The Truth About Tammy Faye Bakker's Second Husband
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While those familiar with the life and times of televangelist-turned-LGBTQ+ icon Tammy Faye Bakker might automatically link her to her ex-husband Jim Bakker (her fellow co-founder and co-host of their Christian TV program "The PTL Club"), he was far from her only significant romantic relationship.
Before the Internet age of stanning and celebrity relationship mania, the Bakkers launched their entrepreneurial empire by branding it as synonymous with their coupledom, using themselves as an example of a good Christian marriage to their viewers — whether consciously or not. But in the late 1980s, the couple began to drift apart. Writing of their marital troubles in her autobiography (via Biography), Tammy described how their relationship issues seeped into their professional and personal lives. "You could feel it on the set, you could feel it when visiting our home," she recounted. "There was little energy left over for deepening our relationship."
Jim's preoccupations were mainly concerned with Heritage USA, a Christian theme park the Bakkers had also built, and how to fund it alongside their show and their lavish lifestyles. Though both ventures brought in millions per year, Jim devised a timeshare-like membership scheme to keep the money rolling in — a scheme which would ultimately turn fraudulent, and which would lead to Jim's conviction and five-year prison sentence in 1989 (via History). During that time, Tammy divorced her first husband, and later married her second, Roe Messner. So who was he?
Tammy Faye and Roe Messner grew closer in the aftermath of a scandal
Tammy Faye Bakker knew Roe Messner (both pictured above) well before her much-publicized split from her first husband, Jim Bakker. As The Columbus Dispatch reported in 2015, Messner had been an employee of the Bakkers' corporation and was made the chief builder for the televangelist couple's Christian theme park, Heritage USA, located at their South Carolina headquarters. By all appearances, Messner was just a colleague — that is, until Jim Bakker's fraudulent, underhanded dealings came to light in the late 1980s.
In an interview Messner gave on "Larry King Tonight" shortly following Tammy Faye Bakker's death in 2007, Messner maintained that he and Tammy grew close only after Jim was arrested and sent to prison. In an older video clip featured during Larry King's segment with Messner, Tammy herself could be seen explaining how their relationship blossomed. "I had always liked Roe," Tammy said in the footage. "I thought Roe was a really neat man. And I began to love Roe as I began to know Roe. He — that's when the spark happened to me when we really started getting to know one another."
While the pair married a year after Tammy divorced Jim in 1992, it seems that other legal woes prevented the newly-minted Messners from a happily ever after — and once again, it all had to do with fraud.
Tammy Faye Bakker's second husband wasn't entirely good news either, but their love lasted
Less than three years after Tammy Faye Bakker married her second husband Roe Messner, Messner was arrested and sent to prison for bankruptcy fraud, which, per the Associated Press, involved "concealing assets from creditors" Messner owed and intentionally giving "false statements about the bankruptcy case," per AP. In addition to being ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in restitution to those he defrauded, Messner served two years in prison, according to The Columbus Dispatch. But rather than divorcing Messner, as she did with her first husband, Tammy remained faithful to Messner, and it stayed that way until her death in 2007.
Though Messner has been evasive concerning his own conviction while speaking to the public, the same can't be said for sharing his feelings about Tammy. Speaking to The Columbia Dispatch in 2015, Messner recounted his admiration and deep love for Tammy. "She was the most common, down-to-earth person you ever saw," Messner recounted. "The press always made her out to be some nitwit type of person. She was totally different. Her IQ was 165. She was so sharp and different than everybody thought she was."