Televangelist Jim Bakker, who founded a lucrative ministry during the 1970s but was felled by a sex scandal and a conviction for fraud and conspiracy that landed him in federal prison, died on Monday. He was 86.
Bakker’s death was announced by his second wife, Lori Bakker, in a social media post. She did not provide a cause of death or say where he died, The New York Times reported. Bakker had what described as a mild stroke in 2020, according to the newspaper.
“He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry,” Lori Bakker wrote. “Jim finished his race with faith. His voice, his vision, and his legacy will never be forgotten.”
Bakker, along with his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, were Bible Belt preachers before evangelist Pat Robertson hired them in 1966 as personalities for his Christian Broadcasting Network, The Washington Post reported.
Their talk-show style of broadcasting, peppered with interviews, upbeat music, prayer and tearful fundraising pleas, drew a loyal viewing audience, according to the newspaper.
Bakker broke with Robertson in the early 1970s and founded his own broadcast network in 1975 out of Charlotte, North Carolina, WSOC reported. Their “The PTL Club” show served as its centerpiece, the Post reported. PTL stood for “Praise the Lord,” and later, “People That Love,” according to the newspaper.
The Bakkers drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and brought in yearly revenue as high as $129 million, the Times reported. They expanded their empire into the Heritage USA resort in Fort Mill, South Carolina, according to WSOC. The couple sold $1,000 shares in the resort, which the Times described as a “sort of Christian Disneyland” – a 2,500-acre site filled with water slides and skating, coupled with prayer and Bible study.
“If the Bible says we are to be fishers of men, then a water park is just the bait,” Bakker reportedly once said, according to the Post. “And I don’t see anything wrong in using some pretty fancy bait.”
Books by the Bakkers and gospel albums recorded by Tammy Faye Bakker were peddled on their shows, which included fundraising telethons, the newspaper reported.
Jim Bakker made no apologies for the financial success that he and his first wife enjoyed, according to the Times.
“Excess and success are close together,” he said during a 1985 interview. “Anyone who is successful has got to be excessive.”
The Bakkers’ run of success came to a halt in 1987 with the revelation that seven years earlier, Jim Bakker had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry, the Times reported. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped, which Bakker denied.
He still offered Hahn $265,000 from the PTL treasury to buy her silence, according to the newspaper.
The scandal led to his banishment from the Assemblies of God, and he stepped down from his show and related PTL interests, the Post reported. The Rev. Jerry Falwell took over the PTL ministry.
Bakker claimed he had been “wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues.”
His downfall, and his wife’s tears, would become fodder for jokes by late-night comedians, according to the newspaper.
More trouble loomed for Jim Bakker.
In 1988, he was indicted by a federal jury on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy, the Times reported. After a six-week trial in 1989, he was found guilty on all counts, was fined $500,000 and was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. The sentence would be trimmed, and Bakker was released from prison in 1994, according to the newspaper.
Tammy Faye Bakker filed for divorce in 1992 and married Roe Messner, a Bakker business associate, the Times reported. She died of cancer in 2007, when she was 65.
Over time, Jim Bakker admitted that his command of scripture had been tenuous. In his 1996 book, “I Was Wrong,” he wrote that his studies in prison had led him to understand that Jesus “did not have one good thing to say about money.”
“When I came to the awareness that I had actually been contradicting Christ, I was horrified,” he said.
James Orsen Bakker was born on Jan. 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan. His middle name was his parents’ misspelled tribute to Orson Welles, whose radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” had been a national sensation in 1938, the Times reported.
As a youth, Bakker was forbidden to watch television, but his father bought him an expensive tape recorder, which he used to practice speeches, according to the Post. He was a disc jockey at high school dances.
When he was 18, Bakker accidentally ran over a 3-year-old boy in a church parking lot while driving his father’s car, the newspaper reported. The boy recovered, but the forgiveness shown by the child’s parents inspired Bakker to become a minister.
While attending North Central Bible College -- now North Central University -- in Minneapolis, Bakker met fellow student Tamara Faye LaValley, the Times reported. They married in 1961 after their third date, according to the newspaper.
In 2003 and out of prison for nearly a decade, Bakker returned to the airwaves with a new television program, the Times reported.
“The Jim Bakker Show” was broadcast out of a cafe in Branson, Missouri, and was carried by several dozen Christian-themed stations. His partner was his second wife, Lori Beth Graham, whom he married in 1998, seven weeks after they met at an urban ministry in Los Angeles, according to the newspaper.
“I’m not back for the perfect people, the people who have it all together,” he said about his ministry in 2007. “I’m here for the broken and the bruised and the hurt. I’m here to say we have a God of second and third chances.”
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