Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Shutterstock
In another week or so, the world will have a better understanding of the special relationship between Jerry and Becki Falwell—first couple of the modern evangelical movement, former powerhouses, and stewards of Liberty University (the largest evangelical university in the country), whose unprecedented endorsement probably guaranteed Donald Trump the presidency—and Giancarlo Granda, the hapless “pool boy” who spent his twenties in a misbegotten affair with them. (That is, if it’s fair to saddle a young man of 32 with a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Real Estate Finance and Development with such an unfortunate epithet.) That’s because Giancarlo’s book, of which this writer is the co-author, dropped on October 25 (Off the Deep End, by Giancarlo Granda and Mark Ebner, Harper Collins Books). On November 1, God Forbid, Billy Corben’s independent but overlapping documentary on the Falwells and their affair to remember, will premiere on Hulu.
The Falwells’ sexual peccadillos blew up into such a media frenzy in part because of the puritanical views of the evangelical community, which they quite intentionally came to embody, and the breathtaking hypocrisy of living their lives on such extreme parallel tracks, and amid such cognitive dissonance.
As Giancarlo writes in the book, “The sex was never the issue; it was the hypocrisy and the abuse of power. Because they helm an institution whose business it is to shame others for what they do in private, and to hold the threat of shame over them to demand fealty and subservience.”