Jim Bakker, Televangelist Who Went to Prison for Fraud, Dies at 86

Jim Bakker, who turned a children's puppet show into a Christian television empire and then lost it to a sex scandal and a federal fraud conviction, died Oct. 5 at 86.

His second wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death on the Facebook and Instagram pages of his most recent program, "The Jim Bakker Show." She did not give a cause of death.

"It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening," she wrote. She called him a pioneer of Christian television and "my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry."

Jay Bakker, his son with first wife Tammy Faye and a preacher himself with a far more liberal view of Christianity, confirmed the death in his own Facebook post. "We had a very complicated relationship and he was also my father and a grandfather and I need to mourn in my own time," he wrote.

Bakker had suffered a stroke in 2020. He and Lori lived near Branson, Missouri, where they had taped their show since 2003.

A Michigan Factory Town, Then a Puppet Show

James Orson Bakker was born on January 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of an auto parts factory worker who kept a strict fundamentalist Christian household.

He met Tammy Faye LaValley at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. They married in 1961 and both dropped out of school to become traveling evangelists in the Pentecostalist Assemblies of God denomination. He preached. She sang and played the accordion as they worked churches and tent revivals around the country.

The couple caught the attention of televangelist Pat Robertson, and in 1965 they launched a children's show on Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. By 1966, Bakker was hosting "The 700 Club." He left CBN in 1972, and two years later started PTL in Charlotte, beaming the message "God loves you. He really does" into homes across the country and overseas.

13 Million Viewers and a 2,300-Acre Theme Park

"The PTL Club" became the ministry's signature show, taped mostly at a sprawling complex just south of Charlotte, North Carolina. The format ran like a Christian version of "The Tonight Show," with celebrity guests telling their born-again stories, upbeat sermons from Bakker and songs from Tammy Faye in her trademark heavy mascara.

PTL stood for Praise the Lord, and also People That Love. Detractors, pointing to his daily on-air pleas for donations, said it should have stood for "pass the loot."

At its peak the ministry drew 13 million viewers on 200 TV stations and took in $129 million a year, according to a Reuters account of his life. The operation employed 2,000 people and included the 2,300-acre Heritage USA complex in Fort Mill, South Carolina, a theme park and hotel built on the small donations of hundreds of thousands of believers, some of whom pledged their life savings.

March 1987 and the Jessica Hahn Payment

The empire cracked in March 1987, when The Charlotte Observer reported that PTL had paid church secretary Jessica Hahn to stay quiet about a sexual encounter with Bakker years earlier. The payoff came to $265,000 in ministry funds. The encounter had taken place in 1980.

In his resignation statement, Bakker acknowledged the encounter but said he had been "wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate." Hahn accused him of rape. Bakker maintained the encounter was consensual, and those competing accounts were never resolved.

Hahn went on to pose nude for Playboy, became a regular on "The Howard Stern Show" and briefly dated comedian Sam Kinison.

Bakker resigned from PTL and handed operations to Jerry Falwell, the pastor and broadcaster who founded the Moral Majority. Bakker was later defrocked. Further reporting turned up the spending that defined the scandal in the public mind: an air-conditioned doghouse at the Bakkers' lakefront home and gold-plated bathroom fixtures.

Convicted on All 24 Counts

A federal investigation of PTL's finances produced an indictment in 1988 on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. The trial in Charlotte ran six weeks. In 1989, a jury convicted Bakker on all 24 fraud and conspiracy counts.

Prosecutors said he had defrauded followers of $158 million by selling promises of lifetime annual vacations at Heritage USA that the ministry could not deliver. They said he siphoned $3.7 million to bankroll several homes, luxury cars, mink coats, diamonds and servants. They described him as a petty con man driven by greed and a hunger for power.

Judge Robert Potter said at sentencing that people of faith were "ridiculed as being saps" for "money-grubbing preachers or priests."

Bakker's own words to the court were different. "I have sinned," he said. "I have made mistakes. But never in my life did I intend to defraud anyone."

Potter ordered 45 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced to eight years. Richard Dortch, Bakker's chief aide, served 18 months of an eight-year sentence after pleading guilty to reduced charges in exchange for testifying against his boss. Tammy Faye was never charged. After the guilty verdict, she stood in front of reporters' microphones and sang the hymn "On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand."

Prison, Divorce and a Book Called "I Was Wrong"

Bakker served just less than five years and was paroled in 1994.

Tammy Faye had stood by him for years, then filed for divorce in 1992 while he was still locked up, just short of their 31st anniversary. She married Roe Messner, the contractor whose company built much of Heritage USA. Messner was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 1995 and spent about two years in prison. Tammy Faye rebuilt her life as a Christian TV personality who played knowingly with her own image for secular audiences. She died of colon cancer in 2007 at 65.

Out of prison, Bakker renounced the prosperity gospel he once preached and wrote a book titled "I Was Wrong." On CNN in 2000, he said he had been given a second chance at life and had a beautiful wife who loved him. He said he was embarrassed by the man he used to be. "I'm put back together by my faith in Jesus Christ," he said. "He forgives everyone. And if I don't receive his forgiveness, how can I teach anyone else that God will forgive them?"

Branson, Food Buckets and the Missouri Lawsuit

Bakker married Lori in 1998. The couple adopted five children in 2002 and launched "The Jim Bakker Show" in 2003. By 2008 they were taping at a development called Morningside outside Branson, Missouri, that carried echoes of Heritage USA.

The sales pitch had changed. The new show leaned apocalyptic and survivalist, selling freeze-dried food buckets and water filtration systems rather than lifetime vacations. The on-air requests for donations never stopped.

Politics worked its way in, too. In 2017 Bakker said Christians would launch a civil war if President Donald Trump were impeached. Trump later became the first U.S. president to be impeached twice.

Missouri's lawsuit said Bakker and a guest claimed across 11 episodes in February and March of 2020 that a product called Silver Solution could cure COVID-19. The Missouri Attorney General's office said anyone who had bought it from the show should know it could not cure or treat coronavirus. In June 2021, Bakker and Morningside Church Productions Inc. settled the state's lawsuit, agreeing to $156,000 in refunds to people who had paid money or given contributions to get the product.

Andrew Garfield Played Him, Jessica Chastain Won the Oscar

The Bakkers were famous enough in their prime to be a standing joke on late-night television and a recurring target on "Saturday Night Live." Their rise and collapse reached theaters in September 2021 with "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," with Andrew Garfield as Bakker and Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye. Chastain won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role.

Bakker's path from the TV pulpit to a federal prison cell drew comparisons to Elmer Gantry, the fictional preacher-huckster. He was not a fire-and-brimstone man on camera. He came from a working-class home, talked easily to ordinary people and sold a friendly Christian message, with the collection plate never far away.

Lori Bakker's statement said her husband gave 66 years of his life to preaching the Gospel and that even in his final days his heart was still set on the work. She wrote that he finished his race with faith.

Bakker had two children with Tammy Faye, including Jay, and five adopted children with Lori. Both Lori and Jay Bakker asked for privacy.