Televangelist Jim Bakker, who built a Christian TV empire with Tammy Faye before scandal, fraud convictions, and prison, has died at 86, his wife announced.
Fox News Digital reported that Bakker died Monday at age 86. His second wife, Lori Bakker, said he “went home to be with the Lord this evening.” The cause of death was unclear. Bakker had suffered a stroke in 2020.
Lori Bakker framed the loss as both personal and ministerial.
"It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening,"
She tied his life to decades of preaching and to the partners who backed the work.
"For 66 years, Jim gave his life to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry."
Bakker’s career stretched from early Christian broadcasting to a peak empire, a public collapse, federal prison, and a later return to the air. The record is long, public, and full of hard turns.
Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan. He attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. They married in 1961, left school, and started a traveling ministry.
In the 1960s he joined the Christian Broadcasting Network under Pat Robertson. A biography on Bakker’s website said he developed a daily children’s program called “Come On Over” and later became the first host of “The 700 Club.”
He left CBN in 1972. Two years later he formed the PTL Satellite Network. The signature show was “The PTL Club”, Praise the Lord, with Tammy Faye beside him as co-host and singer.
By the 1980s the program drew millions of viewers and brought in millions of dollars a year, the Associated Press has reported in material carried by Fox. The ministry also built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park and hotel in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
That scale made Bakker one of the most recognizable faces in televangelism. It also put the finances under a microscope.
In March 1987, Bakker admitted to a sexual encounter with church clerk Jessica Hahn. He turned PTL operations over to pastor and broadcaster Jerry Falwell.
Federal investigators then moved on the money. In 1988 Bakker was indicted on mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges tied to PTL’s finances. He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. The sentence was later reduced to eight years.
U.S. marshals escorted him from an attorney’s office to a car in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 31, 1989. After the guilty verdict, Tammy Faye sang the hymn “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand” at a news conference, a stark public image of a ministry in freefall.
Tammy Faye divorced him in 1992 while he was still in prison. She later married building contractor Roe Messner, whose projects had included Heritage USA. Messner was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 1995 and served about two years. Tammy Faye died of colon cancer in 2007. The couple had two children together.
Bakker was released on parole in 1995. The rise had been spectacular. The fall was public, legal, and complete.
In 1998 Bakker married Lori. Five years later he launched “The Jim Bakker Show.” In 2002 the couple adopted five children.
The program described itself as an hour-long daily broadcast of “prophetic and Biblical revelations” aimed at “end times.” Lori said his focus never fully left the work, even late in life.
"Jim loved people deeply. He loved this ministry, and he loved the friends and partners who stood with him throughout the years. Even in his final days, his heart was still for the work of God and for the Gospel to continue reaching the world,"
Controversy followed him back onto television. In June 2021, Bakker and Morningside Church Productions Inc. settled a lawsuit accusing him of falsely claiming a health supplement called Silver Solution could cure COVID-19. The settlement called for $156,000 in refunds.
That episode sat in the same pattern as earlier years: bold claims, a devoted audience, and a bill that eventually came due in court.
Bakker’s story is not a clean morality play written by his admirers or his critics. He helped build modern Christian television when the medium was still young. He also admitted a sexual scandal, lost a media empire, and went to federal prison for fraud.
He remarried, returned to broadcasting, adopted children, suffered a stroke, and kept preaching until the end his wife described. Viewers who sent money in the PTL years, and viewers who tuned in decades later, both belong in any honest account.
American religious broadcasting has always mixed faith, fundraising, celebrity, and human failure. Bakker’s life ran through all four. The cameras made him famous. The courts made the cost plain. Lori Bakker’s statement closed the final chapter in the language of the ministry he never fully left.
A free country lets preachers rise, fall, and try again on a public stage, and it still expects the books, and the truth, to add up when the lights come on.
