You're no MLK, Falwell
I’m ‘free at last’ (with $10.5M due him)
Jerry Falwell Jr. quoted Martin Luther King Jr. on Tuesday after resigning from Liberty University, crowing “free at last’’ — a day after kinky allegations surfaced about him watching his wife in sex romps with a pool boy.
Falwell, whose resignation was unanimously accepted by the ultraconservative Virginia school’s board of trustees, called his tortured departure “a relief.”
It was also profitable: A source familiar with Falwell’s contract told The Wall Street Journal he is is due to receive about $10.5 million from the school. Roughly $8 million is owed as part of a contractual clause, and $2.5 million will come from two years of his salary.
“The quote that keeps going through my mind this morning is Martin Luther King Jr.: ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I’m free at last,’ ” Falwell told The News & Advance in Lynchburg, Va., where the evangelical powerhouse had been president of Liberty since 2007.
King famously delivered the line during his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the civil-rights March on Washington in August 1963.
By comparison, Falwell, 58, was forced to resign as president of the university amid fallout over a salacious sex scandal embroiling him, his wife and a much-younger former Miami pool boy.
Falwell — pressured by an impending exposé on his spouse’s affair — released a lengthy statement Sunday saying that his 53-year-old wife, Becki, cheated on him with Giancarlo Granda in around 2012 and that the younger man had attempted to extort them over it since.
Falwell — the son of the late religious-right and Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell Sr. — said that his wife’s affair was brief and added that he was not “involved.”
But Granda fired back Monday that not only was the affair yearslong, but that the Bible-thumping Falwell Jr. liked to watch the illicit pair have sex. Granda denied any extortion attempts.
The former pool boy claimed Tuesday that Becki seduced him the first day they met — and that her holy-roller hubby then came out in his Speedo to watch.
“During my work shift at the Fontainebleau Hotel in March 2012, I was chatting with some girls my age,’’ Granda, then 20, told Politico.
Granda said Becki walked over to him at the Miami hotel and said flirtingly, ‘Those girls don’t know what they’re doing, you need someone with more experience.’ ”
Granda said the mom of three was soon suggesting the pair go to a hotel room.
“And then she goes, ‘But one thing.’ And I’m like, ‘OK.’ ” Granda told the outlet.
“And she’s like, ‘My husband likes to watch.’
“And just then he comes out, and he’s wearing a Speedo,” Granda added of Falwell.
Granda claimed that he and Becki had sex for the next seven years, either in Miami where he lived or at the couple’s farm in Virginia — and that Jerry developed a system to revel in their antics from afar.
“He enjoyed watching us in person and also remotely through video cameras,’’ Granda said. “He also listened to our phone calls.”
Granda’s claims came as Becki broke her silence to insist she and the husband on whom she cheated are “more in love than ever.”
“We have the strongest relationship, and Jerry is the most forgiving person I’ve ever met,” Becki told The Associated Press.
She denied to The Washington Post that her husband watched her and Granda have sex.
Falwell had already been on leave from his position at the university over a photo of him with his arm around a pregnant woman and his pants’ zipper down. He has said it was just a joke.
Liberty’s board of trustees said in a statement Tuesday that Falwell would get his full severance package in accordance with his contract.