Liberty University announced on Friday that its Board of Trustees asked Jerry Falwell Jr. to take “an indefinite leave of absence” as president and chancellor after a photo circulated of him with his pants unzipped, his underpants showing, and his stomach protruding.
Prominent conservatives question Jerry Falwell Jr. vacation photo https://t.co/4MnkQKtrhR pic.twitter.com/mx0dkcJcvh
— The Hill (@thehill) August 4, 2020
“The Executive Committee of Liberty University’s Board of Trustees, acting on behalf of the full Board, met today and requested that Jerry Falwell, Jr. take an indefinite leave of absence from his roles as President and Chancellor of Liberty University, to which he has agreed, effective immediately,” the school announced in a statement.
The unflattering photo, which Falwell himself shared on Instagram before deleting it, shows him on a yacht with his arm around his wife’s assistant. Many criticized the photo as inappropriate, especially for the leader of one of the nation’s largest Christian universities, which maintains a strict code of conduct for its students, including a dress code.
“How is this Jerry Falwell Jr. photo even real?” Meghan McCain asked. “Also if you’re running the largest Christian university in America maybe don’t put photos of yourself on social media with your pants undone on a yacht – with random women in bad wigs. So gross, so hypocritical.”
How is this Jerry Falwell Jr. photo even real? Also if you're running the largest Christian university in America maybe don't put photos of yourself on social media with your pants undone on a yacht – with random women in bad wigs. So gross, so hypocritical.
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) August 3, 2020
Falwell apologized for the photo during a radio interview on Wednesday, telling Lynchburg’s WLNI 105.9FM, “I’ve apologized to everybody. And I’ve promised my kids I’m gonna try to be a good boy from here on out.”
“She’s pregnant, so she couldn’t get her pants up,” he said of the woman with him. “I had on a pair of jeans that I hadn’t worn in a long time, so I couldn’t get mine zipped either. And so, I just put my belly out like hers.” Falwell maintained the costumes were “in good fun.”
Falwell, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, has been entangled in a photo-related scandal before. According to The New York Times, Falwell settled a lawsuit last October in a case that revolved around “purported sexually compromising photographs involving the Falwells that could have been used as leverage against them.”
NYT also reported that Falwell paid “an undisclosed sum to a young man who claimed he had been offered an ownership stake in a gay-friendly youth hostel, the Miami Hostel, that Mr. Falwell and his wife, Becki, bought in 2013.”
Liberty University recently sued The New York Times over an allegedly misleading story about COVID-19 on the school’s campus. The $10 million defamation suit, filed against two NYT reporters, claimed that they “intentionally misrepresented that ‘Liberty’ had reopened its campus after spring break and suffered a COVID-19 outbreak as a result.”
“They picked on the wrong conservative,” Falwell told The Washington Examiner of the case. “It’s just not right for the mainstream media to lie about and target conservative Christian organizations just because of their faith and because of their political beliefs, and we’re going to make an example out of them.”