Jim Bakker, the televangelist who built one of the biggest Christian television empires in America before scandal and prison brought it crashing down, has died at 86.
His wife, Lori Bakker, announced that he died Monday evening. A cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
Fox News reported the news early Tuesday:
Bakker’s story is often compressed into a few familiar words: PTL, Tammy Faye, sex scandal, fraud conviction, prison.
But the final prison chapter was far more complicated than most of the quick obituaries will tell you.
It included a 45-year sentence, a federal appeals court’s finding that the sentencing judge crossed a constitutional line, a new eight-year sentence, and a little-known legal campaign involving Drake University law professor James Albert.
The Associated Press reported that Bakker’s wife described him as a pioneer of Christian television, her husband and her best friend through many seasons of life and ministry. She said he had devoted 66 years to preaching the Gospel and remained focused on that work in his final days.
Bakker died Monday, October 5, near Branson, Missouri, where he and Lori had produced “The Jim Bakker Show” since 2003. He suffered a stroke in 2020, but his family did not immediately identify a cause of death.
He is survived by Lori and the children in his blended family, which included two children with Tammy Faye and five children adopted with Lori in 2002.
The Bakkers had become household names long before the fall.
Jim and Tammy Faye met at North Central Bible College, married in 1961 and began as traveling evangelists. They later worked with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, where Jim hosted “The 700 Club.”
In 1974, Bakker formed the PTL Satellite Network. Its signature program, “The PTL Club,” reached millions of viewers, while the ministry’s Heritage USA complex in South Carolina grew into a Christian resort and theme park.
At the ministry’s peak in the 1980s, the show drew millions of viewers and brought in millions of dollars each year. The Bakkers became cultural celebrities as well as preachers, recognizable enough to be parodied regularly on late-night television.
The New York Times noted the scale of both the rise and the collapse:
Bakker resigned from PTL in 1987 after admitting to a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn. The ministry had paid Hahn $265,000 in connection with the episode.
The criminal case that followed centered on money raised through “lifetime partnerships” that promised annual lodging at Heritage USA.
The government said Bakker sold far more lodging partnerships than the completed facilities could accommodate and diverted ministry funds while promoting an extravagant lifestyle.
A federal jury convicted him in 1989 on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy.
Judge Robert Potter sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison and imposed a $500,000 fine.
That punishment did not survive appeal.
The official decision in United States v. Bakker is the clearest record of what happened next.
The Fourth Circuit recounted that Bakker raised at least $158 million by selling roughly 153,000 partnerships with lodging benefits to viewers, including people living on modest incomes. It said he promised to cap one Grand Hotel partnership program at 25,000 memberships but sold 66,683.
Only the Grand Hotel and one bunkhouse were completed, according to the opinion, leaving most partners without the lodging benefits they had been promised.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Bakker’s convictions. It rejected his arguments about the trial, the jury, the evidence and the fraud instructions.
But the three-judge panel found a serious constitutional problem with the sentence.
At sentencing, Potter had said Bakker’s conduct caused religious people to be ridiculed as gullible victims of money-hungry preachers. The appeals court concluded that the remark created the appearance that Potter’s own religious feelings had entered into his punishment of Bakker.
The panel said a judge’s personal faith is not the issue. The constitutional problem begins when the bench becomes a pulpit and the punishment appears to reflect the judge’s own religious offense.
The court ruled that personal religious principles had been impermissibly injected into the sentencing process. It vacated the 45-year sentence and ordered that a different judge resentence Bakker.
That is an important distinction: Bakker did not win an acquittal. His convictions remained intact.
What the appeal destroyed was the original punishment.
At a new hearing in November 1992, Bakker’s sentence was cut from 45 years to eight.
He was transferred to a minimum-security prison and released to a halfway house on parole in July 1994 after serving roughly four and a half years behind bars.
That brings us to James Albert.
Drake University Law School identifies Albert as a professor specializing in litigation and media law. His listed publications include the book Jim Bakker: Miscarriage of Justice?
Albert earned his law degree at Notre Dame and built a career that included administrative law, torts, broadcast law and courtroom work. Drake’s biography also lists repeated teaching awards and national media appearances tied to his legal expertise.
Albert spent years digging through the Bakker case. Contemporary descriptions of the book say he examined thousands of pages of trial transcripts and interviewed Bakker, lawyers, witnesses and jurors.
He argued that the trial and sentence had been badly distorted by hostility toward Bakker, even while refusing to excuse Bakker’s vanity, greed and recklessness.
His project was not a devotional defense of a favorite preacher. Albert approached the case as a trial lawyer and media-law scholar asking whether an unpopular defendant had still received the process the Constitution required.
Bakker’s own ministry biography credits the efforts of Albert and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz with winning the appeal that changed the course of Bakker’s prison term.
The biography says Bakker spent five years in prison, intensely studying the Bible and the Book of Revelation while his television empire and first marriage disappeared. It places the Albert-Dershowitz effort between his original punishment and his July 1, 1994 parole, describing the appeal as the legal turning point that made his release possible.
It then traces his post-prison years through nationwide church appearances, his 1998 marriage to Lori and the 2003 launch of their new television ministry near Branson.
That claim needs to be stated carefully.
The published Fourth Circuit opinion does not identify Albert as the attorney who argued the appeal, and it did not declare Bakker innocent. The ruling affirmed all 24 convictions.
Nor did the opinion say Bakker should never have served time. Its specific remedy was a new sentencing hearing before a different federal judge, free from the appearance that personal religious offense had influenced the penalty.
Albert’s documented role was part of the legal advocacy and reexamination surrounding Bakker’s case. The successful court result was the vacating of the 45-year sentence, which led to resentencing and made Bakker’s much earlier release possible.
In other words, saying Albert simply “got Bakker out of prison” skips the legal machinery in the middle.
But it is fair to say his work helped power the effort that turned a sentence carrying the possibility of decades behind bars into an eight-year term followed by parole in 1994.
The Los Angeles Times reported from Bakker’s arrival at the Salvation Army halfway house in Asheville, North Carolina. He was 53 and had served about four and a half years.
Bakker flew from a minimum-security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia, and arrived with his teenage son and attorney. He was required to remain at the halfway house until December 1 and take a local job while finishing the transition out of federal custody.
After prison, Bakker rejected parts of the prosperity-gospel message he had once preached and wrote the memoir I Was Wrong.
He married Lori Graham in 1998 and returned to television in 2003 with “The Jim Bakker Show,” based near Branson, Missouri.
The comeback brought a new audience and new controversies.
In 2021, Bakker and his church settled a Missouri lawsuit over claims that a product called Silver Solution could cure COVID-19. The settlement required $156,000 in refunds.
The later controversy showed that release from prison did not end the debate over Bakker’s judgment or fundraising. It also did not change the constitutional flaw the Fourth Circuit found in the original sentence.
CNN’s report captured the two halves of the public figure—national prominence and enduring scandal:
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There is no honest way to tell Jim Bakker’s life as a simple redemption story or a simple morality play.
He built something enormous. He betrayed people who trusted him.
He was convicted by a jury. He was also given a staggering sentence by a judge whose own words undermined the fairness of that punishment.
James Albert saw the legal problem when much of the country had already decided Bakker deserved whatever happened to him.
The appeals court did not erase Bakker’s crimes. It did insist that even an infamous defendant must be sentenced by a court—not punished for offending a judge’s personal religious sensibilities.
That ruling changed the rest of Bakker’s life.
Now, with his death at 86, it belongs in the record too.
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[ H/T WLT Report ]
