Jerry Falwell Jr, who took an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University after photos and videos of the Evangelical Trump-supporting zealot partying on a luxury yacht with men and women in various states of undress spread across social media earlier this month, said in a lengthy statement on Sunday that he has been in a state of depression because his wife had an affair with their pool boy who then tried to extort them.
UPDATE: Pool Boy Says Jerry Falwell Jr. ‘Enjoyed Watching' Me Have Sex with His Wife
The “pool boy” has been previously identified as Giancarlo Granda in news stories about racy photographs of Granda, his wife, and Falwell and their imbroglio.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, reportedly helped evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. get rid of the racy photos according to a recorded conversation obtained by Reuters in May 2019. Soon after Cohen disappeared the photos, Falwell endorsed Trump, just before the Iowa caucuses.
Wrote Falwell in his statement about the “fatal attraction”-like scenario: “During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school. We encouraged him to pursue an education and a career and we were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity. My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.”
“Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved – it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about,” Falwell Jr. added. “After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention.”
“While we tried to distance ourselves from him over time, he unfortunately became increasingly angry and aggressive. Eventually, he began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies,” Falwell Jr. continued. “Even years after the improper relationship had ended, this person continued to be aggressive with Becki and me in a variety of ways. We finally decided that we had to further withdraw completely from him, which resulted in him stepping up his threats to share more outrageous and fabricate claims about us (under the guise of that business entity). He clearly moved forward with this plan through a specific member of the media who has continued to badger us, as well as other members of the media, regarding the false claims about the nature of the relationship based on the individual's misrepresentations. Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public.”
Read the full statement here.
Wrote SiriusXM radio host and author Michelangelo Signorile in early August: “Falwell likes taking photos of his wife in sexually explicit poses and costumes and enjoys showing them to other men — including men with whom the two have developed close relationships. And perhaps Falwell also enjoys having sexual threeways with his wife and other men. Nothing wrong with any of that — unless you're running a university that condemns people who don't lead a monogamous heterosexual lifestyle. … It just seems like too much of a coincidence to many of us that Falwell and his wife met a handsome young pool boy in Miami Beach and then invested in a hostel with him that just happened to be welcoming of non-heterosexual, non-traditional sexual goings-on. Sometimes things are exactly as they appear — or something close to it.”
