Jerry Falwell, Becki Falwell and the Story of the Lucky Young Men Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Jerry Falwell, Becki Falwell and the Story of the Lucky Young Men

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

We live in an age of plutocracy where money and extortion are the hidden ligaments of power. I don’t know whether you’ve read the jarring Politico article on Jerry Falwell Jr, who runs the family’s Christianity business in Lynchburg, Virginia. The focus of the story is that Falwell Jr appears to run the operation not as a religious organization or university so much as a real estate investment vehicle. It appears to be a festival of self-dealing, setting various cronies up in their own businesses which stream money back to the family and using the whole operation as what amounts to a real estate investment private equity firm. Since most of the operation is at least nominally a nonprofit this is a major problem. Whatever we may think of the founding patriarch, Jerry Sr., at least according to the insider sources in the article, he ran the operation as one mainly dedicated to advancing his hyper-traditionalist vision of Christianity, in both the spiritual and political realms.

Jerry and his wife Becki seem to have a pattern of striking up intimate relationships with younger, extremely fit men; nude or provocative pics of Becki get into the mix somehow and then suddenly the younger guy is set up with his own business courtesy of a few million from the Falwells or Liberty University.

But the really wild stuff is oddly buried deep down in the Politico piece. Liberty University prohibits dancing and drinking. Jerry Jr appears to operate by a different set of rules. One of the many anecdotes in the story is one in which Jerry and his son Trey are off clubbing in a Miami night spot and get photographed by some society website. Jerry brings in his cyber fixer from Liberty to make the pictures disappear. This is the same cyber-fixer who Michael Cohen hired to fix a series of online polls for Donald Trump back in 2015. How he’d do that since the cyber-fixer works for Liberty University?

Well, he has a private consulting business on the side. He’s also now been promoted to the top at Liberty.

Jerry’s adventurous sexual lifestyle appears to be an open secret among Liberty University executives because he won’t shut up about it.

He’s “very, very vocal” about his “sex life”, one Liberty official told Politico, a claim backed up by multiple Liberty insiders. Another former top Liberty official described a car ride in which “all [Jerry Jr] wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort.”

Provocative or nude photos of Becki Falwell also seem to be an open secret among top Liberty executives and even present in many inboxes.

Benjamin Crosswhite, Bigassfans.com

One story is of Jerry accidentally texting a photo of Becki in some sort of French Maid get-up to a bunch of work colleagues. Now, couples can and do share photos of themselves. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Texting accidents do happen. But what’s striking here is the backstory. Jerry was trying to send the photo to a guy named Ben Crosswhite, Becki’s and Jerry’s personal trainer.

You probably already know about Giancarlo Grande, the pool attendant who struck up a relationship with the Falwells after they stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. The three vacationed together at secluded resorts and Giancarlo eventually got set up in his own business running a gay-friendly but divey hostel in Miami. It’s in relation to the Giancarlo story that the nude photos we’d already heard about come into the story. Those are the ones Michael Cohen was brought to help with.

Giancarlo Granda and Jerry Falwell Jr at the Cheeca Lodge in Islamorada, Florida

Keeping all this straight?

Well, that’s Giancarlo. Then there’s Ben Crosswhite. Ben is the physical trainer for both Falwells. Somewhat in the manner of Giancarlo, by dint of being the trainer for the Falwells, Ben got set up with his own physical training studio and gym business.

In any case, Jerry was sending the pictures of Becki in the French Maid costume to Ben “as a ‘thank you’ for helping his wife achieve her fitness goals,” according to Politico. But he accidentally texted them to his Liberty University colleagues and not Crosswhite. The Politico article describes how Crosswhite came to run the Crosswhite Fitness facility first as the Falwells private trainer and then by a whole Liberty University facility that was sold to him by Liberty in a sweetheart deal that no one at Liberty could make sense of.

In any case, given the Falwells’ role as staunch public advocates of gender and sexual traditionalism, this story is full of hypocrisy and a veritable overdose of schadenfreude. Where it becomes more than that is in piecing together Falwell’s relationship with Trump and his surprise endorsement of Trump at a critical moment in the 2016 primary cycle.

In 2019, support for President Trump is virtually an article of faith for white evangelicals. Maybe not quite up there with justification by faith but close. That was not nearly the case in early 2016. Indeed, Ted Cruz’s campaign reportedly thought they had lined up the endorsement until Falwell announced his support for Trump. Michael Cohen apparently brokered that endorsement. Cohen also had some role – still not fully explained – in making or trying to make some of the Becki Falwell nude pics disappear. When he wanted to fix some online polls for Trump in the lead up to his presidential campaign, Cohen hired the Falwell fixer who made the the Jerry clubbing pictures disappear.

I don’t know just what the Falwells’ relationships with these young men entails apart from being highly lucrative for the young men. This part remains a genuine mystery to me. I’m not being coy. I’m pretty confident that whatever it is is not consistent with sexual propriety as defined by Liberty University. But just what’s going on and who’s doing what isn’t clear. What is pretty much a dead certainty to me is that somehow the endorsement, Michael Cohen and the nude pics and all the lucky young men fit together. Remember, Cohen is a fixer. Quite specifically, one of his main jobs for Trump was cleaning up and covering up sexual assignations. Also, did I mention? How on earth did Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Michael Cohen cross paths in the first place?

Something is going on here. All the reporters on the story seems to get the outlines of it at least. Someone at some point will get the whole thing.

SHAREVISIT WEBSITE