Oh Damn, 'The View' And Barbara Walters Owe Jessica Hahn A Big Apology

As does the whole country, really.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like we've come very far, especially given that this month we've had to watch as our reproductive rights get rolled back to a time before disco. But sometimes it does, at least when you realize how horrifying things were not too long ago.

Yesterday, while looking for a video of Jim Bakker's arrest, I happened upon an 11-year-old clip from "The View," rather gruesomely titled, "Jessica Hahn Smacked Down By Barbara Walters Over Affair." It is only 38 seconds, but it is an extremely unpleasant 38 seconds.

In the clip, former host Sherri Shepherd starts to ask Hahn about her "affair" with Jim Bakker. Hahn quickly jumps in to correct her, saying it was not "an affair" like the one Barbara Walters had with Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke in the 1970s.

But before she could say, as she has since the beginning, that she was drugged and raped, Hahn was interrupted by Walters, who snapped, "This is about you, my dear. this is not about me. OK?" The audience applauded wildly.

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In 1987, televangelist and food bucket purveyor Jim Bakker resigned from his position as the head of PTL Satellite Network and the Heritage USA theme park after the Charlotte Observer started investigating an incident seven years prior in which he paid Jessica Hahn, who was then his 21-year-old secretary, $279,000 from PTL funds so that she would keep quiet about an incident he claims was consensual sex and that she has always maintained was rape.

Hahn says she was a sheltered virgin at the time, and that Bakker's fellow PTL preacher John Fletcher put something in her drink so that Bakker could rape her and then raped her himself. She kept quiet about it for years until it came out without her consent, at which point she said she was raped, and the nation responded by calling her a homewrecking whore and turning her into a national joke. Indeed, it was Hahn saying "I am not a bimbo" in an interview for Playboyin which she also posed nude that led in part to the media declaring 1987 "The Year of The Bimbo." 

Then, as now, there was a particular sort of rage reserved for women who were seen as undeservedly "getting attention," either for being victims, not being good enough at being victims, or for being involved in a scandal of some kind. Or for literally any other reason. Even today, in our slightly more enlightened era, few people are more despised than a woman who hath violated our unwritten laws of who does and does not merit attention, especially if she is seen as having committed the even more egregious crime of "drawing attention to herself."

Hahn would later tell Larry King she posed nude for Playboy because she had $40 to her name, was living in hiding in a hotel and had no one on her side. Hugh Hefner offered her a million dollars, a place to live and she took it. She also said of her experience that "Those guys, they never took advantage of me. They took care of me. They fed me. They protected me and I'd love to do it again." Which, you know, seems a lot better than what happened with the Jesus people.

Here is a transcript from Hahn's 2005 interview with Larry King, where she described her rape:

HAHN: Yes. So, Jim Bakker ripped off the bedspread and said, you know, my wife doesn't make me feel like a man anymore. And, you know, when you help the shepherd, you help the sheep. And so...

KING: Did you think you were performing -- what did you think while it was happening.

HAHN: I thought, I don't want to get pregnant, because, you know, I was a virgin, you know.

KING: Did it hurt? What was it like?

HAHN: It hurt like hell. And then, after that, John Fletcher comes in, who was the middle man, and said, you know, you can't just be with Jim Bakker. You've got to be with me. He threw me on the floor, head back. I had blood coming out of my back. And, you know, he just went nuts on me.

KING: Did you make charges right away?

HAHN: I kept quiet for eight years.

KING: Why?

HAHN: Because I did not -- my first quote was, I did not want to hurt the church.

It's not exactly difficult to believe her over Jim Bakker, a convicted fraudster who spent the pandemic hawking fake cures that turn people blue. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem like people at the time were sure she was lying so much as they didn't think what happened to Hahn was that bad, or at least not as bad as her posing for Playboy for a million dollars.

This, from Pennsylvania newspaper the Morning Call, is real special:

Remember Jessica Hahn? It's hard to forget the woman who gave new meaning to the term "bimbo." She was the church secretary who was, she claimed, seduced by PTL leader Jim Bakker, bribed to keep her lip zipped about the dalliance and who then blabbed to the world about it in excruciating detail. Poor Jessica.

There was a time she might have been considered a victim. But her liaison with Hugh Hefner, her nude photo spread in Playboy magazine, her recent $12,000 worth of plastic surgery to rearrange certain portions of her anatomy and her willingness to cash in on her notoriety make Ms. Hahn something less than a shrinking violet, worthy of pity.

"Seduced" does seem to have been a popular euphemism for rape in 1987.

It would have been bad enough, what happened to Hahn in the media, if it had been consensual — especially considering the power dynamics in play in that situation — but to go through that as a rape victim is unimaginable. Practically everything you can read about her from that era is startling in its cruelty. Even this brief Washington Post article extolling the virtues of Barbara Bush:

After a year that saw Donna Rice, Fawn Hall and Jessica Hahn parade across the national stage like the finalists in a Miss America-Gone-Bad pageant, there is finally a woman in the headlines who prefers working in her garden to fooling around with somebody's else's husband, secreting government documents or moving into the Playboy mansion.

If that doesn't make you want to scream endlessly into a void, I don't know what will. But back to the other Babs.

Given that this exchange occurred in 2011, there was a good deal of media coverage of it. Business Insider referred to Hahn as Bakker's "mistress" and didn't mention rape. HuffPost's article had the same title as the video above, and only included a brief parenthetical about Hahn having "claimed" she was raped. A CBS article was slightly less gross about it and interpreted the incident as Hahn "calling out" Walters rather than the other way around, and directly said that Hahn has always said she was raped.

And here's Gawker's coverage of the incident:

 Tacky Guest Jessica Hahn Insults Barbara Walters on The View  
As part of "Where Are They Now?" week, The View had onJessica Hahn, who had a sexual encounter with1980's televangelist Jim Bakker. Rudely, she juxtaposes her experience withBarbara's affair with a senator, provoking Barbara to snappily retaliate.

It's likely meant to be snarky (let's hope), but "sexual encounter" is still pretty bad.

A Washington Post article, which at least recognized Walters as the villain in this interview, described what happened after this clip, which is somehow even more repugnant, and not least of all because Elisabeth Hasselbeck of all people comes off the best in it.

"This is about you, my dear," Babs interrupted. "This is not about me, okay?"

Hahn: "But what I want to say -- " Hahn tried to continue.

"I don't want to talk about my relationship," Babs continued to sniff indignantly. "This is about you."

Hahn: "But what I'm going to say is my situation was ---

""And where are we now?" Babs sneered, interrupting Hahn a third time, which has gotta be some kind of record, even on "The View."

"Where we are now is that I had an encounter. It was 15 minutes in a hotel," Hahn finally managed to get in, despite Walters' indignant huffing and puffing. It seemed Hahn had won the round.

"This was consensual or non-consensual"? Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked, to keep the interview moving.

"It was not consensual," Hahn responded.

"He said it was," Babs interjected, but not with any real chirpiness.

If this happened today, there would likely be a pretty serious reckoning for Walters and the rest of "The View." I also believe that if what happened to Jessica Hahn happened today, there would be an extremely different media narrative. Frankly, I can't even imagine what happened in 1987 happening today.

But neither of these things happened all that long ago in the grand scheme of things, which makes them a pretty stark reminder that we don't have very far to fall in order to go back to a place we really don't want to be.

[ Washington Post ]

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