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Jerry Falwell Jr.'s son no longer employed by Liberty U
months after father resigned
By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter
Thursday, April 15, 2021
The Freedom Tower at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The Tower is the home for Liberty's School of Divinity. | Courtesy Liberty University
The son of Jerry Falwell Jr. is no longer serving in a leadership position at Liberty University, less than a year after his father resigned as president of the Lynchburg, Virginia-based evangelical Christian school amid a sex scandal.
Liberty University spokesperson Scott Lamb told Politico on Wednesday that Jerry Falwell III, also known as Trey Falwell, is “no longer employed by the university.”
Trey Falwell, whose grandfather founded the university in 1971, had served as vice president of support services at Liberty. Before his father's departure, some had assumed that he would one day take over as Liberty president.
Lamb declined to tell Politico why Trey Falwell left his position and did not explain if Falwell’s son, Wesley, or his daughter-in-law are still employed with the university.
Save71, a group of students, faculty and alumni calling for leadership reform at Liberty, took to Twitter in response to the news. The group claimed that they “received a tip last month that Trey, his brother and his sister-in-law had been given 30 days’ notice that they had to leave.”
“We couldn’t confirm it then, so we didn’t report it. This seems to be confirmation,” added the group. “Many in the LU community have long assumed that Trey would one day take over as Liberty’s president, but that began to change when Falwell Jr left.”
Last August, Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned from his position as president and chancellor of Liberty University following a highly-publicized sex scandal regarding his wife and former pool boy.
Soon after, Falwell filed a lawsuit against Liberty, claiming that the school had harmed his reputation by jumping “to conclusions about the claims made against my character.”
But last December, Falwell dropped the lawsuit, stating at the time that he was going “to take a time out from my litigation against Liberty University, but he assured he would “continue to keep all options on the table for an appropriate resolution to the matter.”
Although Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his son Trey are no longer part of the university leadership, Liberty has not completely severed its ties to the founding family.
Last week, the university announced that Thomas Road Baptist Church Senior Pastor Jonathan Falwell, another son of founder Jerry Falwell Sr., will become Liberty’s new campus pastor.
The announcement came after the school’s current campus pastor and vice president of spiritual development, David Nasser, announced to the community that he was leaving the university at the end of the semester to work with a nonprofit in Tennesee.
Former Kanakuk counselor Peter Newman named
in new sex-abuse lawsuit
Gregory J. Holman
Springfield News-Leader
Missouri: An anonymous "John Doe" plaintiff who says he suffered sex abuse while he attended a Christian youth camp based near Branson recently sued a former counselor for civil damages.
Filed April 8, the new lawsuit names only Newman. It does not name Kanakuk as a defendant.
The new suit seeks $5 million in damages from Newman personally and is the second lawsuit against Newman to be filed in Christian County courts in the past three months. On Feb 4., a separate anonymous plaintiff sued Newman for the same amount of money.
Craig Heidemann, attorney for the plaintiffs, dubbed John Doe XII and John Doe XIII in court filings, declined to comment on the lawsuits during a brief interview Monday.
In the latest lawsuit, attorneys for John Doe XIII argue that he began to be groomed by Newman for sexual abuse as early as 1999, when he was an underage camp attendee.
The lawsuit accuses the former counselor of sexually abusing the boy in multiple locales: "Newman’s home, the Kanakuk Tree Tops Ropes Course, the Kanakuk Bunk house, the Kanakuk K-Kountry Gym, and Kanakuk’s lake."
The lawsuit adds, "During each of these activities Defendant Newman falsely represented to the young Plaintiff that these behaviors were okay or normal and were not 'sinful'."
Echoing similar suits filed in the past, Doe XIII's complaint asserts that before Newman’s 2009 arrest and prosecution in Taney County, there were "at least 57 alleged victims of Newman including Plaintiff."
Newman did not have an attorney on file for the case Monday.
Monday evening, Kanakuk marketing officials said they declined to comment on the new lawsuit against Newman, referring the News-Leader to a recently-published statement on sex abuse on the camp's website.
Kanakuk under scrutiny
Accusations of sex abuse tied to Newman and Kanakuk have made headlines recently as two journalists with conservative online news site The Dispatch published a report on March 28 that asserted the Newman scandal was more widespread and systemic than previously understood.
"... The limited scope of the guilty plea concealed the sheer scale of the abuse," wrote David French and Nancy French with The Dispatch. "The resulting civil lawsuits received little attention, and nondisclosure agreements silenced victims and kept evidence under seal."
In a statement on the camp's website, Kanakuk noted that "no charges for failure to report were ever filed against any Kanakuk staff" in connection with the Newman case and that "we were devastated by the deceptive practices of this individual, and continue to grieve with the victims and their families."
Kanakuk also said it developed a "comprehensive Child Protection Plan" because of the "tragedy."
Does it include reporting violations?
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