Jim Bakker
It was an accusation of rape which hastened the process which brought down the ministry known as The PTL Club, run by an Assemblies of God minister named James Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye Bakker. Broadcast from Charlotte, North Carolina and reaching nearly one hundred stations and twelve million viewers, The PTL Clubs’ fundraising soon attracted the attention of the Charlotte Observer, which investigated the Bakker’s for their activities.
The Bakker’s had built the nearby Heritage USA amusement park and sold lifetime memberships in the park for $1,000. The lifetime membership included a three-day stay at the resort, which the Observer noted had only a single 500 room hotel. The Bakker’s sold many thousands of lifetime memberships, but no additional hotel space had been added to accommodate members.
The money had instead covered park expenses and a hefty payment of well over $3 million to Jim Bakker. Two sets of books covering the finances of the Bakker’s schemes were uncovered and when one of them which revealed a payment of $279,000 to a former employee, Jessica Hahn, was discovered it was soon established that it had been made to buy her silence over being raped by Bakker and another associate.
Bakker resigned from PTL the day after the payoff was revealed and despite denying the rape he admitted improprieties with Hahn. Jerry Falwell excoriated Bakker in the media, calling him, among other things, “…the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity…” in the history of the religion. Falwell also took control of Heritage USA, which he retained determinedly for some time, recognizing its income potential.
Bakker was convicted of 24 federal counts of fraud and was fined a half-million dollars and sentenced to 45 years in prison in 1988. His appeals led to his conviction being upheld but his sentence thrown out, and he was re-sentenced to eight years in 1992. He was released from prison in 1994 and returned to preaching. Divorced from Tammy Faye while in prison he since remarried, and now focuses his message on surviving the end of days. To help do so, he sells buckets of survival food as part of his message to his true believers.