Giancarlo Granda was just a 20-year-old pool boy at Miami’s Fontainebleau hotel when Jerry Falwell Jr.’s wife showed a sudden interest in him, allegedly asking him to join her in her hotel room—where her husband, the prominent evangelical leader, wanted to watch.
Granda, who described being visually uneasy at the unexpected request, wrote that Becki Falwell told him not to worry about her husband. “Oh don’t worry, he’ll hide in the corner and watch us. That’s his thing. You won’t even know he’s there,” she allegedly said.
In an extract from his forthcoming book, published by Rolling Stone, Granda writes about the love triangle he shared with the Liberty University president and his wife, and the fear he had of Falwell.
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“I was still worried that he might attack me and stove in the back of my head,” Granda wrote of that first night, while he carried Becki to the bed. “But he told me, ‘Don’t worry about it. You guys do what you want to do.’”
In the book, titled Off the Deep End: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Collapse of an Evangelical Dynasty, Granda described Falwell’s giddiness and giggling throughout the encounter. It was “disconcerting,” he writes, and “added to the absurdity” as Falwell, who was supposed to stay by the bathroom door, at times got a little too close.
“I told him, ‘If you get jealous at any point, just let me know and I’ll get the hell out of here. I will not hesitate,’” Granda recalls in the book.
At one point, as Falwell approached the bedside, Granda gently warned him to back off. “He apologized and quickly walked back toward the entrance and stood right outside the bathroom. After that I was able to put blinders on and block him out.”
“At the time I had the impression they had never done this before, but a decade later I think that’s highly unlikely,” Granda wrote of the couple, who he says covertly snapped photos of him, arranged strategic routes through the hotels to remain unseen, and had a mutual, pre-arranged agreement in regards to the encounter.
Falwell, whose 2016 endorsement of Trump helped him secure the Republican nomination for president, resigned from Liberty University in August 2020 amid several scandals, including posting a provocative photo of himself standing beside a woman he said was his wife’s assistant with his pants unzipped.
Read it at Rolling Stone
