Jerry Falwell Jr. is, for lack of a better term, a bit of a weirdo. Fortunately, he seems to know it. If you’re a fan of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, just imagine him as a real-life version of Jesse Gemstone, Danny McBride’s not-terribly-religious pastor and heir to the Gemstone Ministries megachurch.
Like Jesse Gemstone, Jerry Falwell Jr.— who broke out a “Yo Mama” joke at the 2016 RNC—has spent the bulk of his life riding the coattails of his dad, the late televangelist Jerry Falwell, Sr. This included a stint as president of Liberty University, the Evangelical university Jerry Sr. co-founded in 1971. But Junior’s life began to implode back in 2020, when a sex scandal erupted and eventually led to his resignation as president of Liberty University.
Originally the story was that Jerry Jr. and his wife, Becki, were involved in a throuple situation with a former Miami pool boy named Giancarlo Granda. According to Granda, he spent approximately six years having sex with Becki while Jerry Jr. watched. A lot of he said/she said/he said followed, but now Falwell—alongside Becki, and with some contradictory quotes from Granda—is attempting to set the record straight on his very public fall from grace in an interview with Vanity Fair. And the biggest takeaway here is that the real fault for all his problems lies with… the testosterone supplements he was taking to win his wife back from the hunky pool dude.
Becki admitted to her affair with Granda and explained that it was happening because she was lonely. And what’s the cure for loneliness? Why, testosterone pills, of course! As Gabriel Sherman writes for Vanity Fair:
The affair inspired Jerry to get in shape to win Becki back. “I was thinking maybe I was the reason she was lonely because I wasn’t taking care of myself,” he said. Jerry hired a trainer. He lifted weights and took testosterone supplements. Jerry attributed a lot of the incendiary things he later did to side effects of the hormones. “The testosterone made me more combative,” he said.
Not combative enough to call it quits on his marriage, just enough to use it as an excuse for his many other bizarre behaviors. You can read the full story, including quotes from Granda—who has both a new book and a Hulu documentary coming out—here.
(Via Vanity Fair)