Jim Bakker, the disgraced televangelist who along with Jerry Falwell made “horrible sex creep and financial scammer” a synonym for “TV preacher,” died Monday at the age of 86, according to a statement from his wife and co-grifter Lori Bakker, who was never as interesting as the late Tammy Faye. Her statement didn’t mention Bakker’s cause of death, where he died, or whether his burial site will be accessible to members of the public wishing to use it as a urinal.
Bakker rose to prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s as a “prosperity gospel” preacher whose fantastically successful Jesus-TV empire funded a lavish lifestyle for himself and Tammy Faye, which they showed off on TV to let viewers know God always rewards those who spread His Word. Their PTL (“Praise the Lord” and later “People That Love,” also parodied as “Pass the Loot”) network was among the first to use satellite TV to reach large audiences as cable started booming, and the Bakkers had a great schtick where they’d cry on air to show how moved they were by the Word of God and stuff.
As the money rolled in, Bakker expanded PTL with international broadcasts and shows where other Prosperity Gospel grifters preached and talked about every topic you’d find on daytime TV. Bakker launched “Heritage USA” in 1978 as a fundamentalist theme park/resort, with grand plans to turn it into a real city for Christians to flock to. (Walt Disney wanted to do that with EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which also never happened. Lesson to entrepreneurs: Nobody wants to live full-time in a theme park.)
Then it all turned to shit in 1987 when the Charlotte Observer exposed Bakker’s hush-money payoff to Jessica Hahn, who is still being defamed in this week’s obituaries of Bakker. NBC News described her as “a church secretary with whom Bakker had a one-time tryst years earlier,” which grossly downplays Hahn’s very credible account of being raped by Bakker in a Florida hotel room. Unfortunately, we’ll be discussing what happened in some necessary detail, so if you want to skip to the next subheading (“Rape is A Joke, $ Fraud Sends You To Prison”), go right ahead.
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Just Call It Rape. If ‘Alleged’ Keeps You Out Of Court, Add ‘Alleged.’
Hahn went to Florida in December 1980 at the invitation of John Wesley Fletcher, a PTL-wannabe TV preacher and occasional guest minister at the Massapequa, New York, church where Hahn worked as a secretary. Fletcher told Hahn she could join the PTL crew as a babysitter for the Bakkers while they held a telethon. But as she later told Playboy and other outlets, shortly after arriving, Fletcher gave her a glass of wine that she suspected had been drugged. Bakker came to her hotel room wearing only a swimsuit, and told Hahn that Tammy Faye belittled him, and that he needed Hahn to have sex with him to help him deal with his awful home life. Fletcher added, “Jessica, you’re going to be doing something tremendous for God.”
Hahn said that after Fletcher left, Bakker removed his swimsuit and began forcibly undressing her, telling her when she tried to push him away, “Jessica, by helping the shepherd, you’re helping the sheep.” He raped her for nearly an hour, and as she cried and told him he’d destroyed her life, Bakker spun out a fantasy about seeing her again, as John Wigger writes in his extensively researched book PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (Wonkette affiliate link):
“You’ll appreciate it later,” Hahn remembers Bakker saying. He told her he had jets at his disposal and could make “arrangements” for her to “be by his side.” “You really ministered to me,” Bakker said, just before he left.
After that, Hahn says, Fletcher also violently raped her. Bakker and Fletcher both denied the allegations after the scandal broke years later, so there’s their side of the story. Fletcher was later shitcanned from the Assemblies of God for allegedly being gay, and died in 1996, reportedly from AIDS.
In the year 2026, as yet another college rape horror story dominates headlines, it’s a gut punch to see obituaries of Bakker calling Hahn’s ordeal a “tryst,” or whitewashed as an “affair” (CNN) or a “sexual encounter” by major news outlets (The AP, Fox News, and the Washington Post, which also called it a “dalliance,” suggesting a romp in a meadow instead of an assault). The Guardian was especially bad, not only calling it a “sexual encounter” but also piling on the slut-shaming by saying Hahn “later posed nude in Playboy magazine,” without noting that’s where Hahn first called Bakker a rapist.
The New York Times obit (gift link) has the decency to at least lead with Hahn’s insistence that she was raped, adding that Bakker “denied the accusation” but also that he tried to “buy her silence in 1985 by tapping the PTL treasury to make a $265,000 payoff, equivalent to roughly $825,000 in 2026 dollars.”
USA Today also gets a point for writing that in 1987, “allegations became public that Jim Bakker had raped his former New York church secretary Jessica Hahn. He said the encounter was consensual.” But then it loses the point for that passive voice and for confusing where Hahn had been a secretary.
Rape Is A Joke, $ Fraud Sends You To Prison
In the years leading up to the revelation of the hush-money payment to Hahn, Bakker was also leveraging donations and “partnerships” from faithful donors into a series of Ponzi schemes that began unraveling with the “sex scandal.” The Bakkers had long been mocked for their ostentatious lifestyle, which they insisted was proof that God was rewarding them for bringing so many people to Jebus. As Heritage USA got bigger, Bakker started more new “exclusive” schemes to bring in new investors, until of course all the marks had been tapped out and the mess collapsed.
After the uproar over Hahn, in which she was inevitably portrayed as having been a willing participant, not a victim of assault (Late-night TV has a lot of penance yet to do) Bakker was forced out of PTL and replaced by Jerry Falwell, who at least gave the internet one of its greatest enduring memes when he went down the park’s water slide in a full business suit.
As the New York Times obit reminds us (gift link), the Bakkers also considered their worldly wealth “good bait” that would make them “fishers of men,” just like Prosperity Jesus preached. The Bakkers paid themselves millions in salaries and bonuses, and paraded a whole bunch of shit that would be difficult to squeeze through the eye of a needle, including “a 55-foot houseboat, a mini-fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces, diamonds and gold jewelry, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, an air-conditioned dog kennel, and homes and apartments” all over the country.
Trivia fun: That damned “air-conditioned doghouse” became media shorthand for the Bakkers’ insanely luxe lifestyle, although as Wigger noted in his book, the thing was pretty small, had no floor, and was cooled by a used AC unit cobbled onto the side of one wall. The Bakkers’ dogs didn’t even like it. Of all the stupid shit they blew millions of dollars on, the doghouse was nothing. For all the mentions of it, Wigger notes, the actual doghouse almost never appeared in news stories, “leaving people to imagine a doggie mansion of ostentatious opulence.”
Bakker was eventually indicted and convicted on 24 federal charges of fraud and conspiracy against PTL investors, and sentenced to 45 years. Per the Times obit,
During a six-week trial the following year, federal prosecutors described him as a “most brazen, accomplished con man” who had bilked the PTL faithful out of $158 million with offers of lifetime vacations at Heritage USA that could not possibly have been provided. The government said that $3.7 million had also been siphoned off to support the Bakkers’ grand living.
Only 3.7 million? Get outta here. Ultimately, Bakker served only five years, with some time as the cellmate of another rightwing freak, Lyndon Larouche.
He then started a whole new racket trying to sell survival food for the Apocalypse, curing (not curing) COVID with useless silver pills, and explaining that abortion clinics are literally performing demonic rituals with dead babbies.
Here’s a too-long supercut of Bakker’s grifting and predictions of imminent apocalypse that somebody edited together a few years ago. You can no doubt find many others!
Also, Tammy Faye had a redemption arc where she liked gay people.
In 2020 Bakker suffered a stroke and it was all nonbelievers’ fault, and now we suppose we killed him for good, the end.
In the interim, America has started turning into a Christian Nationalist theocracy run by even worse people, and Jim Bakker hardly got a penny of it, also the end.
Also also also OPEN THREAD
BEFORE HE DIED!
[NYT (gift link) / PTL (book by John Wigger) / NBC News / Daily Beast]
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Bakker's prison sentence re-corrected to 45 years; I saw "40" in a different obit and changed it, but the Times had it right and I shoulda stuck with it.
And yes, this is the Open Thread, silly.
Gimothy the Goose update!
I think that the Gimmy Crew is actually Gimothy’s family. I believe Angel, the one with one wing that has a section sticking up is mom, the goose on the left is dad and the one in back is a sibling. They are always together and always looking out for Gimothy. They stay away from the other geese (who harass Gimmy) and stick with the ducks. It is incredibly sweet and amazing to see how these birds stay together and care for one another.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-354352178?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc