By Will Dunham
Oct 5 (Reuters) – U.S. televangelist Jim Bakker, who built a multimillion-dollar empire and lived in opulence before being disgraced by a sex scandal, fraud conviction for bilking followers and divorce from television co-host Tammy Faye, died on Monday at age 86.
The death of Bakker, whose journey from the TV pulpit to a prison cell in the 1980s inspired comparisons to the corrupt character of the fictional preacher-huckster Elmer Gantry, was revealed on social media by his second wife, Lori Bakker.
“It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening,” she wrote on the Facebook and Instagram pages of her husband’s latest television ministry.
She paid tribute to Bakker as a “pioneer of Christian television,” but the cause and circumstances of his death were not revealed.
Bakker revived his career as a television preacher after prison with a new wife and new television show in 2003, later becoming a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, who was known for his own brand of right-wing populism.
Bakker had been among the most popular of the Christian preachers who thrived on U.S. television in the 1980s, achieving fame on the show “The PTL Club.” PTL stood for “Praise The Lord” and “People That Love.”
Detractors, pointing to his unabashed daily exhortations to viewers for donations to his ministry, said PTL should have stood for “pass the loot.”
Bakker spent 4-1/2 years in prison after being convicted in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1989 of defrauding followers in a scheme involving vacations at his Heritage USA Christian theme park and resort.
Prosecutors painted him as a selfish and petty con man driven by greed and lust for power.
“Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests,” Judge Robert Potter told Bakker before sentencing him.
Bakker had quit the PTL ministry in 1987 after revelations of a 1980 sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary who later posed nude in Playboy magazine, and a subsequent $265,000 payoff with ministry funds to gain her silence. Bakker was later defrocked.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, his first wife, had started with a small TV ministry and eventually created a multimillion-dollar operation with 2,000 employees and the 2,300-acre (930-hectare) Heritage USA complex in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
At its peak, the PTL ministry drew 13 million viewers on 200 TV stations and raked in $129 million a year.
With his working-class upbringing, the affable Bakker related well to common folk.
He did not deliver fire-and-brimstone sermons like other televangelists, instead offering a friendly Christian message – although it was larded with requests for money donations.
Tammy Faye was more much more flamboyant, with her enthusiastic singing and penchant for tears that left her heavy makeup smeared on her face.
‘I HAVE SINNED’
Bakker was convicted after a six-week trial in federal court on all 24 fraud and conspiracy charges brought against him.
Prosecutors said he defrauded followers of $158 million by selling promises of lifetime annual vacations that he could not provide.
They said he siphoned $3.7 million to bankroll a lavish lifestyle that included several homes, luxury cars, mink coats, diamonds, servants – and an air-conditioned dog house.
The judge ordered Bakker to 45 years in prison but the sentence was later reduced. “I have sinned,” Bakker told the court. “I have made mistakes. But never in my life did I intend to defraud anyone.”
Bakker’s chief aide, Richard Dortch, served 18 months of an eight-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to reduced charges in exchange for testifying against Bakker.
Tammy Faye was never charged. She stood by Bakker at the trial – even singing to reporters after his conviction – but divorced him in 1992 while he was in prison. She died of cancer in 2007.
Bakker started his life over after leaving prison in 1994, renouncing the “prosperity gospel” he once preached and writing a book titled “I Was Wrong.”
“I’ve had a second chance at life. And I have a beautiful wife who loves me,” Bakker told CNN in 2000, referring to his second wife, Lori, who he married in 1998.
They started a TV ministry together in 2003. In 2008, they began taping “The Jim Bakker Show” at a 600-acre (240-hectare) development called Morningside near the tourism city of Branson, Missouri, that bore similarities to Heritage USA.
Bakker once again pleaded with his followers for donations.
In 2020, he drew the ire of state and federal officials for selling a false treatment for COVID-19 during the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Bakker also said in 2017 that Christians would launch a civil war if Trump were to be impeached. Trump later became the first U.S. president to be impeached twice.
James Orson Bakker was born on January 2, 1940, the son of an auto parts factory worker in Muskegon, Michigan, who maintained a strict fundamentalist Christian household.
He met Tammy Faye LaValley at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis and they married in 1961. Both dropped out of school to become traveling evangelists as he pursued the career of a minister of the Pentecostalist Assemblies of God denomination.
Their big break came in 1964, when televangelist Pat Robertson aired a children’s religious puppet show with them on his fledgling TV network.
Setting out on his own in the 1970s, Bakker used the emerging world of cable and satellite TV to build an empire.
(Reporting and writing by Will Dunham in Washington; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Trott and Clarence Fernandez)
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