Jerry Falwell Jr. has filed a counter-suit against Liberty University, using a “you-didn’t-ask” defense against the school’s claim that its former president and chancellor withheld details of a personal scandal and enriched himself before the two parted ways last year.
According to the complaint filed in Lynchburg, Va., Circuit Court, the university is seeking more than $10 million in damages. It alleges Falwell Jr. set up a “well-resourced exit strategy … (and) chose personal protection” in the form of a 2019 employment agreement which contained a higher salary from Liberty.
“When I was planning to retire (from Liberty) and told them I’d be leaving,” Falwell Jr. said, “you’d think they’d have the smarts to ask me, ‘Is there anything we should know?’ Y’know, like, ‘Are you going to embarrass the hell out of us with anything sexual?’ I mean come on.”
He left Lynchburg-based Liberty last August, shortly after Giancarlo Granda, a Falwell family business partner, said in an interview with Reuters that he had met Jerry Jr. and Becki Falwell in 2012 when he was a 20-year-old pool boy at the Fountainbleau Miami Beach hotel and that the relationship evolved into him having sex with Becki Falwell from then into 2018. Liberty’s lawsuit contends that her husband took part in some of the romantic counters as a voyeur.
“Oh, that’s another thing,” Jerry Jr. said. “How do you ‘take part’ as a voyeur? Voyeuring is only looking, not touching, not saying anything. Not doing. Just watching. What’s so wrong about that?”
The Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the evangelical school in 1971 as well as the Moral Majority, a political organization that became a major force in the Republican Party. Jerry Jr., also an attorney and real estate developer, became Liberty’s leader when his father died in 2007.
“Considering what’s happened to the GOP since then, and especially with (former President Donald) Trump and (Sen. Mitch) McConnell running things,” Jerry Jr. said, “I thought it was time to head in a different direction, which is why I’ve founded the Immoral Majority. God knows that’s what we’ve become.”
Even before the Granda scandal, Falwell created an uproar when he posted a photo on social media showing him on a yacht with a drink in his hand, his arm around a young woman who was not his wife, and their pants unzipped.
“I know that I supported Trump when he ran for president in 2016, even defended him when his comments about women and sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape came out,” Jerry Jr. said. But, I mean, given my activities, or maybe I should say proclivities, who was I to cast the first stone?”
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