Jim Bakker, PTL televangelist convicted of fraud, dies at 86

Jim Bakker, who built the first Christian satellite network and a nightly television show that drew as many as 13 million viewers before a sex scandal and a federal fraud conviction cost him both, died on Oct. 5 at 86.

It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening

Lori Bakker posted the announcement on the Facebook and Instagram accounts of her husband's most recent program, The Jim Bakker Show, and did not disclose a cause of death. He had suffered a stroke in 2020, CBS News reported. His son Jay Bakker, an evangelist who holds a far more liberal view of Christianity than his father did, confirmed the death in his own Facebook post, NBC News reported.

Resignation and federal conviction

Bakker's empire began to crack in March 1987, when he admitted a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn and was forced out of the ministry he had built, turning operations over to the pastor and broadcaster Jerry Falwell, CBS News reported. Hahn said she had been sexually assaulted by Bakker, according to Live 5 News. He was later defrocked.

The Irish Times reported that the encounter took place in 1980 and that Hahn received a $265,000 payment from ministry funds in exchange for her silence. A federal indictment on mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy charges followed in 1988, and a jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, convicted Bakker the next year on all 24 counts after a six-week trial.

Those of us who do have a religion are ridiculed as being saps for money-grubbing preachers or priests

The judge ordered 45 years in prison, a sentence later cut to eight, CBS News reported. Bakker served nearly five years and was paroled in 1994. His chief aide, Richard Dortch, served 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to reduced charges in exchange for testifying against him, and Tammy Faye was never charged. Bakker told the court he had sinned and made mistakes but had never intended to defraud anyone.

How the network was built

James Orson Bakker was born on Jan. 2, 1940, the Irish Times reported. He was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and met Tammy Faye at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, according to CBS News. They married in 1961, dropped out and started a traveling ministry, with Bakker preaching and Tammy Faye singing and playing the accordion at churches and tent revivals.

God loves you. He really does

Pat Robertson noticed the couple, and in 1965 they launched a children's show on his Christian Broadcasting Network. By 1966 Bakker was hosting The 700 Club. He left CBN in 1972 and formed the PTL Satellite Network two years later, the first Christian satellite network, which carried his program into homes across the country and overseas, NBC News reported.

The PTL Club became the network's signature program, a Christian version of The Tonight Show with guests, Christian entertainers and born-again testimonials from some of the biggest celebrities of the 1980s. Bakker offered upbeat sermons; Tammy Faye, in her trademark heavy mascara, sang. Most episodes were taped at the couple's complex just south of Charlotte, CBS News reported.

PTL stood for Praise The Lord and People That Love, and detractors, pointing to the unabashed daily on-air appeals for money, said it should have stood for pass the loot, the Irish Times reported.

The ministry at its peak

Heritage USA, the Christian theme park and resort the Bakkers built at Fort Mill, South Carolina, covered 2,300 acres and ranked among the largest theme parks in the world. It was paid for with small donations from hundreds of thousands of believers, NBC News reported, and the ministry employed 2,000 people at its height.

Part of that money came in through lifetime memberships that promised buyers annual stays at the park's hotels, far more than the rooms could hold, and the memberships were at the heart of his fraud conviction. He did not preach fire and brimstone. The Irish Times described an affable message aimed at working people, friendly in tone and threaded through with requests for donations.

Prosecutors painted Bakker as a selfish and petty con man driven by greed and lust for power, saying he had defrauded followers of $158 million and siphoned $3.7 million to pay for several homes, luxury cars, mink coats, diamonds, servants and an air-conditioned dog house, the Irish Times reported.

Life after the sentence

Bakker left prison in 1994, renounced the prosperity gospel he had preached and wrote a book titled I Was Wrong, according to the Irish Times. He married Lori in 1998. Tammy Faye had divorced him in 1992, just short of their 31st anniversary, and later married Roe Messner, a building contractor whose projects included Heritage USA; she died of colon cancer in 2007, CBS News reported.

The Branson years

The Jim Bakker Show launched in 2003 and was taped near Branson, Missouri, where the couple lived, CBS News reported. In 2008 production moved to Morningside, a development of nearly 600 acres in Blue Eye, outside the city, that bore similarities to Heritage USA, the Irish Times reported. The program aired throughout the United States and Canada, according to KY3.

On the new program Bakker discussed Christianity, biblical prophecy and current events, sold survivalist products and again pleaded with his followers for donations. He became a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump and said in 2017 that Christians would launch a civil war if Trump were impeached, the Irish Times reported.

Eric Schmitt, then Missouri's attorney general, sued Bakker and Morningside in March 2020, seeking an injunction ordering him to stop selling a product called Silver Solution as a treatment for COVID-19, KY3 reported. The suit said Bakker and a guest made the cure claim on 11 episodes in February and March of that year. The case settled in June 2021, with $156,000 in refunds to people who had paid or donated to obtain the product, according to CBS News.

Played by Spacey and Garfield

Kevin Spacey played Bakker in Fall from Grace, an NBC television film broadcast in 1990. Andrew Garfield played him in The Eyes of Tammy Faye in 2021, and Jessica Chastain won the Oscar for best actress in 2022 for her performance as Tammy Faye, Deadline reported.

Long before either film, the couple were fixtures of comedy, skewered by late-night hosts in the 1980s and 1990s and parodied on Saturday Night Live for their lavish lifestyle and Tammy Faye's abundant makeup, CBS News reported.

Bakker and Tammy Faye had two children, including Jay. He and Lori adopted five children in 2002, CBS News reported.

In her statement, Lori Bakker said her husband had given 66 years of his life to preaching the Gospel and called him a pioneer of Christian television, adding that even in his final days his heart was still for the work of God and the Gospel. She asked for prayers and privacy for the family.

The statement did not say what will become of The Jim Bakker Show, which Deadline reported he had been hosting on digital platforms at the time of his death.