March 19: On This Day in World History … briefly
Jessica Hahn was the American model and actress who accused televangelist Jim Bakker of rape while she was employed as a church secretary. She frequently appeared on The Howard Stern Show throughout the late 1980s and into the 2000s.
1987: Televangelist preacher resigns after sex and corruption scandal
TV preacher Jim Bakker is forced to resign from his extremely lucrative ‘Praise the Lord’ (PTL) religious network in the southern United States after confessing to a string of ‘sexual adventures’ unfitting for a man of the cloth. Bakker and his wife Tammy LaValley were well known on hundreds of religious networks in dozen of countries, exhorting viewers of the ‘Jim and Tammy Show’ to follow their spiritual example.
An extramarital group sex scandal dating back to 1980 also forced his unfrocking as a minister of the Assembly of God. In addition, Bakker was under investigation for having pocketed church funds donated by supporters. The Bakkers had a lavish lifestyle. In an April 23, 1990 New Yorker article, Frances FitzGerald quoted Dave Barry:
“They personified the most characteristic excesses of the 80s – the greed, the love of glitz and the shamelessness – which in their case were so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence.”
Two scandals brought down the ministry in 1987; Bakker was accused of sexual misconduct by church secretary Jessica Hahn, which led to his resignation, and illegal misuse of ministry funds eventually led to his imprisonment. Bakker was dismissed as an Assemblies of God minister on May 6, 1987. In 1990, the biographical TV movie ‘Fall from Grace’ starring Kevin Spacey and Bernadette Peters depicted his rise and fall within the religious televangelist arena. On January 18, 2019, ABC’s ’20/20′ aired a two-hour special entitled ‘Unfaithfully Yours’ about the rise and downfall of the Bakkers.
Tamara Faye Messner (née LaValley, formerly Bakker) would garner significant publicity when Jim Bakker was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, resulting in the dissolution of ‘The PTL Club’. After divorcing Bakker in 1992, she married Roe Messner. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996 and suffered intermittently for over a decade before dying of the disease in 2007.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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