Jerry Falwell Jr. is moving the goal posts after his multiple scandals, and it’s… a lot to digest.
Let’s dive in…
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Background
To catch everyone up who’s been able to avoid this man’s nonsense, Falwell Jr. (the son of the racist televangelist who infamously opposed integrating schools) was the president of Liberty University, the fundamentalist institution his father started. At least, that was the case until recently when he was forced to resign over numerous scandals…
The first was when he was accused of funneling university funds into real estate deals enriching him and his family. The investigation into that scandal led to multiple accusations of the Christian leader — who has spent the past few years hobnobbing with Republican Senators and even visiting the White House during the Donald Trump years — being inappropriate with his staff. Insiders claimed he spoke openly and disgustingly about his sex life and sent nude and risqué photos of his wife to men he knew, including employees. You can read all about that HERE.
Related: Liberty University Allegedly Threatened To Punish Female Students For Reporting Rapes
But the house of cards really came apart after Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen admitted to helping covering up a scandal involving a “pool boy” that Jerry and his wife Becki Falwell were involved with. The story goes that the religious leader was into watching while this 29-year-old hunk had sex with his wife.
The “pool boy”, Giancarlo Granda, actually ran an LGBTQ-friendly hostel in Miami. Granda later came forward spilling the whole story, along with receipts — including recordings of phone calls between them. He said the couple went into business with him, investing nearly $2 million in the hostel, amid the three-way cuckold affair, and he only went public because they had a falling out over money.
Jerry was forced to resign from his position at Liberty University — but maintained his innocence, throwing his wife under the bus instead, admitting she’d had the affair but claiming he didn’t know about it.
OK, now that we’re about caught up…
‘We Had To Put On An Act’
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Jerry and Becki are opening up about the scandal. And dropping bombshells along the way. The first? Oh, just that all this kinky sex stuff isn’t even a scandal really because he’s not even really a Christian. He said:
“Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not.”
THE EFF YOU SAY?!
After his father’s death, the 59-year-old says, he was forced to take up his mantle as the leader of Liberty U:
“There was so much pressure on me to become somebody I wasn’t. I’d wake up each day saying, ‘How am I going to do this?’”
Becki added:
“We had to put on an act.”
So… you were just pretending to be homophobic all this time? Just an act? Telling your followers the only good marriage was between a man and a woman, that homosexuality was a sin, that it was the duty of people to discriminate against LGBT folks, that was just some play-acting y’all were doing while doing whatever you wanted in your bedroom?? How about telling evangelical Christians they should trust Trump?
Honestly, this somehow makes us angrier than if they’d been true believers all this time.
An Affair To Misremember
Telling their side of the affair story, they put on what frankly seems to us like another “act” — this time about a couple where the lonely wife lost her way.
She had gotten married young, she told the magazine, and “didn’t have a college life.” So when the boys on the Liberty University campus started to give her “attention that I’d never gotten before” it set her down a path that led to meeting Giancarlo at the Fontainebleau hotel pool in March 2012:
“I had someone I could talk to. It’s that dopamine rush. All of a sudden this young, handsome fella starts texting you and giving you attention and you’re like, wow, this is kind of nice.”
Unlike the young man’s version, where Jerry watched from the corner while they had sex, the elder couple claim Becki had the affair in secret for eight months before finally coming clean after she felt too guilty.
But doesn’t that timeline mean the Falwells went into business with Granda even after Jerry learned the man was sleeping with his wife? Yep. Jerry claims he still invested $1.8 mil with Granda after it all came out — and that Granda apologized to him:
“He said, ‘I hope you’re okay.’ And I said, ‘I’m dealing with it.’ The only way I could do it was to detach. I let it go on. I’m partly to blame.”
“Partly to blame.” Wow. We mean, the other option would have been to not give hundreds of thousands of dollars to someone you already knew you couldn’t trust, someone who, per the account, had committed the ultimate violation against you, right? Becki even admits the couple “didn’t think we could trust him” as they worried the story of the affair would get out. (After all, the press was starting to put things together — like how much time the president of a Virginia religious university spent in Miami nightclubs.) So why would they get into bed, figuratively, with someone they couldn’t trust?
Becki’s answer to that?
“The idea was, you keep friends close and your enemies closer.”
Not when your enemies are banging your spouse!
BTW, Becki claims the affair ended in 2014 after Granda started seeing someone else. If you’re doing the math, yes, that’s several months after she claims Jerry learned about it. So she told him because she felt guilty — but kept having sex with the guy for months? And after he knew about it, Jerry gave him money and then a recommendation letter for his Georgetown application?
Yeah, this story doesn’t really add up, does it?
Granda doesn’t think so either. When asked by Vanity Fair to fact-check this version of events, he didn’t go into detail at this time, instead responding:
“Ha ha, oh man it’s an alternate reality in that email list… I can assure you that everything will be answered in the book and Hulu documentary.”
Oh man, can’t wait for that!
A New Accusation
The most incendiary claim in the interview comes after the affair was over.
Becki and Jerry invited Granda, his mother, and his sister, to stay with them at their farm in August 2018 as a way, they claim, to say goodbye to the young man after the many delightful years he spent in their life as a part-time homewrecker and business associate. Still trying to wrap our heads around that one.
This is where things get disturbing. Becki says she found Giancarlo in her daughter’s empty bedroom because, he told her, the WiFi in the guest house wasn’t working. But then, she says he pushed her onto the bed and tried to have sex with her, something she says hadn’t happened since 2014 — and that she wasn’t keen to start again. But he kept pressuring her:
“He said he wanted to have sex and I said, ‘No, no, no.’”
She says Jerry was not in the corner but down the hall in the shower at the time. She claims when she refused to sleep with Granda again, he sexually assaulted her on her daughter’s bed:
“I kept saying no. I didn’t want to do it. But I was scared to death of him too, because he was still holding everything over me, so we had sex… He left and I went into the room and just cried.”
She says she didn’t report it at the time because it took her time to realize it was assault. That and she was still scared.
Yeah, about that — what does she mean about Granda “holding everything over” her? Just revealing the affair? That her husband already knew about? But to the world?
Well, it wasn’t just that. She was afraid, she says, of revenge porn coming out. She told Vanity Fair she made sex tapes with him.
“I had a big Canon camera. A couple of times I put it on the dresser and Giancarlo agreed to it.”
So the sex tapes were her idea, the camera was hers… but she was afraid he had copies.
The Trump Card
As it turns out, topless photos of Becki did get out once before in 2015… but not from Granda. No, they were ones taken by her husband, before she even had an affair. If you believe the multiple witnesses who say Jerry was sharing them all over town, it’s not actually that surprising. In any case, they called Michael Cohen once again, who worked his magic (mostly threatening people apparently?) to make sure they went away. Cohen wrote in his memoir:
“In good time, I would call in this favor, not for me, but for [Trump], at a crucial moment on his journey to the presidency.”
We have good evidence of the second half of that alleged quid pro quo. In order to become the Republican nominee, you need the Christian right’s stamp of approval, something that was going to be tough for a non-religious reality TV star who’d been an infamous womanizer in the public eye for decades. That was before the worst stuff about Trump came out. But Jerry Falwell Jr. stepped forward and became one of the first to endorse Trump, telling Fox News in December 2015:
“Trump reminds me so much of my father. In my opinion, Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught.”
After the shocking Access Hollywood scandal, in which Trump was heard on a hot mic bragging that he would sexually assault women (“grab ’em by the p***y”) and get away with it, Jerry came to the rescue, saying:
“We’re never going to have a perfect candidate unless Jesus Christ is on the ballot.”
He continued to defend him after Charlottesville and beyond.
Innerestingly, Jerry now blames his own downfall on his close association with Trump, saying the press was out for blood:
“Trump was the reason they came after me as hard as they did.”
Right. We guess it was all just some “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and not the fact that you’re all a bunch of cheaters and liars who keep getting caught.
You can read the rest of the unbelievable — and we really mean that — interview HERE.
[Image via ABC News/WSLS/YouTube/Jerry Falwell Jr/Instagram.]
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