Jerry Falwell Jr. Blames Wife For Emerging Cuckold Sex Scandal
Why am I not surprised?
The whole story of Adam and Eve always struck me as inherently sexist. The way the Bible tells it, one can only logically conclude that Adam threw his wife under the bus, and nobody — not even God — cared to correct him.
According to Genesis, God told Adam to never eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and long before Eve was ever in the garden. The Serpent tells Eve that she really ought to eat from that tree, and she takes a bite of the fruit. She gives some to her husband, who was apparently with her the whole damn time, and then Adam shirks culpability when God questions him about what he’s done.
As in, “Hey, it’s not my fault. The woman you gave me did this to me.”
Fucking serious?
Growing up in an evangelical bubble meant I was witness to a whole lot of this nonsense. As it turns out, there are lots of unbelievably sexist stories in the Bible and among Christians at large.
Another favorite is Queen Vashti, who was banished by her drunk husband, King Ahasuerus when she refused to dance — presumably naked — on command for him and his friends. Vashti is, of course, replaced by a submissive yet crafty Esther, who wins the king’s beauty pageant and goes on to save her people, the Jews.
I was always taught that Vashti was wicked and vain, while Esther was modest and wise. The biblical archetype of a good woman is apparently one who tricks her husband into thinking her good ideas are his brilliant ideas, all while submitting to his will. Ah, misogyny.
Then there was Jezebel. You might have heard conservative Christians like Jerry Falwell Jr. talk about a “Jezebel spirit.”
In the Bible, Jezebel was a queen who worshiped Baal instead of Yahweh. As a believer in Baal, she had competing prophets killed, and arranged for an innocent man to be falsely charged and executed. Nothing that Jezebel did was particularly different from the atrocities that several “heroes” of the Bible committed — except she batted for the wrong dude, and not the God of Israel.
Jezebel, Vashti, and Eve have all come to represent conservative Christianity’s unflattering views about women. We are frequently viewed with contempt or suspicion, and Christian leaders, husbands, and fathers are often guilty of throwing women under the bus just to avoid the consequences of their own actions.
“A woman’s greatest weakness is wanting to control men,” one Christian teacher lectured when I was a part of a cult called Teen Mania Ministries. “And a man’s greatest weakness is his tendency to be passive with women.”
Over the years, “Jezebel” has become a loaded term in Christianity. One that refers to evil women as cunning and manipulative, seductive, and promiscuous.
When I first heard about the scandalous sexual allegations against Jerry Falwell Jr., I couldn’t help but think about Jezebel, and then notice how he threw his wife Becki Tilley under the bus. Just like Adam, just like King Ahasuerus, and just like every other Christian leader who teaches about “the Jezebel spirit.” In fact, Paula White rebuked the “spirits of Jezebel” who stood against Donald Trump in 2016, back when she and the Falwell family helped secure evangelicals' faith in Trump.
So, I halfway expect “Jezebel” to be the next word that comes out of Falwell Jr’s mouth. After all, a younger business associate has accused the couple of using him in a sexual affair that spanned seven years. Although the man has essentially described Falwell’s role as the cuckold husband, Jerry Jr. wasted little time in claiming this mess was all his wife’s doing.
Falwell has already painted himself as the victim, the suffering husband who’s been deeply wounded by his wife’s affair. It’s more than a little bit strange coming from a man who’s built his entire career upon things like upholding “sexual purity,” but stranger yet when we consider how he recently posted then deleted a photo of himself and his wife’s assistant with… unzipped pants.
Frankly, his excuse that the photo “was a joke” is more than lame. The Falwell brand of Christianity is the same as Mike Pence’s — avoid the appearance of evil at all costs. In the confines of conservative Christianity, there is literally no way to spin this photo in a positive or otherwise benign light. And the fact that they were on vacation on a yacht in the middle of a pandemic really just adds an extra layer of WTF.
I’m not angry because I’m a judgmental prude, however. It’s all about who these people pretend to be. And regardless of the way folks try to spin it, things aren’t looking too good for Jerry Falwell Sr’s son.
Because of this swiftly-deleted Instagram photo, Falwell was put on an extended leave from his duties at Liberty University. Today, major news outlets are reporting that Falwell Jr. has indeed resigned after a long day of back and forth — including a moment where he initially resigned and promptly withdrew that resignation.
As I continue to read through various articles about the Falwell affair, I’m reminded of Ted Haggard, the conservative Christian pastor who in 2006 was outed as a closet bisexual and methamphetamine user. When that story broke, other Christians like Mark Driscoll shifted blame to Haggard’s wife. Driscoll suggested that she had let herself go:
“Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”
Wow. Who knew that a pastor’s wife who failed to meet certain standards of beauty could be pushing her husband into the arms of a male sex worker? And meth. Poor Ted.
Sarcasm aside, such thinly veiled misogyny is a real problem among the Christian right.
The issue here isn’t that Becki Tilley had an affair with the pool boy, or that Jerry Jr. reportedly liked to watch. What consenting adults do in their bedroom is their business. The issue is that Jerry Falwell Jr. and Becki Tilley are two more prominent Christian leaders who have ruined lives while preaching a set of ethics and sexual guidelines they apparently cannot uphold themselves. They are destructive hypocrites and despite what some folks within the Christian church will tell you, that matters.
Liberty University, the college founded by Jerry Jr’s father, has an extensive “Honor Code” which forbids homosexuality, pre-marital sex, alcohol and tobacco, profanity, and alone time between members of the opposite sex. Among other things. Up until 2015, its students weren’t allowed to view rated-R movies. In 2017, the university finally eased up on curfew for students who are 20 and older.
For nearly 50 years, the Falwell family has profited from telling young people how to live supposedly good and moral lives. Without question, Jerry Falwell and his father — along with Becki Tilley — have caused real harm with their unrealistic, judgmental, and hypocritical values.
Furthermore, they’ve been instrumental in giving the Trump administration its strange foothold in conservative America.
The Falwells also have a history of making shady real-estate deals to benefit young men in their circles, including Becki’s paramour Giancarlo Granda, and personal trainer Benjamin Crosswhite. Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen also says he had helped Falwell clean up racy “personal” photographs.
Through everything, Jerry Jr. can’t seem to come clean.
In a 1,200 word statement, he claimed his wife’s affair happened after his father died, and it was short-lived. Falwell insisted he never had anything to do with his wife’s affair, that it shocked him, and that her former lover became erratic and unreasonable, yet his legal counsel advised them to stay in contact with Giancarlo. Um, sure.
Jerry Jr. claimed the entire situation was like the film Fatal Attraction, and that he has suffered a significant bout of depression as a result of his wife’s affair. His wife appears to corroborate his story.
“I made a mistake a long time ago and luckily my husband forgave me. We have been dealing with this situation for years. This predator has attempted to extort millions of dollars from me and we refused to pay. Finally we couldn’t take this torture any more and so we went public with the story. And Jerry resigned to protect the reputation of the university that he and his family spent their lives building," Becki Tilley, to ABC News
The statements seem peculiar, though, given that they’ve offered no proof to substantiate their claims of blackmail while Giancarlo offered this recording of all three of them chatting. There’s no way to listen to that conversation and not recognize that Falwell was clearly aware of some intimacy between his wife and Giancarlo, and Becki was obviously jealous that the pool boy was hooking up with other women.
What a mess.
Perhaps his wife now sees it as her Christian duty to take all of the responsibility for the scandal. After all, I don’t suppose so-called Godly men will ever stop blaming women for their misdeeds. Samson and Delilah. David and Bathsheba. Amnon and Tamar.
Now, there’s Jerry Jr. and Becki too.
It’s hard to say what’s next for Jerry Falwell Jr. but if he’s anything like most Christian leaders who fall from grace, he’s not really going anywhere.
Haggard famously went back into ministry. His wife stayed with him and wrote a book about her decision. The church they now lead has a mantra that says, “Give someone a break.” They even appeared on Celebrity Wife Swap and he swapped wives with Gary Busey.
At this point, we all know that lies and hypocrisy haven’t been enough to stop evangelicals or the rest of the religious right from pretending that they have God and morality on their side.
“Evangelical Christians love President Trump. They voted for him in 2016 by a staggering margin — 80% to 16% — and a Pew Research poll released in March found that 69% of white evangelicals approve of the job Trump is doing as president. The fact that Trump is a lewd, twice-divorced former casino magnate who has bragged about grabbing women by their genitals does not seem to bother the nation’s most devout Christians. Jerry Falwell Jr. is a big reason why.
The son of prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. (naturally), Falwell’s January 2016 endorsement of Trump shocked religious leaders while essentially giving evangelicals wrestling with Trump’s not-so-Christian behavior permission to vote for him. Falwell’s support for the president hasn’t wavered since.”
Last year, in the same story, Rolling Stone even suggested that part of the reason Falwell Jr. endorsed Trump was because of his strange dealings with the Miami Beach pool boy:
“Why did Falwell (who was nearly 50 at the time) and his wife invite a 21-year-old hotel pool boy to travel with them on multiple occasions, and then put up seven figures for him to open up a hostel in Miami Beach that Politico described as a ‘cesspool of vice’?”
Why indeed.
The Republican Party prides itself on “family values.” Its evangelical members pride themselves on “family values.” Do you know what I never hear these people promote whenever they talk about those supposed family values?
Honesty.
It is a strange world when the Bible thumping religious right can’t be bothered to tell the truth about anything. Americans are supposed to buy into this idea that Republicans and Christians alike care about doing the “right thing” for this country when apparently, their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
You’ve got to wonder when these people will give it a rest. And when evangelical voters will wake up to see that these guys don’t give a damn about women or their families. They don’t care about anyone but themselves.
In a delicious irony, it appears that the Trump campaign and RNC sidelined Jerry Jr. long before this latest bit of drama. It seems that Falwell himself is now too scandalous and too much of a liability for Trump, the man who’s bragged about his own extramarital affairs and has been accused by at least 25 women of sexual misconduct.
Perhaps Donald draws the line at cuckold?
Only time will tell if, when, and where evangelical voters will ever draw a line for themselves.