Giancarlo Granda - Off the Deep End: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Collapse of an Evangelical Dynasty

You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.

Ezekiel 34:4 (New International Version)

My name is Giancarlo Granda. Unfortunately, I am better known as the pool boy, the one who embarked on an ill-considered affair with Becki Falwell, wife of Jerry Falwell Jr., the oldest son and namesake of the late founder of the Moral Majority, and the heir to his evangelical dynasty. I was twenty when it started, working at the fabled Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, and I had never had a steady girlfriend.

That momentary lapse in judgment on a sunny day in March 2012 has now consumed a third of my thirty-odd years, or roughly my entire adult life. Moreover, it lit a long and winding fuse that has seen Falwell forced to resign as president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, one of the largest evangelical universities in the world, a legacy position he inherited upon his fathers death. Pending an independent audit, it may further expose any number of questionable financial dealings, real estate transactions, secret agreements, and instances of crony capitalism masterminded by Falwell over the course of his decade-and-a-half tenure. Along the way, I caught wind of others like me, who had stumbled into their web and were still buzzing around its edges. Except that unlike me, they didnt wind up a national punch line.

More importantly, my transgression has managed to shine a light on Liberty University as the private fiefdom of this charmed familyand a whole host of possibly unlawful actions only now coming to lightoverseen by their handpicked board of rank apologists and moral relativists. Nowhere does this disparity between appearances and actions stand in starker relief than in how those private ethics and double standards I witnessed from inside the Falwells bubble, the couples wildly inappropriate and reckless sexual behavior, inflamed by a regal sense of entitlement, have given rise to Libertys privileged, predatory culture, one that eventually would engender an epidemic of sexual violence. That so many among this often naive and sheltered student body were sent there by overprotective parents terrified of the secular world makes it all the more tragic and predictable. Liberty and the worldview it embraced turned out to be a con in so many ways.

Falwell Jr.s 2016 endorsement of Donald J. Trump helped deliver Trump the evangelical vote, securing him both the Republican nomination and the presidency (just as the senior Falwells Moral Majority facilitated the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980). That endorsement was allegedly brokered by Trumps private fixer Michael Cohen (calling in a favor, as he calls it in Disloyal, the book he wrote in prison) after he claimed to have made the details of my affairand the graphic photos that would have made denying it pointlessquietly go away. So my simple youthful indiscretion, which has caused me embarrassment and regretnot to mention a very real fear for my own safetymay also have played a not insignificant role in making a person like Trump president.

My choices ultimately pitched me into a rarefied world of political influence and financial brinksmanship. At one point I was threatened by an armed individual and told, Keep your mouth shut. Exactly the ultimatum Im violating as I write this. Even that epithet pool boy became part of an orchestrated campaign to ridicule me and diminish my standing in the eyes of the media and their scandal-addled audience. I am shackled to the name and the sordid tale it conjuresan albatross around my neck. Forever.

What follows is my storyat least as much of it as I can see from where Im standingand Im grateful for the opportunity to share it. I hope by the end of it, youll see me less as a pool boy and more as a flawed human who is trying to reclaim his identity and his dignity. Perhaps, too, this will serve as a cautionary tale for those of us who fall prey to the powerful and the influential. Either way, it is, above all, the truth.

Miami is Americas fabled Magic City, where the normal high school preoccupations of sex, money, ambition, status, and assimilation are shared by the population at large, and perpetually at a high boil. Home of the newly wed and the nearly dead they say, and I saw those sorts of extremes built into every aspect of the town.

I am the proud son of immigrants: a Cuban father from a semi-prominent middle-class family who fled Havana and the revolution in 1960, whose grandfather (my great-grandfather) was an engineer and later the minister of public works under Carlos Pro Socarrs before the military coup that brought Batista to power. He eventually amassed a fortune in Cuban real estate, all of which was seized by Castro. Like every expatriate he knew, he went to his grave believing he would one day return to Havana and reclaim his empire.

Similarly, my mother emigrated from Mexico City, where her uncle (my godfather) owned a bakery and later his own multi-unit apartment building. In addition, my godmothers husband is an architect and developer of gated communities, and both my sister and I have been interested in real estate development from an early age. My parents met in Miami in 1980, shortly after my mothers arrival, where my father managed a chain of beeper stores, which were extremely popular, this being the era of Miami Vice. My sister was born in 1984, and I came along seven years later. We were close, and remain so today. She currently works in the high-end residential real estate industry.

By the time I reached high school, I had an affinity for economics and its real-world application, excelling in my high school accounting class. My parents both encouraged my interest in real estate, and when we would visit Mexico City, my godfather always went out of his way to walk me through the business. I was also a fan of Donald Trump, then considered a real estate maverick on the strength of the persona he put forth in The Art of the Deal. I believed the hype, was predictably conservative in my politics (being the son of a Cuban exile), and secretly imagined I might one day fulfill my own dream of becoming a real estate mogul.

I grew up middle class in Westchester, a working-class Cuban neighborhood. The Cuban exile community is like any other tribe that has been forced out of its homeland: its descendants are resilient members of a diaspora, always preoccupied with a place that no longer exists, save for the burnished tales handed down over time that evolve as they drift from their original source. Cubans represent over half the population of Miami, and as much as 80 percent of enclaves like Westchester and Hialeah. Conservative politicians can exploit this generational trauma to consolidate power and lock in a reliable voting bloc, so long as they celebrate personal liberty, limited government, and never bend the knee to Castro. This in turn stokes expatriate grievances and can inflate the expat communitys sense of self-worth. Mix that with a genetic disposition toward prodigious energy and self-motivation, and youve got a force to be reckoned with. Cubans in Miami exert an outsize influence in local politics, the construction trades, and real estate in general.

Although I attended Catholic high school, I was never particularly religious, although the trappings were never far away. My mother was the religious one in the family; she eventually became a born-again Christian and went a little off the deep end herselfjoining a storefront evangelical church that was eventually revealed as a racket. And she was a regular viewer of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which includes among its stable of talent Jonathan Falwell, Jerry Jr.s brother and chief pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, founded by his father, and just down the road from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.