Jerry Falwell Jr. officially resigned as president of Liberty University on Tuesday, following a sex scandal involving an affair between his wife, Becki, and Giancarlo Granda, a man who’d been working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach when the Falwells vacationed there in 2012. In 2018, BuzzFeed News reported that after meeting Granda as a 21-year-old, the couple flew him around on a private jet and helped him open a Miami Beach youth hostel.
While Falwell confirmed the affair in a statement to the Washington Examiner on Sunday, some of the details remain in dispute, and Granda has denied Falwell’s claim that he was extorting the couple by threatening to go public with the relationship.
“Becki and I developed an intimate relationship, and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,” Granda told Reuters this week. He showed the outlet screenshots of what he said was a FaceTime conversation he had with the Falwells last year, where Becki was naked and Jerry looked on from behind a door.
“Whether it was immaturity, naïveté, instability, or a combination thereof, it was this ‘mindset’ that the Falwells likely detected in deciding that I was the ideal target for their sexual escapades,” Granda also said. In a statement on Tuesday, he called Falwell a “predator” and said Falwell had sent him a photo of a “female Liberty University student exposing herself at their farm.”
The Falwells have denied that Jerry was involved in the affair. But the news was enough to finally lead him to step down—after a few false starts and conflicting reports—amid a growing list of controversies surrounding him. And enough, apparently, to prompt him to go on something of a press offensive. On Tuesday, in confirming his resignation to the Washington Post, Falwell was sure to note that he’d leave with a $10.5 million severance package.
The agreement, according to the Post, is possible in part because Falwell is stepping down without admitting to wrongdoing or being formally accused of any.
“The board was gracious not to challenge that,” Falwell told the paper.
Falwell also said he was resigning partly because he didn’t want his wife’s actions to embarrass Liberty—but partly, too, because he was bored and wanted to do something else.
An anonymous source whom the Wall Street Journal described as close to Falwell gave the paper the same $10.5 million figure.
Falwell told the Journal he didn’t need to sue to get the money. “I didn’t break any rules—I get my compensation,” he said.
Meanwhile, some Liberty students and alumni have registered their own reactions to the resignation. “The president of a university not abiding by his own standards, in terms of bars and alcohol and sexuality—all those stories, that tipped me off,” Eli Best, a Liberty junior, told the New York Times. “It was like a flashing sign in our faces.” Best’s brother Calum cofounded Save71, an alumni group that pushed for Falwell to leave.
As for the severance Falwell seemed to proudly tout, Dustin Wahl, another Save71 founder, told the Post, “If they’re going to bow down and let this happen, it’s going to be an obvious statement that they care less about the interests of the university than Falwell.
“It might be true that for whatever legal reason he’s owed that money,” he added. “If that’s true, that shows the sheer lack of accountability.”
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