Jim Bakker

James Orsen Bakker was born January 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan. He met Tammy Faye LaValley at North Central University in Minneapolis; the two married in 1961, left college, and worked as itinerant evangelists before joining Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. There Bakker helped build a children's program and, with the Crouch family, helped launch Trinity Broadcasting Network in 1973.

The following year, Jim and Tammy left to found their own ministry in Charlotte, North Carolina: the PTL Club, a daily television program built around an intimate, talk show style format rather than a pulpit. It grew quickly. By 1978 the program reached an estimated 13,000,000 viewers, carried nationally on the PTL Satellite Network, one of the first religious ministries to make full use of satellite cable distribution.

Bakker used that reach to build Heritage USA, a Christian theme park, hotel and residential complex in Fort Mill, South Carolina, that combined a Christian retreat with the amusements of a secular resort: water slides, a shopping promenade and a replica of the upper room. At its peak Heritage USA drew millions of visitors a year, rivaling Disney World and Great America among the country's most visited theme parks, an achievement built entirely on the audience PTL's broadcasts had assembled.

On March 19, 1987, Jim Bakker resigned from PTL after admitting to a 1980 sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn, who later described the encounter as rape and said she had been paid to stay silent about it. He turned the ministry's assets over to fellow broadcaster Jerry Falwell. The resignation opened a wider investigation into PTL's finances that proved far more consequential than the affair itself.

Between 1984 and 1987, PTL had sold more than 400,000,000 dollars in Heritage USA "lifetime partnerships," which promised buyers an annual hotel stay in exchange for a one time payment. Federal investigators found that PTL sold far more partnerships than the resort's single completed 500 room hotel could ever honor, using new partnership sales to fund operating costs and the Bakkers' personal lifestyle rather than the additional hotel construction the sales were meant to finance.

A federal grand jury indicted Bakker on December 5, 1988, and a jury convicted him on October 5, 1989, in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, on all 24 counts: 8 of mail fraud, 15 of wire fraud and 1 of conspiracy. Judge Robert Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in prison and a 500,000 dollar fine. In 1991 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld all 24 convictions but vacated the sentence, ruling that Potter's remarks about "money grubbing preachers" showed judicial bias. Resentenced to 8 years, Bakker was paroled in 1994. He divorced Tammy Faye in 1992 and resumed televangelism from Missouri in 2003.