Off the Deep End: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Collapse of an Evangelical Dynasty by Giancarlo Granda

Author:Giancarlo Granda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Strange Bedfellows

In March 2016, Angelina and I took a vacation to Mexico, where we stayed in an apartment that my parents owned in the heart of Mexico City. One day into our trip, we came home to find the apartment had been ransacked. I checked under the sofa, where I’d hidden my laptop, and it was gone. The perpetrators took paintings off the wall and stacked them on the floor, and smashed up random furniture. The laptop was the only thing missing, although there was jewelry and an expensive watch lying on the bed in plain view. Luckily, the laptop was brand new so there was nothing of consequence on it, plus it was a PC and password protected, and I was able to wipe it remotely. But it’s worth noting that there was no history of burglaries in the building. Needless to say, we were both seriously rattled by this intrusion, which seemed suspiciously of a piece with all the other inexplicable things that had entered my life. After checking every room and closet, not knowing whether an intruder would lunge out at us, we immediately upgraded to a hotel with armed security.

I’ve spoken with sources since then who said it sounds like the handiwork of one of the private security agencies that combine intelligence tactics with psyops, where the psychological dislocation is a big part of it. All I know is that once Jerry hitched his wagon to Trump, all of these people started showing up in my world: publicist Matt Hiltzik, whose client roster included Harvey Weinstein, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump, and whose protégé Hope Hicks became the White House communications director and later an adviser to the president; litigator Michael Bowe, who represented both Jerry against the university and Trump against an FBI investigation into collusion with the Kremlin; and Charlie Kirk, cofounder with Jerry of the Falkirk Center, a multimillion-dollar think tank on the Liberty Campus with a hard-line conservative pedigree and agenda. I believe that Jerry saw this as his destiny, and a path forward from the moral strictures of his father’s faith. Consequently, I believe Trump and those looking out for his interests were aware of my interactions with Jerry, through Michael Cohen and possibly others, and sought to exert damage control where necessary.

After the Mexico City incident, which I was keeping close to the vest, I had my lawyer, Aaron Resnick, tell Jerry’s attorneys that I really wanted out of the deal, regardless of what they were threatening. Whoever was behind this, if they were willing to follow me to another country now just to intimidate me, while targeting my girlfriend in the balance, then that seemed to me like things were escalating. I felt I was increasingly in danger, and I wanted to sever my ties with the Falwell family and this entire world that I didn’t belong in and wanted no part of. A few days before he was to speak at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, Jerry texted me with some good news.

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