‘Pool boy’ gets extended time to tell story on Falwell sex scandal
The darkest moment in director Billy Corben’s mostly jaunty documentary “God Forbid” comes when Giancarlo Granda reads several suicidal texts sent after being branded the “pool boy” in a media storm involving his close ties to evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. and wife, Becki.
“My life is absolutely ruined,” Granda, now 31, wrote in an alleged text to Becki in late 2018, then six years into a sexual relationship with her that Granda said Jerry encouraged and often filmed.
Reading from the text on camera, Granda asks Becki to make sure his dog gets back to his parents in Miami after he’s found dead. “Everything was crumbling for me,” Granda recalled.
Like many of the eyeopening details in “God Forbid” by Corben and producing partner Alfred Spellman, Granda’s alarming texts aren’t new. The Washington Post reported on the messages in 2020 as Granda and both Falwells went public with their conflicting accounts of a saga that helped topple Jerry Falwell Jr. from his perch as an evangelical leader and influential ally of then-President Donald Trump.
But the nearly two-hour documentary is the first to give Granda extended time to tell his story on camera, casting his relationship with the Falwells as fun and exciting at first, then menacing as he found himself feeling trapped by financial arrangements and the prospect of scandal if his role (and those alleged sex tapes) went public.
The media first started reporting on the relationship in 2018. The Falwells
eventually confirmed the sexual relationship but denied Jerry approved of it, much less filmed it. The disclosures both sides made in interviews with news outlets in 2020 came as Falwell lost his post as president of Liberty University.
Granda is telling a more full version of his story in “God Forbid,” now streaming on Hulu. Its release followed the publication of Granda’s book “Off the Deep End: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Collapse of an Evangelical Dynasty.” Granda’s co-author, journalist Mark Ebner, appears frequently in “God Forbid,” too.
In a statement, Falwell declined to comment on the documentary. “While we would love to expose the lies and half truths, on advice of counsel, we are not commenting due to pending litigation,” Falwell wrote.
The documentary, produced with Adam McKay and Todd Schulman, casts Trump as a central influence in the saga. Granda said he decided to go public in 2020 as a way to block Falwell from helping the president’s reelection in the way his endorsement buoyed Trump with evangelical voters in the 2016
GOP primaries.
“He was very interested in highlighting the hypocrisy and the abuse of power he thought his story embodied,” Corben said of Granda, who contacted the filmmakers in summer 2020.
The other young man at the center of the Falwell story didn’t cooperate with Corben and Spellman. Gordon Bello, a former friend of Granda, filed a suit that was the vehicle for the scandal becoming public. The 2015 litigation revealed Granda’s occupation as a “pool attendant” when he met the Falwells, and claimed Bello and his father were cut out of a promised stake in a Miamiarea hostel. Bello, a lawyer, declined to comment on the documentary. (Bello changed his name in 2016 from Jesus Fernandez Jr., the name used in “God Forbid.”)
The alleged betrayal by an old friend adds to the sense of Granda under siege in “God Forbid,” as he despairs over where a poolside flirtation had led him.
“Giancarlo is kind of honey-trapped into this world of power and privilege and real estate,” Corben said. “Ultimately, the story is about more than just the sex scandal.”