The Bakkers were televangelists who built a massive multi-million-dollar religious broadcasting and theme park empire in the 1970s and 1980s

NEED TO KNOW

• The Bakkers rose to fame hosting The PTL Club after launching their ministry in South Carolina
• Jim Bakker was later convicted on 24 federal fraud counts and served five years in prison
• Tammy Faye divorced Jim in 1992 and later remarried

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were, by most accounts, a very American success story.

The two had met at a Minnesota Bible college, working in retail and restaurants before marrying in 1961 and moving to South Carolina, where they began their ministry. By 1964, they had begun hosting a children’s puppet show on Pat Robertson‘s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which ran until 1973.

In 1974, they launched The PTL Club (short for Praise The Lord), a Christian news program initially hosted in an abandoned Charlotte, North Carolina, furniture store. PTL grew — in large part due to Tammy Faye’s eccentric and over-the-top aesthetic, and also because of the couple’s embrace of the prosperity gospel, which offered approval to the idea that ministers and pastors could have abundant wealth.

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By the mid-1970s, the couple had become the most famous televangelists in America. The PTL Club had grown into a massive multi-million-dollar religious broadcasting and theme park empire and as their congregation grew, so did their wealth — with the two amassing several multi-million-dollar homes and luxury vehicles over the years.

But not all was above board, federal authorities would ultimately find out.

Behind the scenes, Jim was using funds raised through his ministry for his own personal benefit — selling tens of thousands of $1,000 “lifetime memberships” to a luxury hotel despite that only one 500-room hotel was ever finished being built. In that case, investigators found that most of the funds were used to pay Bakker’s company’s operating expenses, though he kept $3.4 million, the New York Times reported.

Bakker was also accused of using $279,000 of ministry funds to pay church secretary Jessica Hahn for her silence. Hahn said in an episode of Larry King Live that Bakker and PTL Club co-host John Wesley Fletcher had drugged and raped her, while Bakker would argue the encounter was consensual.

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On Oct. 4, 1988, Jim was indicted on 24 federal counts of mail and wire fraud and conspiring to defraud the public — a case that exploded in the press when the Hahn allegations came to light.

In 1989, following a five-week trial, a jury found Jim guilty on all 24 counts. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison, ultimately serving five.

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Tammy Faye divorced Jim in 1992, while he was in prison, and got remarried to a man named Roe Messner. In 1996, Messner was convicted of bankruptcy fraud, and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.

Tammy Faye was later diagnosed with colon cancer and died in July 2007 at the age of 65.

After divorcing Tammy Faye and getting out of prison, Jim remarried Lori Beth Graham in 1998, with the two adopting five children. He returned to televangelism in 2003 and now hosts a show focused on the end times.

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