The pool boy who had an affair with Jerry Falwell Jr.’s wife said she first approached him at a Miami hotel and offered sex — as long as her husband could watch.
The start of the affair between then-20-year-old pool boy Giancarlo Granda and Becki Falwell is described in Granda’s upcoming book “Off the Deep End: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Collapse of an Evangelical Dynasty.”
The six-year affair led to Jerry Falwell being forced to leave his post as president of Liberty University in 2020. He was subsequently sued by the school after Granda revealed his relationship with his wife.
Granda was working at the ritzy Fontainebleau hotel in 2012 when Becki allegedly locked eyes with him as she sat by the pool in a bikini before she began flirting with him.
Granda, who had no clue who she or her husband were at the time, claimed he was shocked when she asked him if he wanted to come back to her room with her after he got off work.
“When I didn’t say no right away, she added, ‘There’s just one thing … My husband wants to watch,’” Granda wrote in an excerpt of the new book, co-written by Mark Ebner, provided to Rolling Stone.
“I was conflicted. On the one hand, she was in her bikini, touching her neck, fussing with her hair, paying me compliments, sipping on her drink while she stared into my eyes. I found it all very intriguing,” Granda, now 31, revealed. “But it was also weird and unlike anything I had ever done before.”
He asked Becki if just the two of them could meet alone at first, but she said it would go against an agreement she’d made with her husband. He told her he’d think about it and let her know.
“Soon after, her husband came down and joined us, and she introduced him as Jerry. He wore Speedo briefs, with his belly hanging over his waistband,” Granda said in the book. “It was a little awkward, and he largely avoided eye contact, but he shook my hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you, Gian,’ with his thick Southern accent. He pronounced Gian like ‘John,’ and this became his nickname for me for as long as I knew him.”
With some encouragement from his co-workers, he agreed to meet the Falwells at a Day’s Inn. He even phoned his sister to tell her what was happening “in case Becki and Jerry turned out to be serial killers. She thought the whole thing was hysterical.”
Granda met Becki in the hotel lobby, where she appeared nervous and was drinking whiskey out of a plastic cup, according to the excerpt. The two made awkward small talk before heading upstairs, he claimed.
“At the time I had the impression they had never done this before, but a decade later I think that’s highly unlikely,” Granda said.
In the room, Jerry, allegedly was drunk and lying down on one of the two queen-size beds, Granda recalled. “Hey Gian,” Falwell said to the pool boy, letting out a giggle.
Granda, nervous, allegedly told Jerry that if he was feeling jealous at any point, to say something and he would stop — “But he told me, ‘Don’t worry about it. You guys do what you want to do.’”
Becki and Jerry had one rule as part of their arrangement: No sexual intercourse.
nstead, Granda and Becki performed oral sex on each other while Jerry stared, and, at one point, got too close for comfort, the book claims.
“At some point, Jerry got up and walked to the side of the bed to get a better angle. I had a moment of near panic, thinking, What is he doing? and I told him to back off — not in a hostile way, just establishing some boundaries. He apologized and quickly walked back toward the entrance and stood right outside the bathroom.”
Granda said that afterward, he was sure that the encounter was a one-time thing — until he got a phone call from Becki the following day asking if he wanted to see her again.
“I paused, then thought, Why not?” Granda wrote.
The two continued the relationship until 2018.
The widely publicized affair is also the subject of an upcoming Hulu series, “God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty,” which premieres on Nov.
