PRAISE THE LORD AND PICK OUT A DESIRABLE SEX PARTNER

‘They All Got Careless’: How Falwell Kept His Grip on Liberty Amid Sexual ‘Games,’ Self-Dealing

 

By Maggie Severns, Brandon Ambrosino and Michael Stratford 

Politico

Novembe 1, 2020

When Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki strolled around the Lynchburg, Va., campus of Liberty University, the evangelical school which Falwell led as president, they would play a secret game called “Would you rather.”

The middle-aged couple would point to students, men and women, and imagine what it would be like to have sex with them, according to a former student who said Becki told him about the game.

The former student, a member of a band with the Falwells’ son Trey, has said that Becki initiated oral sex with him while he stayed overnight at the Falwell home, following other attempts to seduce him. She confided to him the details of the game she and her husband would play, and told him multiple times how she and Jerry would take note of students' appearances.

“Her and Jerry would eye people down on campus,” the former student, who was 22 when Becki performed oral sex on him and is now 32, said. “She didn’t go into specifics, but said, ‘Oh, me and Jerry play games all the time, like “Would you rather?” with people on campus.’ I’ll never forget that.”

A close friend and neighbor of the Falwells told POLITICO that Becki confided to her about the relationship with the student. When the friend warned that Jerry would be upset to hear about it, the friend said, Becki told her that the only thing Jerry would be upset about was that he didn’t have a chance to watch her have sex with the student.

The Falwells, in an emailed response to questions, said both the alleged game and the alleged confession to Becki’s friend were “completely false.”

Nonetheless, the suggestion that Jerry fantasized about watching his wife have sex with a student would appear to buttress the story of Giancarlo Granda, who met the Falwells when he was a 20-year-old pool attendant at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel and the Falwells were guests. He said Becki initiated a years-long relationship in which he had sex with her while her husband watched. While the Falwells have acknowledged a relationship between Becki and Granda, they denied that Jerry participated in it.

In a lawsuit filed against Liberty on Oct. 29, Falwell called Granda’s claims “outrageous lies” and asserted that Granda had sought to extort money from him. Falwell blamed Liberty for giving credence to Granda’s assertions.

“When Mr. Falwell and his families became the targets of a malicious smear campaign by anti-evangelical forces, Liberty University not only accepted the salacious and baseless accusations against the Falwells at face value, but directly participated in the defamation,” Falwell’s complaint declared.

Granda, however, told POLITICO that Jerry not only participated in his sexual relationship with Becki but would often “joke about having a crush on certain students.”

The Falwells’ interactions with Granda and other accusers may have been shielded from some of the Liberty community, but multiple former university officials and Falwell associates told POLITICO that Jerry frequently shocked them with risqué comments and, in at least two cases, showed off a photo of himself at the beach with his arms around two topless women. (The Falwells said the story about the photo was “completely false.”) His alleged comments included making open references to women’s appearances, discussing oral sex and offering a gratuitous assessment of his own penis size during his 13-year tenure as head of the evangelical university that his father founded, where sex is forbidden outside of marriage.

Now, following an episode this summer in which Falwell posted a photo of himself with his pants unzipped and arm around his wife’s assistant, Falwell has left his job and withdrawn from public life. Supporters of the university, which boasts it has more than 100,000 students, are left to wonder how to disentangle its reputation from that of the Falwell family, given that the two were synonymous for generations. And some are wondering why it took so long — and until a direct act by Falwell like posting a photo — for the university’s trustees to take any action.

A POLITICO investigation, including interviews with dozens of Liberty officials from Falwell’s time as president, found a university community so committed to the Falwell legacy that even trustees considered it unthinkable to exert power over the son and namesake of the university’s revered founder. Plus, the university employed at least 20 relatives of stakeholders — defined as senior administrators and the 32-member Board of Trustees, according to federal tax disclosures — which gave many leaders an incentive to stay on Falwell’s good side.

“I didn’t think there was proper oversight, or enough governance by the board,” said Glen Thomas, a Liberty alumnus and former board member whose father was a multi-million-dollar donor to the university. “The president, or the CEO, of a nonprofit should be working for the board to fulfill the mission of the nonprofit — not the opposite. I feel like the board was mostly on the sidelines. I call it having accountability with no authority.”

Thomas declined to go into further detail about his time on the board, saying he had signed a nondisclosure agreement. He, his brother and his father all left the board within two years of joining it in 2014.

Meanwhile, Falwell experienced so little oversight that he regularly used the university’s private jet for personal travel, often to Florida; kept five of his immediate family members on the payroll, including his 31-year-old son Trey at a salary of $234,310; sold a university-owned home to Trey; extended a university-backed loan to a family friend; rented university property on favorable terms to his former personal trainer; and used the university’s employees for renovations on his home, for which he repaid $175,000, among many instances when Liberty’s resources benefited the Falwells and their allies.

While Falwell’s personal behavior and self-dealing raised alarms among some Liberty loyalists, including people close to his father, they would leave the university — sometimes in exchange for severance agreements that included non-disparagement clauses — and keep quiet about their misgivings. Like many evangelicals, they had a skepticism about the mainstream media and feared outside retaliation against the university.

“The church has a bad habit of keeping things secret. They want to keep it in house, take care of it in house. And Liberty’s the same way. It wants to suppress things and keep things quiet — and that’s what they did with Jerry,” said Mark Tinsley, a former Dean of the College of General Studies at Liberty University who left in 2017.

No one doubted that Falwell, backed by the power of his last name, exerted more control than his nominal bosses, the trustees.

One of Liberty’s most high-profile supporters, board member Mark DeMoss, whose father had donated $20 million to Liberty for construction of DeMoss Hall, one of the largest buildings on campus, was pushed off the board in 2016 after questioning Falwell’s endorsement of Donald Trump over other Republican contenders for president.

DeMoss had once served as Jerry Falwell Sr.’s chief of staff, and chaired the executive committee of Liberty’s trustees when he was abruptly pushed out of the Liberty fold.

After Falwell surprised much of the evangelical world by choosing the twice-divorced Trump, an infrequent churchgoer, over numerous Republican presidential candidates with strong religious backgrounds and evangelical ties, DeMoss made the rare move of speaking publicly about the decision. He told The Washington Post that Trump’s behavior is “not Christ-like behavior that Liberty has spent 40 years promoting with its students.”

Seven weeks later, during the next meeting of the board’s executive committee, the board’s committee members asked DeMoss to resign as chairman. He opted to resign from the board of trustees soon after.

Over the last year, as questions about Falwell’s behavior began to bubble up in POLITICO and other outlets, Falwell utilized his close relationship with the executive committee to negotiate a deal that would grant him, Falwell said this summer, $10.5 million in severance if he were to leave the university. That alleged deal was unknown to some members of the board until Falwell’s actual resignation, according to two people who discussed the change with board members. Asked about the severance, a Liberty spokesperson said that Falwell will not receive $10.5 million, but is entitled to two years of his $1 million base salary plus “accrued retirement benefits” over 32 years of employment at the university. The amount of Falwell’s severance is now a subject of his lawsuit.

With Falwell gone, those same trustees announced plans for an independent investigation into Falwell’s conduct.

But given the insularity of the Liberty leadership, and its skepticism of outsiders, some with ties to the evangelical movement are already raising concerns.

Boz Tchividjian, a former Liberty law professor who is the grandson of the famed evangelist Billy Graham, has publicly questioned Liberty’s willingness to undertake a full accounting of Falwell’s behavior, warning that “independent investigations” are often conducted by law firms hired by trustees to protect institutions while betraying the victims. Tchividjian, who represents victims of sexual abuse in his law practice, discussed Liberty and the risks of internal investigations in a recent article for the Religion News Service. 

“My experience is that a greater transparency oftentimes points to a more credible process,” Tchividjian told POLITICO. “That seems to be missing here, which is troublesome.”