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.
In an upcoming book Off the Deep End: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Collapse of an Evangelical Dynasty, Granda writes about the love triangle he shared with the Liberty University president and his wife, and the fear he had of Falwell.
“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 an extract from the book, published by Rolling Stone, Granda described Falwell’s giddiness and giggling throughout the encounter as “disconcerting,” as Falwell, who was supposed to stay by the bathroom door, at times got a little too close.
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.