Divorced Republican finds love again with 21-year-old as he launches comeback after nude ‘sex tape’ with male staffer destroyed his career

Former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn, 30, has once again found love as he tries to make a political comeback following a scandal that destroyed his career.

The one-time youngest member of Congress got engaged to Alisya Mata, aged 21, outside of Rome’s Colosseum, and announced the happy news on Instagram over the weekend.

The announcement came almost exactly four years after the Daily Mail exclusively reported that a video showing him getting felt up by a close male friend and staff member was at the center of a complaint calling for an investigation into the Republican, then representing North Carolina.

It claimed that Cawthorne provided thousands of dollars in loans and gifts to his close aide and his scheduler Stephen Smith, 23, with whom he was allegedly in an improper relationship.

Amid the allegations, Cawthorne lost re-election and moved to Florida, from where he has discussed launching a new run for Congress.

But that, too, seemed to be derailed last year, when he was arrested for failing to appear in court over a traffic citation claiming he was driving without a valid license.

It now remains unclear whether or not he is turning over a new leaf or just running the same playbook in a new cycle.

Cawthorne and his new fiancée seem to have been together only a matter of months before deciding to get engaged.

The first photograph in Mata’s curated Instagram highlight named ‘my person’ is dated July 19th of last year.

Separate Instagram posts made this weekend by Cawthorn and Mata referencing their engagement both seemed to indicate a short timeline for a seemingly whirlwind romance. 

‘After our first date, I knew you were the one,’ Mata wrote of Cawthorn.

The groom-to-be wrote that there was ‘no need to date for years on end without getting married and delaying starting a family’ on his post introducing his next bride-to-be to the world.

The former North Carolina congressman moved to Florida after losing his 2022 re-election bid. One GOP operative noted that the speed of his second engagement bore a striking resemblance to his first whirlwind marriage.

Cawthorn is now mounting a comeback bid for the congressional seat being vacated by Byron Donalds, who is running for Florida Governor – and appears keen to shed the bad-boy reputation that dogged his first spell in office.

He has racked up several run-ins with the law, including attempting to carry a gun through a TSA checkpoint in 2022, and a 2025 Florida arrest for failing to appear in court on a charge of driving with a suspended license.

The GOP primary to replace Donalds will be on August 18th, and Cawthorn is in the race with over a dozen candidates.

Cawthorn previously married Cristina Bayardelle in a civil ceremony in December 2020, followed by a more elaborate ceremony in April 2021. Less than a year into their marriage, the two announced that they were getting divorced in December of 2021.

They said they had mutually made the ‘enormously difficult decision’ to divorce after realizing there were ‘irreconcilable differences’ between them. 

Bayardelle also noted in 2021 that their ‘marriage, like every marriage, has had its difficulties. The lifestyle shift into public life has been strenuous, and many aspects of the transition have been unexpected.’

Shortly after arriving on Capitol Hill, Cawthorn, then 26, was hit with allegations of sexual misconduct in college, though he once claimed to have ‘never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life.’

He also claimed to have been invited to orgies and been witness to people doing cocaine – which ruffled GOP leadership’s feathers.

‘All of the sudden you get invited to, ‘Well, hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes. You should come.’ … You realize they are asking you to come to an orgy,’ Cawthorn said while on a podcast in 2022.

In the appearance, he also noted he saw addiction advocates ripping ‘key bumps of cocaine.’

Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy later tore into the young Republican for making unfounded claims damaging to the institution’s credibility.

‘He’s got to turn himself around,’ McCarthy said at the time. ‘This is unacceptable. There’s no evidence to this. That’s not becoming of a congressman. He did not tell the truth.’

As for the cocaine allegations, ‘He thinks he saw maybe a staffer in the parking garage from 100 yards away,’ McCarthy later clarified.

In addition to the cocaine and orgies scandal, a leaked video showing Cawthorn nude and humping another man went viral during his tenure.

Cawthorn noted in 2022 the video depicted him ‘being crass with a friend, trying to be funny.’