The Jerry Falwell Jr. / Liberty University Saga Continues

[LFC]

Jerry is now being sued by Liberty University and they're using his own words against him (paywalled).

Liberty University did something truly hilarious today.

It wasn’t so much the fact that it sued its former leader and son of its founder, Jerry Falwell Jr. It’s the way that Liberty did it that makes it so funny.

So, here’s what happened.

When Giancarlo Granda came forward with allegations in August 2020 that he and Becki Falwell would have sex as Jerry Jr. watched, the evangelical scion issued a pre-emptive denial to the Washington Examiner.

In that denial, Falwell claimed that what had taken place was a brief affair between Becki and Granda, but that the former Miami pool attendant had used the affair as part of a multi-year campaign to extort the evangelical leader.

Falwell was dismissed from his position at Liberty in the aftermath of the revelation. And in November 2020, he sued Liberty for additional severance.

But Jerry Jr. went further in that lawsuit, alleging that Granda ran a fairly sophisticated, multi-year effort to extort the couple.

There are a few problems with that narrative, as both Granda himself and Save71, a group of Liberty alumni and students opposed to the Falwells’ alleged excesses, noted.

Save71
@save71lu
It is so important to note that @libertyu is completely buying Falwell’s false narrative in its lawsuit, because doing so helps them financially. It is terribly dishonest, but Liberty’s board is focused on getting money, not on telling the truth.

Giancarlo Granda
@ggrandag
Liberty University’s lawsuit continues to perpetuate a false narrative. The truth detailing the Falwells’ — and their enablers’ — abuse of power, predatory behavior and corruption will come in due time. talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/read

But that looks past the humor of what happened today: Liberty sued Jerry Jr. based in large part on how he defended himself. In short, Liberty accused Jerry of breaking his contract and fiduciary duty to the university by keeping silent about what he would later allege was an extortion campaign.

And, remember: that extortion campaign has really been Jerry’s alibi all along. It’s allowed him to cast himself as a victim of Granda, who himself argues that he’s the aggrieved party in all of it.

But now, Liberty is saying to Jerry, sure, you were extorted. But why didn’t you tell us that?

In asking that question, Liberty, in its suit, points to a 2019 employment agreement that Liberty inked with Jerry Jr. The university says that had it known of Granda’s alleged extortion attempt, it might have proceeded differently.

“Had Liberty’s Executive Committee known in 2018 and 2019 that Granda was attempting to extort Falwell Jr. and thus planning to damage Liberty, and had it known the full circumstances of Granda’s extortion of Falwell Jr., then the Executive Committee would have refrained from entering into the 2019 Employment Agreement,” the lawsuit reads.

Granda, Liberty said, was able to pressure Jerry Jr. in part because he “would be able to provide detail about the fact of the affair with Becki, its duration, Falwell Jr.’s role in abetting it, the attendant circumstances of the affair, and the specific activities in which Granda, Falwell Jr., and Becki engaged during and after the affair.”

And this, Liberty says in the suit, is based almost entirely on Jerry’s own claims defending himself, both in his lawsuit against Liberty and his statement to the Washington Examiner. In both of those, Falwell said that he had been forced to “appease” Granda in order to keep him silent in response to his alleged extortive demands.

Liberty now alleges that that was a conspiracy.

“The Falwells knew they shared a unity of interests with Granda. They had an important goal in common: silence about the Falwell’s salacious acts,” the lawsuit reads. “The Falwell needed silence from Granda in order to safeguard their personal reputation, Jerry Jr.’s professional standing, and his employment with America’s leading evangelical university.”

Liberty is demanding millions of dollars from Jerry in the lawsuit.

[LFC]

Oh, Jerry. Please just disappear.

Jerry Falwell Jr. just wants the evangelical university he ran for more than a decade to stop shaming him.

In a reply to a lawsuit filed by Liberty University in April, Falwell said that university his father founded was abusing the courts to defame him.

“The rehashing of these events and protected defamation of Falwell through litigation serves one mission — ruining Falwell’s reputation through mischaracterization of events and public shaming through out-of-context pictures filed in a public complaint,” Falwell’s court filing reads.

Liberty sued Falwell for millions of dollars in damages, claiming that Falwell had broken his contract with the evangelical institution by concealing an alleged extortion attempt by his wife’s former lover Giancarlo Granda.

[pnwguy]

Thoughts and prayers...

[goldenvalley]

That looks like a very messy divorce.

[pnwguy]

Jun 9, 2021 3:11:29 GMT goldenvalley said:

That looks like a very messy divorce.

Perhaps not the only one, now that his wife got a taste of some other action...

[theronmad]

Interesting story

[LFC]

This could also be posted under "The Sickness of Christian Politics" but since it's explicitly tied to Liberty University I'll drop it here. Like so many other "Christian" organizations they refuse to hold anybody accountable for rape and sexual assault, particularly males and especially males in a position of authority. The piece starts out with this case of a woman softly threatened with discipline after reporting being raped.

When Elizabeth Axley first told Liberty University officials she had been raped, she was confident they’d do the right thing. After all, the evangelical Christian school invoked scripture to encourage students to report abuse.

“Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves, for the rights of all who need an advocate. —Proverbs 31:8.” It was quoted in large type across an information sheet from the school’s office tasked with handling discrimination and abuse.

Axley was a first-year student at Liberty in the fall of 2017. She had been at the school less than three months. One Saturday night, she went to a Halloween party at an off-campus apartment and drank eight shots of vodka, along with a couple of mixed drinks. She doesn’t remember much after that, until, she recalls, waking up with a fellow student on top of her and his hand pressed over her mouth. (The student denies Axley’s allegations.)

After Axley returned to her dorm, she called the campus police department. One of the officers drove her to the local hospital, where, records show, a nurse documented 15 bruises, welts and lacerations on her arm, face and torso.

Axley wasn’t sure what to do next, but she did know that she wanted the man to “stay away from her,” as she recalled. So when Axley got back to her dorm that Sunday morning, she again told someone at Liberty, her resident adviser.

The RA, Axley said, told her not to report it, saying Axley could be found to have violated the school’s prohibition against drinking and fraternizing with the opposite sex.

Instead, the RA offered to pray with Axley.

“I was really confused,” recalled Axley. “They were making it seem like I had done something wrong.”

Axley didn’t want to pray. She wanted the school to do something about what had happened. “I didn’t want to get fined or punished, but I wasn’t going to let this keep me from reporting my assault.”

The next day, Axley went to the school’s federally mandated office for investigating sexual harassment and violence.

She had prepared. Axley saved texts from that weekend. “He was all over you,” one concerned friend had written to her. It was “pretty damn weird.”

“I fucking remember making noise and him covering my mouth oh my god,” Axley texted another friend in the early morning hours. She also took photos of the welts across her chest, multiple lacerations on her right upper arm and a bruised lip.

“When I went into that office,” Axley said, “I was ready.”

But Elysa Bucci, the official who took the complaint, didn’t seem interested, Axley recalled. Bucci was a lead investigator with Liberty University’s equity office, which is responsible for looking into potential violations of Title IX, the civil rights law that bans sexual discrimination on campuses that receive federal funding. Liberty students receive almost $800 million a year in federal aid.

Instead of considering her evidence, Axley said, Bucci started throwing questions at her: Why had Axley gone to the party? What had she had to drink? How much? “I immediately felt judged,” remembered Axley. (Bucci, who is now a Title IX investigator at Baylor University, declined to comment.)

Then Axley waited. She received email updates saying the school was still looking into her case. After five months, Axley heard from Bucci that Liberty had completed its investigation and a committee was now going to consider the case. Bucci invited Axley to first come to the office and review the file.

Axley went in and looked through the materials. The photos with her injuries, she recalled, were no longer there. Axley said that when she asked what had happened, Bucci told her the photos had been removed because they were too “explicit.”

“I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach,” Axley recalled. “I had been relying on them all these months to take my evidence into account when considering my case, and it wasn’t even in my file.”

A few days later, Axley received another email from the university. It said that as the case was moving ahead for a final decision, Axley needed to sign a document acknowledging that she could be found to have violated the university’s code of conduct. The Liberty Way covers nearly all aspects of a student’s life and includes bans on drinking and “being in any state of undress with a member of the opposite sex.”

As the document that Axley received phrased it, by moving ahead with the case, Axley was acknowledging that she herself could face “possible disciplinary actions.”

[goldenvalley]

Good girls don’t drink. Bad ones get punished like this. For years and years that’s been the way of things. In some pockets of the country that’s still the way of things.

[LFC]

Liberty University is openly violating their 501(c)(3) status. Time to make them pay taxes!

Conservative Liberty University is potentially running afoul of the tax code by claiming to be a nonprofit organization while having a main goal of electing political candidates, according to a MSNBC columnist.

In a recording obtained by Politico, Liberty University President Jerry Prevo told Scott Lamb, who was then the university's senior vice president for communications and public engagement, that he wanted the university to be more effective at political activity.

"Are they getting people elected? Which is one of our main goals," Prevo said. "Are they really motivating our conservative people to really get out to vote? If they are, we ought to be seeing some changes in elected officials — and we are to some extent. All I want to do is to make us more effective."

Prevo was discussing the university's internal think tank, the Standing for Freedom Center, which describes itself as an organization dedicated "to uphold[ing] the Christian faith and defend[ing] America's Constitution."

Prevo's remark could have major implications for the school, MSNBC's Steve Benen reports.

"Under federal tax law, Liberty is a 501c3 institution — which is the same tax-exempt designation given to houses of worship and non-political charitable organizations. As far as the IRS is concerned, the evangelical university is entitled to its tax-exempt status because it's a school, focused primarily on education and spiritual matters," Benen explained. "The revelations in the Politico report are important because they call Liberty's purpose into question. If the school exists to influence election outcomes, then it's not entitled to a tax exemption."

[andydp]

Oct 26, 2021 2:27:03 GMT goldenvalley said:

Good girls don’t drink. Bad ones get punished like this. For years and years that’s been the way of things. In some pockets of the country that’s still the way of things.

Justice Kavanaugh's guiding principle.

[LFC]

Two juicy piece on Jerry today! The first is that after having the pool boy bang his wife he felt the need to "up" his game.

Former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. began taking testosterone supplements in an effort to win back his wife from the Miami pool boy with whom she had been having an affair, according to a new report.

That was one of the many revelations after the Falwells sat down with Gabriel Sherman for a Vanity Fair interview at their 500-acre Lynchburg farm.

And then there's the blame game.

Former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. blamed his endorsement of Donald Trump for his downfall in a new interview with Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair.

The son of the televangelist is described as "the Trump-anointing dark prince of the Christian right."

Sherman recounted how a former pool boy named Giancarlo Granda had an affair with Becky Falwell and claimed her husband liked to watch. Falwell resigned from Liberty in August of 2020.

"Viewed in hindsight, the scandal was the combustion of a self-immolating fire that Falwell had been stoking for months, if not years. Liberty had spent the better part of 2020 lurching from one PR crisis to the next brought on by Falwell’s boorish and reckless behavior, his race baiting, COVID-19 denials, and slavish devotion to Donald Trump," Sherman reported. "Two days after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Falwell tweeted a picture of a COVID mask that showed a man in blackface posing with a man in a KKK hood. In early August 2020, Falwell posted a photo on Instagram of himself aboard a yacht with his pants unzipped, a drink in one hand, and his other arm wrapped around a pregnant Liberty employee with her belly exposed."

"The controversies turned Falwell into an avatar of the rank hypocrisy, know-nothingism, and toxic masculinity that explained why 81 percent of white evangelical Christians voted in 2016 for Trump, a thrice-married reality TV star who literally boasted of grabbing women by the pussy.""If you think of Jerry’s downfall as a plane crash, then his Trump endorsement was the fatal error in the decision chain," Sherman wrote. "From that moment, disaster was inevitable. 'Trump was the reason they came after me as hard as they did,' Jerry said."

Sure, Jerry. It had little to do with your own actions. It was all because you supported Trump. You're the victim.