The Bakkers’ world came tumbling down in 1987 with a revelation that in 1980, when he was 40, he had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped. Mr. Bakker denied the accusation. Nonetheless, 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.
The transgression led to his banishment from the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. Other evangelists turned on him. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who took over the PTL ministry, strongly suggested that Mr. Bakker’s sins, despite his denials, included homosexual relations. With characteristic hyperbole, Mr. Falwell dismissed Mr. Bakker as “the greatest scab and a cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.”
Worse lay ahead for the televangelist couple. After persistent reporting on their behavior by The Charlotte Observer and a 16-month inquiry by a federal grand jury, Mr. Bakker was indicted in 1988 on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. 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.
At one point during the trial, Mr. Bakker, who in 1969 had what was described as a nervous breakdown, landed in a mental institution for observation. He was found in his lawyer’s office hallucinating and cowering in a fetal position under a couch. But the proceedings soon resumed, and he was found guilty on all counts. The judge imposed a 45-year prison sentence, which came to be whittled down. After five years, Mr. Bakker was freed in 1994.
Tammy Bakker, who was never charged, did not stand by her man. Long before the trial, the marriage had been shaky, and in 1992 she divorced him. A year later she married Roe Messner, who had been a Bakker business associate and who in 1996 would be sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud. Tammy Bakker died of cancer in 2007 at 65.
