‘God Forbid’ Doc Focuses Billy Corben’s Florida Lens On Scandal That May Have Elected A President

Did revelations of the scandalous side relationship of a prominent evangelist and his wife with a hotel pool boy also help get Donald Trump elected president in 2016? That’s the tantalizing possibility presented in director Billy Corben’s latest documentary, God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty, which debuts today on Hulu.

The movie’s full title suggests part of its ambition, but not all of it. Yes, public revelations of the extended relationship between Becki Falwell and Giancarlo Granda, with the consent and alleged participation of her husband, the powerful televangelist Jerry Falwell Jr., definitely ended that family’s perch atop one of the nation’s biggest and wealthiest religious institutions, Liberty University in Virginia.

But the film takes a right turn part way through to explore (without definitively answering) another, even more tantalizing question: how a Florida land deal involving the Falwells and Granda went bad, and led to the intervention of Donald Trump’s chief fixer of the time, Michael Cohen. Did Falwell Jr. subsequently endorse Trump’s candidacy, the first such from any prominent evangelical, because Cohen earlier had gotten possession of material documenting Becki’s trysts?

“There’s a shakedown on top of shakedowns,” said Corben, who was also an executive producer on the film with long-time producing partner Alfred Spellman as well as Oscar-winning writer/director Adam McKay (The Big Short, Don’t Look Up) and Todd Schulman (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Q: Into the Storm).

Over the past couple of decades, Corben has produced a long list of documentaries tracking the many, many transgressions of hucksters and grifters who populate the Sunshine State in apparently outsized numbers. Corben delicately says the collected works can be summed up as examinations of “Florida fuckery,” a term whose definition you likely won’t need a dictionary to divine.

Indeed, from the Cocaine Cowboys docs (he’s working on the fifth now, about Medellin Cartel co-founder Carlos Leder) to bare-knuckle brawlers in Miami’s back streets (Dawg Fight; it’s getting a sequel too) to an out-of-control college football program (ESPN’s The U and its sequel), Florida has provided endless material, he said.

“Miami is the grift that keeps on grifting,” Corben said. “I knew I would never have a dearth of characters and stories to tell.”

God Forbid isn’t even Corben’s first politically involved documentary. That distinction goes to 2020’s 537 Votes, about the bare margin of victory George W. Bush was ruled to have secured amid butterfly chads and other problematic minutia in the Florida voting process that helped decide the 2000 presidential election.

But God Forbid gets to its political component by way of some saucy kink: a long-term sexual relationship between Becki, Jerry Jr. and Granda that eventually evolved into a partnership running a $4.6 million Miami Beach commercial property. Some problematic Florida real-estate guys involved in the deal went to court in a dispute, then threatened to publicize compromising texts and photos as part of the proceedings. That’s when the Falwells called in Cohen to make the suit go away.

“Then he winds up with the materials and what kind of a role did all of that play in Jerry Falwell, Jr. ‘s decision to be the first evangelical leader to endorse a candidate who was a twice-divorced New York liberal Democrat with five children from three different women,” Corben said. “You know, how did that happen?”

How indeed. Corben acknowledges he wasn’t able to solve all the mysteries in the chain of custody for incriminating texts, photos and videos that ultimately ended up with Cohen.

“It’s not even conflicting reports,” Corben said. “People just won’t tell us or claim they don’t know. It’s a shame because these are really the MacGuffin of this story that all of this action (revolves around). It remains a mystery as to how these photos fell into the hands of people who use them for their own ends, and really led us to where we are. Because without that, you and I aren’t having this conversation.”

But once again, for Corben, he’s found a Florida subject worthy of the “fuckery” folio. The Virginia-based Falwell’s Florida land deal and personal transgressions left him vulnerable to schemers there. On the other end, his endorsement of Cohen’s boss fueled the evangelical embrace of Trump that proved an unlikely but crucial part of his winning 2016 coalition.

“These are kind of twisted tales of the American Dream by any means necessary,” Corben said. “There always seems to be a kind of gangster element to it as well, you know, people in power, who the rules don’t apply to them. kind of operating on the edge, if not the other side of the law.”

The difference with this one, however, is that it’s not about drug dealers or street fighters or out-of-control college boosters. What resulted from this deal gone bad really mattered to the rest of the country as more than another Florida Man Does Wrong sideshow.

“The Falwells and this bizarre real estate dispute may very well have impacted the outcome of the last two elections, and forever changed the course of of this country,” Corben said. “So, I think that the while the genre of (popular documentaries) kind of stays the same, I think the ambition, and the consequences, and the positions of power that our characters inhabit, have grown. I should only hope that along with our experience and the technology evolving, that the quality of the work and the maturity of the work is hopefully starting to show as we get long in the tooth.”