 

‘I am unworthy, but eternally thankful for her love and forgiveness,’ the congressman added. 

Tania Joya: British ‘first lady of ISIS’ who abandoned Western life for the Caliphate before renouncing extremism 

Joya is one of five children born to Nural and Jahanara Choudhury who raised their children as Muslims but also encouraged them to embrace a university education and embark on professional careers.

Her birth name is ‘Joya’, but she was always known as Tania. While her moderate Muslim parents were hard-working — her mother ran a catering business while her father moved between various jobs, including bank clerk and accounts assistant — Joya said that as ‘the fourth unwanted daughter’, she felt unloved and wanted to run away.

Her unhappiness at home, she previously claimed, was exacerbated by the racism the family experienced when they were living in Harrow, North-West London, next-door to a halfway house for former prisoners who, she says, smashed their windows and urinated on the roof of the family car. 

After the Choudhurys moved across London to Barking, Joya began studying for A-levels at a new sixth-form college in East London. She had never taken religion seriously, but now she fell under the spell of a group of ultra-conservative students.

She began reading the Koran and wearing a loose robe called a jilbab and a niqab to cover her face even though her family ‘hated it’.

‘I thought I had been living a lie, been ignorant of Islam,’ Joya told Texas Monthly. ‘I started wagging my finger at my family, judging them, calling them insincere Muslims.’

Joya is one of five children born to Nural and Jahanara Choudhury who raised their children as Muslims but also encouraged them to embrace a university education and embark on professional careers

Joya was radicalised in east London and married a jihadi. She went to Syria with him but escaped in 2013. She has now turned her back on islam and lives in Dallas, Texas (pictured in 2018)

The 2001 terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York, when she was 17, only hardened her resolve. Her new friends, she recalls, said the attack was retaliation for persecution of Muslims throughout time. By her own admission, she went on to become ‘really jihadi, hardcore’.

Her extremist views and the conservative clothes she wore led to rows with her parents. ‘For them, it was going backward, and they didn’t know why I wanted to go backward,’ she said in the interview.

It was to escape, she says, that she went on a Muslim matrimonial website in February 2003 looking for a husband. Within a month, she met John Georgelas, youngest son of Colonel Timothy and Martha Georgelas, who had spent part of his childhood in Cambridgeshire when his father was stationed there during the Eighties.

Like Joya, Georgelas had rebelled against his family and their politically conservative, Christian values.

Like Joya, Georgelas had rebelled against his family and their politically conservative, Christian values

Despite his military heritage — his World War II hero grandfather was awarded the Purple Heart and his grandmother worked as a secretary at the Pentagon — he had dropped out of school, become a prolific drug-user and converted to Islam shortly after 9/11 after meeting foreign students near his parents’ home in Plano, Texas.

When he was jailed in the US for three years in 2006 for hacking into the website of a pro-Israel lobbying group, loyal Tania waited for him.

In 2009, she gave birth to a second son, Laith, and two years later the pair relocated to Cairo.

A third son, Hari, was born there on Christmas Day 2011 and for a time, the family seemed to enjoy a comfortable life in the city.

But by 2013, Georgelas was determined to go to Syria. Tania, who was pregnant with their fourth son, was reluctant to take her children into a war zone.

Her relationship with her husband became violent. At one stage, she says, she put a pillow over his head while he slept, but he woke up and forced her off.

‘I didn’t really think I’d kill him,’ she said in the magazine interview. ‘It was more of a cry for help.’

In August that year, they travelled across the border into Syria by bus, setting up home in A’zaz, in the abandoned villa of a Syrian general.

Joya’s stay in Syria lasted only a few weeks. There were shoot-outs on the street. Food was scarce. She and her sons became sick with vomiting bugs. She says she pleaded with Georgelas to let them return to Turkey. Finally, he agreed.

In September 2013, they hired a car and drove to the border, walking through a minefield for the final hour and pushing a buggy with the youngest child in it. Her fourth son was born in January 2014, yet despite the acrimonious way they had parted, he was named after her husband.

This dramatic escape from Islamic State as she was suffering premature contractions and leaking amniotic fluid is, of course, the climax of Tania’s story.

But what followed upon her return to Texas is equally fascinating. In Dallas, she swiftly divorced Georgelas and dropped his surname. Georgelas, who now goes by the name of Yahya al-Bahrumi, is still believed to be in Syria.

With no money of her own, Joya had to move in with her former parents-in-law.

Tania Joya said she met the GOP congressman through the work she does to rehabilitating jihadists in Plano, Texas 

It wasn’t long before she was frequenting the Dallas shopping malls, having her hair done at the salon and learning to shoot at the local gun range. Having abandoned Islam, friends say she describes herself as agnostic or sometimes even atheist.

Having attempted to use marriage as an escape route once before, with such disastrous consequences, she might have been expected to avoid men for a while.

But with four young boys on her hands, she seems to have been keen to replace their father. Speaking during her interview with The Atlantic, she said: ‘I’ve had these children for one reason only and that was so that they could serve God, as Muslims, as mujahideen.

‘And now I didn’t know what to do with them. So I went to the dating website Match. I wrote: “I have four kids. My husband abandoned me to go and become the next Osama Bin Laden.” But I got 1,300 replies.’

She met IT executive Craig Burma within 24 hours of being on the site in June 2015.  

It was Burma, who has three sons of his own, who introduced Joya to ‘Unitarian Universalism’, which has its roots in Christianity but embraces all faiths and offers ‘an open exploration of the divine’.

According to Joya : ‘When I left Islam I was really trying hard to find another religion to replace it. I really missed having a community after Islam. It wasn’t until we started going to this church that I really felt at home in Dallas.’  

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