Jim Bakker, televangelist who built PTL and was convicted of fraud, dies at 86

Jim Bakker died on Monday, Oct. 5, at age 86, his wife, Lori Bakker, said that evening on the Facebook page of "The Jim Bakker Show." She called him "a pioneer of Christian television" and did not give a cause of death. His son, Jay Bakker, also a minister, wrote of "a very complicated relationship," NBC News reported.

Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye, started The PTL Club in 1974. It grew into a Christian satellite network and Heritage USA, a 2,300-acre Christian theme park and resort in Fort Mill, South Carolina. At its peak the program drew about 13 million viewers, according to Reuters and the BBC. Bakker resigned from PTL in 1987 after The Charlotte Observer reported on a 1980 sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn and a payment of about $265,000 in ministry funds to her. Hahn later accused him of sexual assault. He denied it and said the encounter was consensual. He was defrocked.

In 1989 a federal jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, convicted Bakker on 24 counts of mail and wire fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he sold followers lifetime vacation stays at Heritage USA that the ministry could not provide, and diverted millions to his own use. He was sentenced to 45 years. The sentence was later reduced, and he was released in 1994 after serving about four and a half years. Tammy Faye Bakker divorced him in 1992 and died in 2007.

Bakker returned to television in 2003 with Lori Bakker, whom he married in 1998. They later taped "The Jim Bakker Show" at Morningside, a development near Branson, Missouri. In June 2021, Bakker and his Morningside Church Productions signed a consent judgment with Missouri's attorney general. The state had sued over on-air claims that a product called Silver Solution could treat Covid-19. They agreed to about $156,000 in restitution and to stop marketing the product as a treatment, while denying wrongdoing.