Jerry Falwell Jr is accusing a photography company of doctoring photos of him at a nightclub, but the company is clapping back by releasing a whole bunch of pictures of the evangelical leader enjoying the Miami nightlife.
Falwell is the president of America’s best-known evangelical college, Liberty University, and an early Christian conservative supporter of Donald Trump.
Liberty is so conservative that they don’t allow students to drink, even if they live off-campus and they’re over 21. The school also considers it “improper social behavior” for students to interact with the opposite sex after dark or display any affection for one another beyond hand-holding.
A huge expose by Politico earlier this week showed that many officials at Liberty University were concerned that Falwell wasn’t living his best fundamentalist Christian life. One of the accusations was that he went to the WALL nightclub in Miami with his son Trey Falwell.
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Politico licensed a photo from World Red Eye, which photographs nightlife in Miami. Falwell can be seen in the photo.
In this July 19, 2014, photo from Miami Beach's WALL nightclub, Jerry Falwell Jr. (circled here in red) can be seen among the clubgoers. | Seth Browarnik/WorldRedEye.com pic.twitter.com/m3wXHI89n0
— Jack Hutton (@jackhutton) September 9, 2019
Piety, no?: Left: A zoomed-in close-up of Jerry Falwell Jr. in the crowd at WALL nightclub in Miami Beach, taken from the photo at the start of this section. Right: Also at the club that night were Trey Falwell and his wife, Sarah. | Seth Browarnik/WorldRedEye.com pic.twitter.com/YGYGp08pNW
— Jack Hutton (@jackhutton) September 9, 2019
“There was no picture snapped of me at WALL nightclub or any other nightclub,” Falwell told Politico when asked about his alleged visit to the nightclub. “I’m sure you already knew that though.”
Politico said that, according to unnamed sources at the school, his reaction was to get an “IT guy” to lower the image’s ranking in Google search results.
But to the press, Falwell said the image was “photoshopped.”
Now World Red Eye is responding to the accusation that it doctored the image. In a post on their website, founder Seth Browarnik said that they didn’t even know why Politico licensed the photo before the expose was published. They said that they found out along with everyone else that Falwell was in the picture.
“For 21 years, I have maintained an impeccable reputation for documenting Miami Beach’s storied social scene,” Browarnik wrote.
He said that Falwell’s “baseless allegation” is untrue and that the Politico article made him go through pictures from a July 19, 2014, shoot at WALL.
The photography company “discovered an additional four photos that include Mr. Falwell and two more of his son.”
The pictures are up on their website.
Maybe making false accusations about a photography company isn’t the best idea, considering it’s literally their job to take pictures of everything.
