God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
"I know Jerry. But I know him as the cuck in the corner of the room."
(Trigger warning for explicit content.)
I will admit that watching a documentary about the greed, hypocrisy, and sexual peccadillos of grifter “Christians” is pure confirmation bias for someone like me. Schadenfreude isn’t the right word for what I feel since I derive no pleasure from the misfortunes of others, although there is a short list of notable exceptions. I suspect “horror” better describes it, although not for the reasons you might think.
I’m not a believer and never was. My family, however, is Catholic on one side and Pentecostal Holy Roller on the other. There was my grandmother, the nun, who married an abusive Irish bootlegger; this guy here, who I appear to be related to since he’s both an Eskelin and a musician—apparently a famous one in Christian contemporary circles—and who looks like everyone else in my family. Oh, and this super-religious dude, who I just found out two minutes ago was dead. He still comes up all over Google. Who knew? Like me, he was a writer and was involved in the publication of over 200 books while also serving as vice-president of the PTL Television Network (you remember televangelist Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker. Sex-crazed munchkins, weepy mascara, Jessica Hahn—it’s all coming back to you now, amirite?)
And then there was my dad.
Dad used to march into pizza parlors, yank out the jukebox, and start preaching to the godless teens. Sure, he underwent a religious apostasy not long after where he moved to Hollywood, grew his hair long, and dropped massive amounts of acid, but on the night he either fell or leapt to his death from a freeway overpass, the man was still begging family members to tell him whether God existed.
His well-intentioned (perhaps) but dysfunctional and scary-religious family messed him up bad. The rats living inside his skull had, with the help of many recreational substances, completely chewed through the wires. The panache with which he vandalized himself … no way he was ever coming back from that.
But make no mistake. My dad may have died from traumatic bodily injury, but it was religion that killed him.
I mention all this in the interests of full disclosure. Why people think and feel the way they do is always more interesting than what they actually think and feel. I’m a non-believer because I have seen firsthand the appalling destruction religion has caused within my own family. In fact, I wrote about it in this Cappuccino, which remains one of the most viral articles in the history of this publication.
So, I’m hardly alone in this.
If you are religious, please know I don’t judge or begrudge. It’s none of my business who or what you worship, and I hope we can remain friends. I just want to be very upfront about what I (don’t) believe in so the next part of this article doesn’t come as a rude shock.
Hundreds of thousands of children, mostly boys, have been abused by Catholic priests. 216,000 children in France alone. After a recent investigation, the Southern Baptist leadership in the United States compiled a 205-page database that included more than 700 entries from sexual abuse cases spanning only the years between 2000 and 2019. With religious organizations, there are always scandals, an endless number of them, and most involve sex, minors, or money.
For those of us who are non-believers … well, try to imagine how baffling, frightening, and lemming-like this looks to us.
I’m sure there are good religious folks out there. It’s possible I’m related to many of them. And yet, when a documentary like God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty comes out, we all know how it’s going to end, don’t we? The people at the top, the ones who kept telling everybody else how to live their lives, are forever fleecing parishioners or debauching children or other men’s wives. Then oops, cat out of the bag, and now somebody’s wearing an orange jumpsuit and spearing trash on the side of the road.
God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty didn’t go down exactly that way, but when I distill it for you (spoiler alert), especially the part where Becki Falwell’s hungry hungry vagina inadvertently destroys Roe v. Wade, maybe you’ll think twice before throwing a check into the collection plate.
It started at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami on March 13, 2012. A strapping twenty-year-old pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda made as much as $200-$500 a day there fixing butt-sprung deck chairs and fishing lost jewelry out of the pool. An attractive dark-haired woman about twice his age waved him over. “Let’s meet at my hotel. I hope you don’t mind, but my husband likes to watch.”
Like most young men, Giancarlo was up for a fun naughty adventure, so he met the mysterious woman that night at a Days Inn. She was down in the lobby drinking Scotch, waiting for him. “My husband’s upstairs,” she said. “But don’t worry, he won’t be any trouble.” Sure enough, while Giancarlo and the missus got busy, all her husband did was take off his pants and enthusiastically pleasure himself.
The woman sent him text messages, some including family photos, which Giancarlo showed to his sister. She instantly recognized their faces. “That’s Jerry and Becki Falwell!” she gasped. “You just slept with the wife of the president of Liberty University.” Only then did it all start to make sense to Giancarlo—the money, the power. Giancarlo felt guilty, but not guilty enough to stop.
Three weeks in, and Becki was already telling him she loved him. Jerry promised to make him a rich man. Their rendezvous continued, first Giancarlo, and then when Becki had exhausted him, Falwell.
Liberty University was the Falwell family empire, a nearly all-white Christian university with a strict code of conduct for students and staff: no premarital sex, no drinking, no smoking. “Training soldiers for Christ,” is how Junior’s dad, Jerry Falwell, Sr. put it, and this was the same guy who went on television and insisted gays were responsible for 911. He pulled in $100 million a year.
Fittingly, Giancarlo recruited a friend named Jesus “Tito” Fernandez to help him locate a property to buy. Stop and marvel at the irony, but Jesus and his father were shameless grifters, only Giancarlo didn’t know that. They settled on the Miami Hostel for 4.5 million with Becki owning 50.1%, Falwell 25%, and Giancarlo the rest.
The Falwells introduced Giancarlo to their three kids, Trey, Wesley, and Carolyn. They took him to meet Trump, a personal idol, who had just announced his candidacy for president. Giancarlo, who was starting to understand just how duplicitous and hypocritical the Falwells were, got the sense that as long as Becki and Jerry brought in money, the university was obligated to leave them alone to do whatever they wanted to do.
Most of what they wanted to do was get it on with Giancarlo.
But a grifter’s gotta grifter, which was why Jesus threatened to expose the Falwells unless they gave him money. Knowing that Trump craved Jerry’s endorsement, Becki and Jerry reached out to his fixer, Michael Cohen, hoping he could make the matter go away. Only then did Jerry give his public support to Donald Trump, which meant that other mega-ministries thought it safe to follow. Their shared goal, of course, was banning abortion.
Without the evangelical and Pentecostal vote, Trump never would have never won in 2016. Falwell delivered for Trump, and after he did, Trump delivered for him. By stacking the court, he gave the religious right their greatest wish, which was the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, all because Becki Falwell liked hot young studs and husband Jerry was, as Giancarlo put it, “the cuck in the corner of the room.”
Becki had apparently done the same to one of her own son’s bandmates, who came forward to say that she’d “performed a sex act” on him in bed. The point made in this documentary is well taken: “Christian extremists are more dangerous than any Taliban because they live right next door to you.”
Giancarlo eventually went public because he had to. By then, the affair had been going on for seven years, and he was old enough to know he was being played.
After Liberty University fired Jerry Falwell, Jr., he confessed to having never actually been religious. “Nothing in history has done more to turn people away from Christianity than organized religion,” he said. “The religious elite has got this idea that somehow their sins aren’t as bad as everyone else’s.”
You’re going to want to watch God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty. Not for the titillation, but for the irony. We’re all paying the price for what Becki Falwell did.
Here’s my suggestion. The next time you see a collection plate at church—run.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this latest Christian scandal. Be sure to chime in below.
This all played out so recently that for once I don't have to appeal to the fact that I'm twice as old as Gandalf and half as pretty. What the press refuses to acknowledge (and what the neo-Fascist Christian Dominionists savagely deny) is that there *IS* a liberal Christianity alive and well in this country. Two colleagues of mine from SIUC went on to become ministers (in different but amicable churches.)
I will also point out again, for the many who deny with fundamentalist fervor the manifest fact that the American Civil Rights movement emerged from, and was driven by the churches. Secularists participated, but only on the sidelines. The main show -- the philosophy, the argument, the faith -- came from the churches. For some reason folks don't like to recall that it was the *Reverend* Doctor Martin Luther King. (Or that it is the *Reverend* Raphael Warnock who just defended his seat in the US Senate.)
I'll also mention (again) Whitehead's "definition" of religion: Religion is what we do with our solitariness.
So, I've read Jann Wenner's autobiography and now I'm reading Joe Hagan's biography of him. The reason I mention them is that at the time Wenner was starting to chronicle the rock scene and other elements of American culture and politics in the 60s from his perch in San Francisco, your dad was a big player in the "song poem" biz, the locus of which was in LA. And the reason I mention all of that is because there is a book - and a movie based on the book - in this crazy juxtaposition, particularly given your father's religious background and I suppose the insights or personal revelations that must have come to him and that impelled his fall from grace, and ultimately his fall onto that LA expressway. Mainstream religion is one thing, and the religion of American capitalism that places your dad's business and Wenner's on the same thread is another, with both producing people who pluck it to play the tune of the American dream all the way to the bank, and many more who are strangled by it.
Here's your pop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUZfhz4PzhM