The Shady Side Of Jim Bakker

Back in the late 1970s — long before fellow televangelist Joel Osteen founded his megachurch — Jim Bakker and then-wife Tammy Faye Bakker were traveling Pentecostal preachers who came upon the idea of creating a evangelical puppet show for a Minnesota TV station. Their modest production caught the eye of popular televangelist Pat Robertson and, as Christianity Today reported, he helped launch their own talk show, The PTL Club.

An acronym for "Praise the Lord," The PTL Club was sort of "a Christian version of The Tonight Show," PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire author John Wigger told ABC News in 2019. As the series' popularity grew, so did the volume of viewer donations, with the show's former security chief, Don Hardister, recalling to the publication, "We had a cash office and at times there was certainly more money in than ... I could imagine. People would send us mink coats, diamond rings, deeds. I mean, we got all sorts of donations." 

For their part, the Bakkers didn't necessarily try to conceal their newfound (and seemingly shady) wealth. By the 1980s — an era characterized by conspicuous consumption — their surprising purchases rivaled, say, the Trump family, with the Los Angeles Times reporting on such perks as "gold-plated swan-shaped bathroom fixtures" and "an air-conditioned doghouse."

In 1987, reports emerged surrounding a sexual encounter Jim Bakker admittedly had with church secretary Jessica Hahn, 21 at the time of the incident, seven years earlier. As journalists began digging, they uncovered evidence that Bakker, who was 20 years her senior, spent about $265,000 in hush money to buy Hahn's silence, per The Washington Post. She was reportedly even forced to sign a confession admitting it was she — not Bakker — who was the sexual aggressor. 

"That was essentially the straw that broke the camel's back," attorney John Stewart, who had represented Hahn in her federal court case, said. "She didn't want to live a lie." The media outlet detailed how Hahn eventually went public, telling her side of the story in a blockbuster interview with Playboy and then testifying before a federal grand jury. According to her account, she was lured to Bakker's hotel room by evangelist John Wesley Fletcher, who reportedly told her, "You're going to do something tremendous for God."

"The way Jessica Hahn later described her sexual encounter with Jim Bakker," author John Wigger told later ABC News, "sounds very much like rape."

If you ask Jim Bakker, he was supposedly set up amid his adulterous encounter with then-21-year-old Jessica Hahn. According to the Charlotte Observer, Bakker alleged that he'd been "wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends [who] conspired to betray [him] into a sexual encounter." But as the scandal caught fire, the disgraced televangelist stepped down from the PTL, handing over control to Reverend Jerry Falwell. While Bakker saw his resignation as a temporary measure to keep him out of the spotlight until things blew over, it didn't turn out that way. 

The Washington Post reports that Falwell dug into the ministry's finances and was shocked by what he supposedly found. "We don't know the depth of the problems," he claimed of the discrepancies. Fearing there would be some "staggering" revelations to come, Falwell confirmed that $265,000 in hush money was indeed paid to Jessica Hahn, coming out of church funds.

In light of this new information, Falwell took permanent control of PTL and removed Bakker from his own ministry, barring him from ever returning. "We don't know what we're going to do with our lives," a shocked Tammy Faye Bakker told the publication. "Jim's almost numb."

In 1989, Jim Bakker was found guilty of all 24 counts of fraud after prosecutors targeted the 66,000 "lifetime partnerships" he sold at $1,000 a pop for a free stay at his theme park's hotel, the Charlotte Observer reported. According to the Los Angeles Times, the disgraced televangelist received a sentence of 45 years in a federal penitentiary, and would be eligible for parole after 10 years behind bars. The sentencing memo requested that Bakker be ordered to pay restitution, with unsettled claims adding up to about $100 million. He was ultimately fined $500,000.

"I'm deeply sorry for those I have hurt," Bakker told the judge ahead of his sentencing. "I have sinned. But never in my life did I intend to defraud." As stiff as the sentence was, Jessica Hahn still felt it wasn't severe enough. "In my opinion, I still feel like it won't add up to the years that people worked to save up money to give to PTL," she later said, per the Los Angeles Times.

According to The New York Times, Jim Bakker was released from prison in 1994 and placed on parole after serving just about five years of his 18-year sentence. Having lost his ministry amid scandal, his wife following divorce, and with his reputation shattered, Bakker decided to write a book. 

Two years later, he released I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL Power to Prison and Beyond. For Bakker, it seemed the book represented a dual opportunity: attempting some damage control while making a few bucks at the same time. He claimed to have atoned for his many sins, alleging that prison had given him time to contemplate the error of his ways. Money, he alleged, had corrupted his soul. As the Charlotte Observer reported, Bakker wrote that he became "physically nauseated" while studying the Bible behind bars when he realized the prosperity gospel he'd been preaching was actually "contradicting Christ." 

The book, ABC News later noted, also saw Bakker insisting that his sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn was consensual, despite her insistence it was anything but.

If The Jim Bakker Show illustrated anything, it was that its host hadn't lost his touch for asking viewers to send him their money. The Charlotte Observer reports that the Bakkers had moved their modest operation in Branson to the small Missouri town of Blue Eye in 2008 — but a major expansion was underway. 

Millionaire Jerry Crawford — who had previously funded their Branson operation — bankrolled the Bakkers, allegedly paying $17 million to buy 800 acres of land, as well as for the construction of the Morningside Church, from which The Jim Bakker Show would broadcast. The ambitious project, in addition to the main building, also included 100 condos. That's right: condos. Sound familiar? According to The Jim Bakker Show's website, this new venture — Morningside USA — wasn't just a worship center, but also included shopping facilities, a camping and RV park, restaurants, hotels, and cottages. Also onsite was the Morningside School of Media, presumably set up to train the next generation of televangelists.

While the CDC has instructed that one of the best lines of defense against coronavirus is washing your hands, Jim Bakker made headlines when he offered another solution ... but for all the wrong reasons.

According to CBS News, The Jim Bakker Show's website offered a pseudo-scientific product called "Silver Sol Liquid" — advertised as four 4-ounce bottles for $80 a pop — in February 2020, which claimed to have the ability to diagnose and even cure COVID-19. Naturally, the FDA caught wind of this faux coronavirus treatment and sent a letter warning that these unproven claims were in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. After receiving the FDA's attempt "to protect consumers from certain products that, without approval or authorization by FDA, claim to mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose or cure COVID-19 in people," Bakker and Morningside Church Productions were sued by the state of Missouri for being in violation of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act by "falsely promising to consumers that Silver Solution can cure, eliminate, kill or deactivate coronavirus and/or boost elderly consumers' immune system and help keep them healthy." The lawsuit also pointed out that there is "no vaccine, pill, potion or other product available" to treat the virus (via CBS News). 

Bakker's not the only celeb to dish out unhelpful advice amid the coronavirus pandemic, but he's at least since heeded the FDA's warning to take the liquid silver solution off his website.