At Least 22 Women Allege Sexual Assault at Liberty U.

[Jilly_in_VA]

She Alleged Sexual Assault but Said Liberty U. Football Player Wasn’t Even Benched

In another week or so, the world will have a better understanding of the special relationship between Jerry and Becki Falwell—first couple of the modern evangelical movement, former powerhouses, and stewards of Liberty University (the largest evangelical university in the country), whose unprecedented endorsement probably guaranteed Donald Trump the presidency—and Giancarlo Granda, the hapless “pool boy” who spent his twenties in a misbegotten affair with them. (That is, if it’s fair to saddle a young man of 32 with a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Real Estate Finance and Development with such an unfortunate epithet.) That’s because Giancarlo’s book, of which this writer is the co-author, dropped on October 25 (Off the Deep End, by Giancarlo Granda and Mark Ebner, Harper Collins Books). On November 1, God Forbid, Billy Corben’s independent but overlapping documentary on the Falwells and their affair to remember, will premiere on Hulu.

The Falwells’ sexual peccadillos blew up into such a media frenzy in part because of the puritanical views of the evangelical community, which they quite intentionally came to embody, and the breathtaking hypocrisy of living their lives on such extreme parallel tracks, and amid such cognitive dissonance.

As Giancarlo writes in the book, “The sex was never the issue; it was the hypocrisy and the abuse of power. Because they helm an institution whose business it is to shame others for what they do in private, and to hold the threat of shame over them to demand fealty and subservience.”

This refers specifically to “the Liberty Way,” an elaborate and punitive honor code that demands students there refrain not only from premarital sex and traditional college vices like drinking and smoking, but also using profane language and being alone with a member of the opposite sex, particularly at off-campus residences. In practice, this quickly becomes a way to control women, since they’re the ones who must deal with the fallout, be it pregnancy, damage to their reputation, or sexual violence. Traditionally, there was no way to report a sexual assault there without risking violating the Liberty Code, and with it one’s tenure or standing at the university.

As has been tirelessly reported by Politico, ProPublica, and especially the Gangster Capitalism podcast, this has led to what amounts to an epidemic of campus rapes at Liberty, allegedly enabled in part by the institutional decisions of the university itself, of which Jerry Falwell was both President and Chancellor. Chelsea Andrews, a former Liberty senior class president and campus rape survivor, took to Twitter in 2021 to protest Becki and Jerry, who by then had resigned in disgrace, hosting Liberty students at a party at their home—where, she noted in a letter to the Liberty board, “…his wife is alleged to have initiated oral sex on a drunk, sleeping student.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/she-alleged-sexual-assault-but-said-liberty-u-football-player-wasnt-even-benched?ref=home