Televangelist Jim Bakker, Convicted of Defrauding Followers in 1989, Dies at 86

Jim Bakker, the televangelist who turned a cable-access talk show into a $129-million-a-year empire and then lost it all to a sex scandal and a federal fraud conviction, died Monday, October 5, at age 86. His second wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death in a statement but did not give a cause.

"He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry," Lori Bakker said, according to PBS, ABC News and The Guardian, who all carried the same statement.

From Tent Revivals to 13 Million Viewers

Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and met his first wife, Tammy Faye, at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. They married in 1961, dropped out of school, and spent years preaching in tent revivals before Pat Robertson hired them at the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1965, according to the Associated Press reporting carried by ABC News and ABC11 Raleigh-Durham.

Bakker left CBN in 1972 and launched PTL Satellite Network two years later. The PTL Club, short for Praise the Lord, became a national phenomenon. At its peak in the mid-1980s it drew up to 13 million nightly viewers on 200 stations and pulled in $129 million a year, according to The Guardian.

The Bakkers built Heritage USA, a 2,300-acre Christian theme park and resort in Fort Mill, South Carolina, that employed 2,000 people and was, at the time, the third-most-visited theme park in the country, according to Baptist News Global. The money bought a fleet of black Cadillac limousines, vacation homes, truffles flown in from Brussels, a gold-plated bathtub and an air-conditioned doghouse, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The Collapse

The empire cracked in March 1987 when Bakker admitted to a 1980 sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn. Ministry funds were used to pay Hahn $265,000 to stay quiet, the BBC reported. Hahn said Bakker sexually assaulted her; Bakker maintained the encounter was consensual. He was defrocked and resigned, handing the ministry to Jerry Falwell.

Two years later, a jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, convicted Bakker on 24 counts of mail and wire fraud and conspiracy over a scheme selling lifetime vacation packages at Heritage USA that prosecutors said were never going to be honored. Sentencing judge Robert Potter said: "Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests," according to The Guardian. Bakker served more than four years in prison before his release in 1994.

Tammy Faye stood by him through the trial but divorced him in 1992 while he was still incarcerated. She was never charged. She died of cancer in 2007. Their two children, Jay and Tammy Sue, grew up on camera during the PTL years. Tammy Sue later produced her father's comeback show, while Jay became an evangelist with a notably less conservative theology and a strained relationship with his father. In a Facebook post reported by Baptist News Global, Jay Bakker wrote: "We had a very complicated relationship, and he was also my father and a grandfather, and I need to mourn in my own time."

The Comeback, and More Scrutiny

Out of prison, Bakker wrote a memoir titled "I Was Wrong," married Lori in 1998, and in 2003 launched The Jim Bakker Show from a compound near Branson, Missouri. The new ministry traded the prosperity gospel for End Times warnings, and Bakker sold buckets of freeze-dried survival food, fuel-less generators and a product called Silver Solution, which he claimed could help cure the coronavirus, according to the Los Angeles Times. That marketing drew fresh scrutiny from authorities, the paper reported, though no outcome of any such action was detailed in the available reporting. Bakker suffered a stroke in 2020 and continued broadcasting afterward.

Every outlet in this roundup, from PBS to The Guardian to the Associated Press wire carried by ABC News and ABC11, told essentially the same factual spine: the rise, the Hahn scandal, the fraud conviction, the prison term, the 2003 comeback. The Guardian added the sharpest historical framing, comparing Bakker's fall to the fictional preacher-huckster Elmer Gantry and noting he became "a staunch supporter of Donald Trump" in his later years. None of the sources specified what led to Bakker's death, and none detailed any pending legal matters at the time of his death.

Bakker's funeral arrangements had not been announced as of Tuesday. The future of The Jim Bakker Show, which Lori Bakker co-hosted and which Tammy Sue Bakker helped produce, remains unclear.