Jim Bakker, PTL televangelist convicted of fraud in 1989, dies at 86

Jim Bakker died on Monday evening, 5 October 2026. He was 86. His wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death on the Facebook page of The Jim Bakker Show. She wrote that he "went home to be with the Lord this evening" and called him her husband, her best friend, and a pioneer of Christian television. The statement gave no cause and no place of death. The programme he co-hosted with her has been produced from Branson, Missouri.

Bakker was born on 2 January 1940 in Muskegon, Michigan. With his first wife, Tammy Faye, whom he married in 1961, he built the Praise the Lord ministry, known as PTL, into one of the largest religious broadcasters in the United States. The PTL Club ran from the Charlotte area for about 15 years. At its peak the network claimed about 12 million subscribers across roughly 1,300 cable systems and took in more than $128 million a year.

Heritage USA and the money

The physical face of the ministry was Heritage USA, a theme park and resort at Fort Mill, South Carolina, which opened in 1978. A Grand Hotel followed in 1984 and a water park in 1986. In 1986 the park drew more than 6 million visitors, a figure that put it among the most visited private attractions in the country that year. Lifetime partnerships, sold as lodging rights at the park, were the product that later sat at the centre of the fraud case. Buyers paid for a stay they were told would be available. The rooms were oversold.

On 19 March 1987 Bakker resigned from PTL. The immediate cause was the disclosure that he had paid Jessica Hahn, a church secretary from Long Island, to stay silent about a sexual encounter in a Florida hotel room in 1980. The hush money was $115,000, with further monthly interest drawn from a $150,000 trust. Tammy Faye's public tears and Jim's on-air apology became the image of the scandal. The money question outlasted the sex question.

A federal grand jury in Charlotte indicted him in December 1988. Prosecutors said he and associates had conspired to defraud followers of $158 million. In 1989 a jury convicted him on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. Judge Robert Potter sentenced him to 45 years and a $500,000 fine. An appeals court later cut the term. Bakker served just under five years and was paroled in December 1994.

After prison

Tammy Faye divorced him in 1992. She died in 2007 at 65. Bakker met Lori Graham in 1998 while doing inner-city ministry work in Los Angeles and married her the same year. In the 2000s he returned to television with The Jim Bakker Show, co-hosted by Lori, from a studio complex near Branson. The new programme sold survival food, books and airtime, and it drew a smaller and older audience than PTL. He told Larry King in interviews in 2000 and 2005 that he had been forgiven and that the prison years had changed him. The fraud conviction stayed on the record.

A 2021 film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, retold the marriage and the collapse for a new audience, with Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye and Andrew Garfield as Bakker. The film treated the couple as media inventors and as people who spent money that viewers had sent for ministry. That split is the durable fact. PTL helped invent the daily religious talk show, the satellite religious network and the Christian theme park. It also produced a 24-count federal fraud conviction and a sentence that, on paper, would have kept Bakker in prison into the 2030s.

Lori Bakker's announcement closed the public life without a medical detail. He was 86. The PTL verdict is 37 years old. Heritage USA was sold off in pieces after the bankruptcy. What remains in the public record is the conviction, the parole date, the second marriage, and a television format that outlived the man who scaled it.