PTL Satellite Network

In 1960, Jim Bakker met Tammy Faye LaValley while both were students at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.[1] Tammy Faye worked in a boutique, while Jim found work in a restaurant inside a Minneapolis department store. They were married on April 1, 1961, and left the bible college to become itinerant evangelists.

In 1966, the Bakkers began working at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which at the time barely reached an audience of thousands. The Bakkers would make contributions to CBN as a nationally recognized television ministry.[2]^:6 The couple hosted The Jim and Tammy Show, a variety program hosted by the Bakkers and several puppet characters. The program was aimed at young children, whom they entertained with comic routines with the puppets, as well as airings of Davey and Goliath, a claymation Bible-story series. Due to the success of The Jim and Tammy Show, Robertson made Bakker the host of a new prime-time talk show called The 700 Club, which would gradually become CBN's flagship program, and become syndicated on numerous cable channels and network affiliates.

In the early 1970s, the Bakkers left CBN and traveled, holding telethons at Christian TV stations. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the Bakkers set up Trinity Broadcasting Network with TV executives Sandy and Martha Wheeler, who began airing a local version of Praise the Lord on WRET, Channel 36, owned by Ted Turner at the time. The Bakkers moved to California, teaming with their former youth pastors Paul and Jan Crouch, to create the Praise the Lord show for the Crouches' new Trinity Broadcasting Network in California. However, the relationship only lasted about eight months due to a falling-out between Jim Bakker and Paul Crouch, causing the Bakkers to leave this ministry as well. Trinity Broadcasting Systems was based in Charlotte, NC and the California entity was named Trinity Broadcasting Network, which would grow to become the world's largest faith-based network in later years. Before leaving and moving east, the Bakkers managed to retain the rights to use the initials "PTL". What began as a local TV broadcast in Charlotte changed when several members of the Bakker's staff in California moved to Charlotte in February 1974 and with the local staff built Trinity Broadcasting Systems into what became known as the PTL Television Network. The parent company changed its name to Heritage Village Church & Missionary Fellowship in 1976–77. The purchase of the Heritage USA properties in Fort Mill, South Carolina, began at that time. The PTL Satellite Network uplinked from Heritage Village on Park Road in Charlotte until December 1986. The Heritage Village Property was sold and satellite and video tape editing operations moved to Heritage USA.

PTL's fund raising activities between 1984 and 1987 underwent scrutiny by The Charlotte Observer newspaper, eventually leading to criminal charges against Jim Bakker. From 1984 to 1987, Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 "lifetime memberships," which entitled buyers to a three-night stay annually at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA. According to the prosecution at Bakker's later fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships had been sold, but only one 500-room hotel was ever completed. Bakker "sold" more "exclusive partnerships" than could be accommodated and raised more than twice the money that was needed to build the actual hotel. Much of the money went into Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million in bonuses for himself. The $279,000 payoff for the silence of Jessica Hahn, who was mistakenly supposed to be a Bakker staff member, was paid by Tammy Faye's later husband, Roe Messner. Hahn was actually a onetime acquaintance of Bakker set up by a "friend" in 1980.[3]

Bakker, who apparently made all of the financial decisions for the PTL organization, allegedly kept two sets of books to conceal the accounting irregularities. Reporters from The Charlotte Observer, led by Charles Shepard, investigated and published a series of articles on the PTL organization's finances.[4]

On March 19, 1987, following the revelation of a payoff to Jessica Hahn to keep secret her allegation that Bakker had raped her, Bakker resigned from PTL.[3] Bakker acknowledges that he met Hahn at a hotel room in Clearwater Beach, Florida, but denies raping her. Following Bakker's resignation as PTL head, he was succeeded in late March 1987 by Jerry Falwell.[5] Later that summer, as donations sharply declined in the wake of Bakker's resignation and the end of the Bakkers' popular PTL Club TV show, Falwell raised $20 million to help keep the Heritage USA theme park solvent, including a well-publicized waterslide plunge there.[6] Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history."[7] In 1988, Falwell said that the Bakker scandal had "strengthened broadcast evangelism and made Christianity stronger, more mature and more committed."[8] Bakker's son, Jay, wrote in 2001 that the Bakkers felt betrayed by Falwell, who they thought during Bakker's resignation intended to help in Bakker's eventual restoration as head of the PTL ministry organization.[2]^:33–37

Following a 16-month Federal grand jury probe, Bakker was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy.[3][9] In 1989, after a five-week trial which began on August 28 in Charlotte, the jury found him guilty on all 24 counts, and Judge Robert Potter sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison and a $500,000 fine.[2]^:52[10]

He served time in the Federal Medical Center, Rochester in Rochester, Minnesota, sharing a cell with activist Lyndon LaRouche and skydiver Roger Nelson.[11]

In early 1991, a federal appeals court upheld Bakker's conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, but voided Bakker's 45-year sentence, as well as the $500,000 fine, and ordered that a new sentencing hearing be held.[10]

Jim and Tammy Bakker were divorced on March 13, 1992. On November 16, 1992, a sentence reduction hearing was held and Bakker's sentence was reduced to eight years. The judge also cited Bakker's time in the prison shower as a life transforming event .[2]^:104

In August 1993, Bakker was transferred to a minimum security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia, and was subsequently granted parole in July 1994, after serving almost five years of his sentence.[2]^{:116, 130} Bakker's son, Jay, spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the parole board on his father's behalf, urging leniency.[2]^:106–115

His Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) number was 07407-058, and he was released from BOP custody on December 1, 1994.[12]

On July 23, 1996, a North Carolina jury threw out a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 160,000 onetime supporters who contributed as much as $7,000 each to Bakker's coffers in the 1980s.

The Charlotte Observer reported that the Internal Revenue Service still holds Bakker and Roe Messner, Tammy Faye's husband from 1993 until her death in 2007, liable for personal income taxes owed from the 1980s when they were building the PTL empire, taxes assessed after the IRS revoked the PTL ministry's nonprofit status. Tammy Faye Messner's new husband said that the original tax amount was about $500,000, with penalties and interest accounting for the rest. Notices stating the IRS liens list still identify "James O. and Tamara F. Bakker" as owing $6,000,000, liens on which Jim Bakker still pays.

On July 1, 2015 Jim Bakker's ministry announced that it had purchased the trademark to the former PTL Television Network name and logo and that the ministry's Generation Now Network, which is available on Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Apple TV, would be rebranded to incorporate the PTL name and logo. The channel was renamed as PTL Television Network.[13] The network carries current Jim Bakker programming, classic episodes of the old PTL Club, the Jim & Tammy Show and other television shows produced at the former Heritage USA and Heritage Village complex in the 1970s and 1980s, and programs produced by other ministries.

• PTL Television Network website