The known facts point to Jerry Falwell Jr having sexual tastes that would be frowned on by his evangelical followers. Did the Putin/Trump campaign leverage that infomation to gain the Falwell endorsement? Again, the evidence points to yes.
- In 2012, Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki visited the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. While there, they befriended a 21-year-old pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda. Granda soon began traveling with the Falwells, both to their home of Virginia and to the Cheeca Lodge in the Florida Keys.
- The Falwells offered to help Granda, who had practically no business experience, open a hostel in Miami. Falwell ponied up $1.8 million for the venture.
- Later in 2012 Trump was invited to speak at Liberty University. Michael Cohen accompanied him, and the Apprentice star and his fixer developed a relationship with Fallwell. (Granda was in attendance, as well; the Times published a photo of him holding a copy of The Art of the Deal on a private jet.)
- In 2015, as the potential release of compromising photos (purportedly of Giancarlo Granda and Becki Falwell) was becoming a problem for Falwell, he enlisted the help of Cohen, a revelation reported by Reuters. Cohen reportedly then flew to Florida to meet with the attorney of the mystery figure who possessed the photos. The issue was resolved, and the attorney told Cohen that the photos were destroyed. Falwell has only ever commented on the photos to say that he was not in them.
- Jerry Falwell Jr’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. (The endorsement was surprising not only because Trump embodied everything evangelicals detest, but because Falwell allegedly had already agreed to endorse Ted Cruz)
- Cohen’s involvement was initially revealed through a March 2019 phone conversation he had with comedian Tom Arnold, who secretly recorded it. (Click here to read Rolling Stone‘s story on Arnold’s quest to take down Trump and his relationship with Cohen.) “There’s a bunch of photographs, personal photographs, that somehow the guy ended up getting — whether it was off of Jerry’s phone or somehow maybe it got AirDropped or whatever the hell the whole thing was,” Cohen said on the recorded call. He described the photos as “personal” and “between husband and wife,” and said that he had one of them. “It’s terrible,” Cohen said.
