Falwell's Rise and Fall

Falwell and friend at Liberty University commencement, 2017.

The putrid truth comes out:  Vanity Fair has just published an in-depth interview with Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his wife, whose scandalous fall from grace was headline news a couple of years ago.  In it, the former Liberty University president admits candidly that he was not "a religious person" but certainly enjoyed the power and prestige that came with pretending to be one.  Of course, this is an old story among wealthy American evangelists.  Excerpt:

On August 24, 2020, Falwell resigned from Liberty in the wake of a sensational tabloid scandal that could have been dreamed up in the writers’ room of The Righteous Gemstones. A former Miami pool boy named Giancarlo Granda claimed he had a nearly seven-year affair with Falwell’s wife, Becki—and that Falwell often liked to watch them have sex. Granda went on a national media tour—he gave interviews to ABC News, CNN, Reuters, Politico, and The Washington Post—and said the Falwells began “grooming” him when he was 20 and bought his silence with luxury vacations, rides on Liberty’s private jet, and an ownership stake managing a Miami Beach hostel. To bolster his claims, Granda released screenshots of Facetime calls and text conversations with Becki (“I’m not wearing any panties,” she allegedly wrote Granda in one message). Falwell released a statement that acknowledged Becki and Granda’s relationship, but he vehemently denied watching the trysts. Instead, Falwell said he was the real victim of a “Fatal Attraction–type” extortion plot after Granda demanded $2 million to keep the affair secret.

Viewed in hindsight, the scandal was the combustion of a self-immolating fire that Falwell had been stoking for months, if not years. Liberty had spent the better part of 2020 lurching from one PR crisis to the next brought on by Falwell’s boorish and reckless behavior, his race baiting, COVID-19 denials, and slavish devotion to Donald Trump. Two days after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Falwell tweeted a picture of a COVID mask that showed a man in blackface posing with a man in a KKK hood. In early August 2020, Falwell posted a photo on Instagram of himself aboard a yacht with his pants unzipped, a drink in one hand, and his other arm wrapped around a pregnant Liberty employee with her belly exposed. The controversies turned Falwell into an avatar of the rank hypocrisy, know-nothingism, and toxic masculinity that explained why 81 percent of white evangelical Christians voted in 2016 for Trump, a thrice-married reality TV star who literally boasted of grabbing women by the pussy.

Read the full interview here.  Falwell and his wife are very candid about their mistakes and misdeeds - but it seems to me that the one thing lacking is any sense of remorse.  The multi-millionaires, having plied a lucrative racket of misleading the gullible for years, are now living in very comfortable retirement on their scenic estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It is not stated whether there is a pool on the property or not.

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