LYNCHBURG, Virginia — As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell, its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.
“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas Eppes said he told Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do, and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Eppes said in an interview.
So Falwell — a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.
“Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law,” Falwell said in an interview Sunday when confronted with the numbers. He added that any student returning now to campus would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days.
“I can’t be sure what’s going on with individuals who are not being tested but who are advised to self-isolate,” said Kerry Gateley, health director of the Central Virginia Health District, which covers Lynchburg. “I would assume that if clinicians were concerned enough about the possibility of COVID-19 disease to urge self-isolation that appropriate screening and testing would be arranged.”
Of the 1,900 students who initially returned last week to campus, Falwell said more than 800 had left. But he said he had “no idea” how many students had returned to off-campus housing.
“If I were them, I’d be more nervous,” he added, because they live in more crowded conditions.
For critical weeks in January and February, the nation’s far-right dismissed the seriousness of the pandemic. Falwell derided it as an “overreaction” driven by liberal desires to damage Trump.
Although the current crisis would appear epidemiological in nature, Eppes said he saw it as a reflection of “the political divide.”
“If Liberty sneezes, there are people who don’t like the fact that Liberty sneezed,” he said in an interview. “Mr. Falwell called me to listen to a view that wasn’t exactly his. Great leaders do that type of thing.”
The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, is furious.
“We had a firestorm of our own citizens who said, ‘What’s going on?’ ” said Treney Tweedy, the mayor.
Some Liberty officials accuse alarmed outsiders of playing politics. Tweedy has called Falwell “reckless.” And within the school, there are signs of panic.
“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student living on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”
Under the Falwell family’s leadership, Liberty University has grown in five decades from a modest Baptist college to an evangelical powerhouse with cash investments and endowments of nearly $2 billion, nearly 46,000 undergraduates and a campus that sprawls across Lynchburg and neighboring counties in Virginia. Total enrollment, including online students, exceeds 100,000.
The institution is a welcome and generous presence in this Blue Ridge Mountain region, where the percentage of Lynchburg residents living in poverty is twice the state average. Liberty and its Thomas Road Baptist Church donate goods and services; its medical students conduct free health screenings; and its students participate in city beautification, maintenance and charity projects.
The university was founded by Falwell’s famous father as a bastion of social conservatism, one that was unabashedly combative as it trained what it called “Champions for Christ.” If anything, the younger Falwell has made it more so since his father’s death.
The mayor and city manager here, Bonnie Svrcek, felt relieved two weeks ago, when Falwell assured them that he fully intended to comply with Virginia’s public health directives and close the school to virtually all students, most of whom were scattering for spring break. Then he changed his mind.
“We think it’s irresponsible for so many universities to just say ‘closed, you can’t come back,’ push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers,” Falwell said Wednesday on a radio show hosted by a far-right conspiracy theorist, Todd Starnes.
“We’re conservative, we’re Christian, and therefore we’re being attacked,” he said.
Michael Gillette, a former mayor of Lynchburg and a bioethicist now working with its hospitals on rationing scarce ventilators, disagrees.
“To argue that criticism of Liberty is based on political bias is unfounded and unreasonable,” he said. “Liberty just did not take this threat as seriously as others have.”
Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, Lynchburg city officials and a growing number of Liberty students, parents and employees have urged Falwell to reverse course, but such pleas have only prompted a stream of often conflicting statements.
“Our messages did change throughout the week as the governor’s orders changed. We had to adapt,” Falwell said.
Falwell initially said only international students or those with nowhere else to go would remain. Then he welcomed back a much larger group of about 1,900 students to campus housing last week, in addition to faculty members and staff. Others returned to off-campus rentals in Lynchburg.
Students who remained at home had to return last week to clean out their rooms, a requirement that was later relaxed. Faculty members were at first ordered back to campus, even though they would be teaching online. Then some were allowed to work from home. Falwell also waffled on whether the school would issue refunds to students who did not return for the semester before announcing Friday that most would receive a $1,000 credit for next year’s bills.
Falwell and his administration have worked to tamp down dissent. After a Liberty undergraduate, Calum Best, wrote on his personal Facebook page that students should receive refunds, he said Liberty’s spokesman, Scott Lamb, called his cellphone to berate him. Asked about the call, Lamb said he was simply objecting to an error in the post, and Best was “spinning.”
After Marybeth Davis Baggett, a professor, wrote an open letter asking the university’s board of trustees to close the campus, Falwell mocked her on Twitter as “the ‘Baggett’ lady.”
Jeff Brittain, a Liberty parent, wrote on Twitter, “I’m as right wing as they get, bud. But as a parent of three of your students, I think this is crazy, irresponsible and seems like a money grab.” Falwell replied, calling him a “dummy.”
All of this has left even his critics scratching their heads.
“It’s honestly hard to figure out what his motives are,” Best, the student who wrote the Facebook post, said in an interview. “If he had purely political motives, he’s being way more conservative than even Trump is being right now. Trump is at least allowing doctors to say their piece. Jerry is not. It kind of shocks me at this point.”
On campus, the administration says it is adhering to Virginia’s public health mandates, but students are flouting them. While security guards appear to be enforcing state advisories requiring a 6-foot distance from others and gatherings of no more than 10 people, students are still assembling in closer proximity to eat, play sports, study and use dormitory restrooms. Decals slapped on furniture that say “Closed for Social Distancing” have wound up on laptops and car bumpers. Study tables are farther apart, but shared computer terminals remain. While some students are trying to adhere to social distancing guidelines, they live in group houses, pile onto city buses and crowd the few businesses that remain open in Lynchburg.
It was not supposed to be this way. As the number of reported cases of the coronavirus in Virginia began rising, Tweedy said Falwell personally assured her that the school would not fully reopen. “We have some students who cannot go anywhere or they have nowhere to go,” she recalled his telling her. “The number on that day was 300 or so students, and even if it was a few more, we said, ‘OK, well, thank you.’ ”
But as spring break drew to a close in mid-March, all Liberty students were encouraged to return.
“We never discussed numbers, and I never told them the dorms would be closed,” Falwell said Sunday. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on what was said.”
Falwell runs Liberty his own way, and his word is law. Professors are not tenured and can be fired at will. The administration controls the student newspaper.
Falwell echoes Trump’s talking points on the coronavirus, which he often calls the “flu.”
“It’s just strange to me how many are overreacting” to the pandemic, Falwell said on “Fox & Friends” on March 10. “It makes you wonder if there is a political reason for that. Impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.”
Lynchburg is particularly ill-prepared to become a hot spot. Hospitals in the region have a total of 1,174 beds, only 55 of them intensive care, according to a recent analysis by the Harvard Global Health Institute. Those must serve 217,000 adults, nearly 50,000 of whom are 65 or older. Tests for the coronavirus remain in short supply.
Falwell has played down the dangers of his decision in interviews with the news media, where he has even suggested that the coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon. On Fox News, he blithely asserted that the cure rate for COVID-19 “is 99.7% for people under 50,” adding that “we have talked to medical professionals, numerous medical professionals, before we made this decision.”
An archived version of Liberty’s website said those medical professionals included the school’s own public health faculty and campus health providers as well as “Dr. Jeffrey Hyman of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider.”
When contacted by The New York Times, Northwell Health denied that Hyman provided any formal guidance to Liberty, adding that he is not an infectious disease specialist. In a statement, the hospital system said that Hyman was a personal friend of the Falwell family who told them in private conversation “that reconvening classes would be a ‘bad idea.’”
c.2020 The New York Times Company
LYNCHBURG, Virginia - Evangelical leader and prominent Donald Trump backer Jerry Falwell Jr personally approved real estate transactions by his nonprofit Christian university that helped his personal fitness trainer obtain valuable university property, according to real estate records, internal university emails and interviews.
Around 2011, Falwell, president of Liberty University in Virginia, and his wife, Rebecca, began personal fitness training sessions with Benjamin Crosswhite, then a 23-year-old recent Liberty graduate. Now, after a series of university real estate transactions signed by Falwell, Crosswhite owns a sprawling 18-acre racquet sports and fitness facility on former Liberty property. Last year, a local bank approved a line of credit allowing Crosswhite's business to borrow as much as $2 million against the property.
Falwell, one of the most influential right-wing Christian leaders in the United States, has been buffeted by disclosures about his private dealings over the last year and a half.
A Florida lawsuit brought public scrutiny to a relationship between the Falwells and Giancarlo Granda, a young man they befriended while he was working as a pool attendant at a luxury Miami Beach hotel and later backed in a business venture involving a youth hostel. Falwell filed an affidavit in 2018 saying he used his own wealth to lend $1.8 million to the $4.65 million project with Granda.
And U.S. President Trump’s now-jailed fixer, Michael Cohen, has said he helped the Falwells suppress racy personal photos, as Reuters reported this May, in the months before Cohen persuaded Falwell to endorse Trump’s 2016 White House bid. There is no evidence that Cohen’s efforts to suppress the photos were a quid pro quo for Falwell’s vital political backing.
The support Falwell provided to the two young men, Granda and Crosswhite, has some parallels. Both were aided in business ventures and both have flown on the nonprofit university’s corporate jet.
One difference: When Falwell helped Crosswhite, he used the assets of Liberty, the tax-exempt university he has led since 2008. Among the largest Christian universities in the world, Liberty depends on hundreds of millions of dollars its students receive in federally backed student loans and Pell grants.
In 2016, Falwell signed a real estate deal transferring the sports facility, complete with tennis courts and a fitness center owned by Liberty, to Crosswhite. Under the terms, Crosswhite wasn’t required to put any of his own money down toward the purchase price, a confidential sales contract obtained by Reuters shows.
Liberty committed nearly $650,000 up front to lease back tennis courts from Crosswhite at the site for nine years. The school also offered Crosswhite financing, at a low 3% interest rate, to cover the rest of the $1.2 million transaction, the contract shows.
Crosswhite declined to answer questions about the deal. "All I will say is that my wife and I consult each other before every major business deal and we bought the complex from Liberty together," he said in an email. "My wife and I both work around the clock to make our business succeed."
Falwell referred Reuters to the university for comment. Liberty issued a statement describing the transaction as both proper and beneficial for the school.
Liberty had received the athletic center as a gift in 2011 from a trustee who has since died, but it quickly became a “drain on university resources,” the statement said. Crosswhite had been leasing gym space at the property since 2013, and was thus “the most viable purchaser.” Liberty said it adjusted the price and financed Crosswhite’s purchase because its tennis team would continue to use the courts.
Falwell has “tried to be a business mentor” to Crosswhite, the university statement said, but that effort did not “cause him to abandon his fiduciary duties” to Liberty.
As Liberty’s leader, Falwell draws an annual salary of nearly $1 million, and is obligated to put the university’s financial interests before his own personal interests when conducting Liberty business.
“The concern is whether the university’s president wanted to do his personal trainer a favor and used Liberty assets to do it,” said Douglas Anderson, a governance specialist and former internal audit chief at Dow Chemical Co, who reviewed both the transaction and Liberty's explanation of it at Reuters’ request. That would be bad governance, he said. “At a minimum, the terms suggest the buyer got a great deal and Liberty got very little.”
The Crosswhite Athletic Club is set off a quiet residential lane about seven miles from Liberty’s campus. Its large windowless buildings house indoor tennis and racquetball courts, a gym and pavilion.
During a visit by a reporter in August, Crosswhite, a muscular 31-year-old with short blond hair, was training a client in the well-equipped facility, running him through kettlebell swings and dumbbell presses. On a wall: A sign for “Crosswhite Fitness,” with a cross where the T should be, and a citation to a verse from the New Testament’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
Falwell has publicly credited Crosswhite with helping him lose 75 pounds. “That’s the kind of guy he is,” Crosswhite told Reuters. He asked Reuters to submit written questions about his dealings with Liberty and Falwell, but did not respond to them.
PITCHING A ‘SWEET DEAL’
The story of the business relationship between Crosswhite, Liberty and Falwell appears to begin in 2011.
That year, Falwell urged other Liberty personnel in an email to cut Crosswhite a “sweet deal” allowing him to offer private gym training at the Lynchburg fitness facility, then known as the Sports Racket, which Liberty had recently acquired through the trustee’s donation.
“Becki and I wouldn’t mind working out over there with Ben as a trainer because it is more private,” he wrote in the email, which was reviewed by Reuters. Falwell and his wife, who goes by Becki, each work out with Crosswhite twice a week, the university said. Falwell has become a vocal advocate of the trainer’s skills, as have other university executives and clients who work with Crosswhite.
The Falwells brought the trainer along on Liberty’s private jet during a 2012 trip to Miami. Later, Falwell sent an email directing Liberty to lease its gym space to Crosswhite’s fitness business, which began a five year lease in 2013. The cost, according to a lease document: $2,300 per month.
Liberty said Falwell uses the university-chartered jet to fly every year to his annual physical in Miami. Crosswhite joined him in 2012 “to explain to the doctors Mr. Falwell’s diet and exercise program and help document the results,” the university said. Because Liberty’s board requires an annual physical for Falwell, the president doesn’t have to reimburse the university for the corporate jet travel to Miami, the statement said.
It was in Miami in 2012, as well, that Falwell met Granda, the pool attendant he would later finance in business. The financial ties between Falwell and Granda have been detailed by BuzzFeed and others.
In 2016, Falwell signed the deal transferring the facility to Crosswhite. The contract says the price is $1.2 million, but notes that the “Net Purchase Price” is $580,000, because Liberty “agrees to credit” Crosswhite with rental payments for seasonal use of the site’s tennis courts through 2025. The courts are used by Liberty’s tennis team for practices and tournaments.
Liberty “agrees to finance the purchase” at a 3% interest rate, the contract says. To help Crosswhite in the transaction, Liberty was lending Falwell’s fitness trainer more than half a million dollars to buy its property. The university would receive no cash up front from the sale, the contract shows.
Transactions on such favorable terms could raise concerns over stewardship of corporate assets, and potentially insufficient scrutiny by the board, said Anderson, the independent governance specialist.
In 2017, after Liberty had sold the facility to Crosswhite, some university representatives voiced concern about whether the indoor tennis courts and roof over them were receiving needed maintenance, as the sales contract required, internal emails show. Falwell wasn’t included in the email chain.
Liberty’s general counsel, David Corry, responded that the school should remind Crosswhite of his maintenance obligations, according to the email exchange, which was reviewed by Reuters. But Corry, referring to Liberty University by its initials, added a note of caution: “Ben Crosswhite enjoys a close working relationship with several LU administrators, including the President.” Anyone communicating with Crosswhite should do so “with knowledge ahead of time that it may be second guessed,” Corry wrote.
Asked about Corry's warning, Liberty said he was raising the possibility that Crosswhite might complain to any one of "several people" at Liberty if he felt he was being treated "harshly" over the maintenance obligations. Therefore, Liberty said, the university needed to "have an approach that was not only legally sound, but cordial, professional and above reproach."
In 2017, Liberty provided Crosswhite with another $75,000 line of credit to conduct maintenance and repairs, the university said in its statement.
In an email sent earlier this month, Corry, citing a Reuters reporter’s “persistent” attempts to reach former board members and the Falwells, reminded the former trustees they had signed confidentiality agreements. He told them they were required “forever” to keep secret what they knew about the university.
Crosswhite’s acquisition of the sports facility appears to continue benefiting him. Last year, according to a Lynchburg Circuit Court filing, the trainer's business obtained a $2.05 million credit line from a local bank against its interest in the facility. Liberty said the credit line amount was linked to the property’s future value after Crosswhite builds a swimming pool there.
On April 23, 2018, the day after the $2.05 million bank financing, Liberty University filed paperwork saying the $576,000 note Crosswhite owed for the property had been paid in full.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Months before evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.’s game-changing presidential endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016, Falwell asked Trump fixer Michael Cohen for a personal favor, Cohen said in a recorded conversation reviewed by Reuters.
Falwell, president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian universities, said someone had come into possession of what Cohen described as racy “personal” photographs -- the sort that would typically be kept “between husband and wife,” Cohen said in the taped conversation.
According to a source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the person who possessed the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened on the Falwells' behalf.
The Falwells, through a lawyer, declined to comment for this article.
Cohen, who began a three-year prison sentence this week for federal campaign violations and lying to Congress, recounted his involvement in the matter in a recording made surreptitiously by comedian Tom Arnold on March 25. Portions of the recording -- in which Cohen appeared to disavow parts of his guilty plea -- were first reported April 24 by The Wall Street Journal.
The Falwells enlisted Cohen’s help in 2015, according to the source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the year Trump announced his presidential candidacy. At the time, Cohen was Trump’s confidant and personal lawyer, and he worked for the Trump Organization.
The Falwells wanted to keep “a bunch of photographs, personal photographs” from becoming public, Cohen told Arnold. “I actually have one of the photos,” he said, without going into specifics. “It’s terrible.”
Cohen would later prove successful in another matter involving Falwell, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Cohen helped persuade Falwell to issue his endorsement of Trump’s presidential candidacy at a critical moment, they said: just before the Iowa caucuses. Falwell subsequently barnstormed with Trump and vouched for the candidate’s Christian virtues.
Reuters has no evidence that Falwell’s endorsement of Trump was related to Cohen’s involvement in the photo matter. The source familiar with Cohen’s thinking insisted the endorsement and the help with the photographs were separate issues.
Cohen’s connection to the Falwells sheds light on the formidable alliance between Trump and a man who, through his university, is one of the most influential evangelical figures in America. Falwell’s backing helped galvanize evangelicals and persuaded many Christians concerned about Trump’s past behavior to embrace him as a repentant sinner.
Falwell’s support for Trump has not wavered throughout the New York celebrity-politician’s own tribulations, including the Access Hollywood recording of Trump talking about grabbing women’s genitals and payoffs made by Cohen to hide Trump’s extramarital affairs. This past weekend, Falwell tweeted that “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term” to make up for the two years of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
BLOCKBUSTER ENDORSEMENT
Falwell’s endorsement of Trump, however, did surprise some students and staff at Liberty University, the school in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by Falwell’s father, Jerry. It was at Liberty where fellow Republican presidential candidate and major Trump rival Ted Cruz had chosen to launch his campaign the previous year. Cruz’s father was an evangelical preacher, much like Falwell’s father; Trump has been married three times and divorced twice. For years, prior to running for president, Trump boasted of his sexual exploits and supported a host of social positions, such as abortion rights, that run counter to beliefs espoused by Falwell.
Although Falwell declined interview requests for this story, he has said repeatedly that he endorsed Trump because Trump was the strongest candidate, had significant experience running a business, and had the right vision for the country.
The connection between Trump and Falwell goes back years. In 2012, Trump gave the convocation at Liberty University. One link between Trump and the couple appears to have been Cohen, a now-disbarred New York lawyer who formed a close bond with the Falwells.
During the campaign, Cohen worked closely with Liberty University to help promote Trump’s candidacy. It was around that time that Cohen heard from the Falwells about the photographs, said the source familiar with Cohen’s thinking.
The Falwells told Cohen that someone had obtained photographs that were embarrassing to them, and was demanding money, the source said. Reuters was unable to determine who made the demand. The source said Cohen flew to Florida and soon met with an attorney for the person with the photographs. Cohen spoke with the attorney, telling the lawyer that his client was committing a crime, and that law enforcement authorities would be called if the demands didn’t stop, the source said.
The matter was soon resolved, the source said, and the lawyer told Cohen that all of the photographs were destroyed.
Months later, in early 2016, Trump faced what seemed like an enormous challenge. The Iowa caucus was coming up, and Cohen -- then deeply loyal to Trump -- was concerned about how Trump would fare, the source said. Cohen felt Trump “was being slaughtered in that community,” and “didn’t want to see him embarrassed or, you know, without support,” said the source familiar with Cohen’s thinking. Cohen repeatedly reached out to Jerry Falwell, and pleaded with him to back Trump, the source said.
Soon after, according to this account, Falwell made his historic announcement. “I am proud to offer my endorsement of Donald J. Trump for President of the United States,” Falwell was quoted saying in a statement issued by the Trump campaign. “He is a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.”
source: news.abs-cbn.com
