PTL Club and Scandal
Jim and Tammy Bakker had been involved with television from their departure from Minneapolis, until they moved to the Charlotte area, via Portsmouth, Virginia, where they were founding members of the 700 Club. While in Portsmouth, they were hosts of the popular childrens's show "Jim and Tammy." They then created a puppet ministry for children on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) from 1964 to 1973, and co-founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network with personal friends Paul and Jan Crouch in California. Jim and Tammy founded the PTL Club in the mid-1970s.
During the PTL shows, she provided a sentimental touch to stories and loved to sing. In a move that sharply distinguished her from other televangelists, she showed a more tolerant attitude when it came to homosexuals, and she featured people living with AIDS on PTL, urging her viewers to follow Christ and show sympathy and pray for the sick.
The PTL empire continued to grow under the Bakkers' leadership, but the concern about their opulent lifestyle grew as media reports of an air-conditioned dog house at their Tega Cay, South Carolina lakefront parsonage as well as gold-plated bathroom fixtures dominated newscasts in the 1980s. The Bakkers' home, owned by the ministry, was actually an older home built in the early 1970s and it was a few miles away from Heritage USA. Jim Bakker stated that the much-talked-about dog house was heated with an old heater to keep the dogs warm in the winter and the reported gold-plated fixtures were actually brass. The home was later sold by the ministry and burned to the ground not long thereafter. Jim Bakker wrote in his book I Was Wrong that he watched the home burn on live television while incarcerated.
Worthy of note is the Epilogue from the publishers of this book is the following:
"On July 22, 1996, shortly after Jim Bakker had completed the writing of this book, a federal jury ruled that PTL was not selling securities by offering Lifetime Partnerships at Heritage USA. The jury's ruling thus affirms what Jim Bakker has contended from the first day he was indicted and throughout this volume."
However, due to Jim Bakker's resignation from the ministry after an affair with Jessica Hahn became public, as well as investigative reporters from the Charlotte Observer reporting on PTL's finances and management, PTL went bankrupt after being taken over by controversial Lynchburg, Virginia-based Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell, who offered to step in following the scandals in 1988. [2] It was widely reported that Falwell's interest in PTL and Heritage USA was solely an attempt to gain control of its profitable cable television network; something which Falwell was unsuccessful in establishing for his own ministry despite numerous requests to the FCC for permission to obtain a satellite license.
Long before Falwell's death in 2007, Tammy Faye forgave him for the way he behaved.
