MIAMI — 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, the Florida International University graduate asks Becki, then in her early 50s, to make sure his dog gets back to his parents in Miami after he’s found dead. “Everything was crumbling for me,” Granda recalled before asking for a break from the interview.
Like many of the eye-opening 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, when BuzzFeed reported the news of the evangelical couple’s curious investment in a South Beach property with a young man they met on a Miami Beach vacation.
The Falwells eventually confirmed the sexual relationship but denied Jerry approved of it, much less filmed it. They accused Granda of trying to extort them before the sexual relationship became public. The disclosures both sides made in interviews with Reuters and other news outlets in 2020 came as Falwell lost his post as president of Liberty University, the evangelical institution his father founded.
Two years later, Granda is telling a more full version of his story in “God Forbid,” which premieres Nov. 1 on Hulu. The release overlaps with William Morrow’s publication of Granda’s “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 to the Miami Herald, 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 of the celebrity mogul 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 the summer of 2020 by sending an email to the inbox of Rakontur, their Miami Beach production company. The subject line: “Giancarlo Granda-Pool Boy-President Trump and Jerry Falwell Jr - Story.”
The other young man from Miami 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 in Miami-Dade Circuit Court 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 the Alton Road hostel after agreeing to help the university president find a Miami-area business.
A Falwell entity purchased the property on the 800 block of Alton for $4.7 million, and the family put Granda and a Falwell son in charge of renovating it and running operations. Granda remains a partner in the venture today, according to Florida records.
Bello, a lawyer, declined to comment on the documentary. Falwell and Granda deny Bello’s claim, saying the deal was only for a commission. A former Bello girlfriend backs up that account, telling “God Forbid” she never heard the Bellos mention expecting an equity stake in the Falwell arrangement. (Bello, a former legislative aide for the Miami-Dade County Commission, changed his name in 2016 from Jesus Fernandez Jr., the name used in “God Forbid.”)
Falwell settled the Bello case in 2019 for an undisclosed amount. The Bello litigation also brought Michael Cohen into the saga, before he became famous as the Trump lawyer who went to jail and then turned on the president. In 2015, Cohen said the Falwells asked him to retrieve “personal” photos held by Bello — a favor Cohen granted about a year before he arranged for the Liberty University president’s endorsement of Trump in the 2016 primaries.
In his book, Granda described his heart sinking when a lawyer described the photos in question because he recognized them as ones he had seen, too. They were images of Becki Falwell undressed, but with nobody else in the pictures, he said. Granda and Jerry Falwell Jr. both described the photos as stolen. Bello hasn’t commented.
In past interviews, Bello said he changed his name after Falwell got involved with the litigation.
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.”
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