Hulu Releases Trailer for God Forbid Documentary on the Jerry Falwell Jr. Scandal
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Back in summer 2020, Giancarlo Granda, the former Fountainebleau Miami Beach pool boy at the center of a years-long sex scandal involving evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. and Falwell’s wife, Becki, contacted Miami filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman to see if they’d be interested in telling his side of the story.
“We thought it was a compelling opportunity to not only examine the hypocrisy of his illicit affair with the first family of evangelicalism, but some of the even greater macro issues,” Corben tells New Times. “Specifically, the rise of the Falwell’s dynasty, their outsized influence on presidential politics, and how religious hucksters went from televangelism to higher education to the White House.”
Granda’s story and more will be the focus of the Hulu documentary God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty, coproduced by Corben and Spellman through their film production company Rakontur alongside Oscar-winner Adam McKay (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Big Short, and Vice) and Todd Schulman (producer of Who Is America with Sasha Baron Cohen). The official trailer for the project, directed by Corben, was released today by Hulu.
Corben says he’s not into “kink shaming the Falwells.” “This is about the hypocrisy.”
Falwell Jr.’s fall from grace began in 2020 after Giancarlo Granda, a younger Falwell family business partner, said he had a yearslong sexual relationship with Becki and that Jerry would participate as a voyeur, scandalizing the private evangelical Christian college community that Falwell Jr. once served.
“Becki [Falwell] approached me and invited me back to their hotel room to have sex while Jerry watched,” Granda told Fox News in a 2020 interview. “After that night, Becki actively pursued me. They have a public image, but behind the scenes, they’re freaks.”
He was “afraid for a long time and was constantly reminded by the Falwells of how they would come after” him if he spoke up about what happened, Granda said at the time. He added that they lived a lavish lifestyle of “heavy drinking and going to nightclubs, which is strictly prohibited by the honor code that they expect everyone else to follow” at Liberty.
Watch the trailer
Jerry Falwell Jr. was President of Christian Liberty University until he was fired/resigned.
