Televangelist Jim Bakker, who built a Christian television empire with The PTL Club before a sex scandal and fraud conviction sent him to prison, has died at 86.
Fox News reported that Bakker’s second wife, Lori, said he passed away on Monday. The cause of death was unclear. Bakker had suffered a stroke in 2020.
Lori Bakker announced the news and described a long life in ministry, marriage, and broadcast work that made her husband one of the most recognizable names in modern Christian television, and one of the most controversial.
She said he “went home to be with the Lord this evening,” framing his death in the language of the faith he preached for decades on camera and off.
"It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening."
Bakker rose from a small-city upbringing and a short stretch of Bible college to national fame, then fell in a blaze of financial investigation, a public admission of a sexual encounter, federal charges, and prison time. He later returned to daily religious broadcasting and stayed on the air into old age.
In a statement released after his death, Lori Bakker cast his life as one long assignment in Christian media and personal ministry.
"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."
She also said he kept his focus on supporters and the work even near the end.
"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."
Breitbart reported that the death notice went out late Monday on Bakker’s official Facebook account, and that after his scandals and imprisonment he later resumed ministry work in Branson, Missouri.
Public farewells for widely known figures often arrive in clusters of coverage, as when readers saw the recent report on former NFL cornerback Alphonso Smith Jr. dead at 40 after a distressed social media post.
Jim Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan. He attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. They married in 1961 and left school to start a traveling ministry.
In the 1960s he joined the Christian Broadcasting Network under Pat Robertson. A biography on Bakker’s website said he developed an early daily children’s program for Christian audiences called “Come On Over,” and that he became the first host of “The 700 Club,” a talk format that featured prominent ministers and singers of the era.
He left CBN in 1972. Two years later he formed the PTL Satellite Network, Praise the Lord, and built his signature program, “The PTL Club,” with Tammy Faye as a central on-air partner who sang and performed.
By the 1980s, “The PTL Club” was a major draw. The Associated Press material carried in the Fox report said the show pulled in millions of viewers and millions of dollars a year from followers.
The ministry’s footprint included Heritage USA, a Christian-themed park and hotel complex in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Building contractor Roe Messner worked on projects there. For a time, Bakker stood at the center of a donor-funded media and hospitality machine that looked unstoppable on television.
That machine did not hold.
In March 1987, Bakker admitted to a sexual encounter with church clerk Jessica Hahn. The same month, he turned PTL operations over to pastor and broadcaster Jerry Falwell.
The admission blew open a wider reckoning. Federal investigators moved on PTL’s finances. In 1988, Bakker was indicted on mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges tied to that investigation.
He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. The term was later reduced to eight years. After the guilty verdict, Tammy Faye sang “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand” at a news conference, a raw public moment preserved in AP’s account of the fallout.
U.S. marshals were photographed escorting Bakker in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 31, 1989, a visual marker of how far the on-air host had fallen from the Fort Mill stage.
Tammy Faye divorced Bakker in 1992 while he was still incarcerated. She later married Roe Messner. Messner himself was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 1995 and served about two years in prison. Tammy Faye died of colon cancer in 2007.
Bakker was released on parole in 1995. In 1998 he married Lori. The couple adopted five children in 2002. He already had two children from his marriage to Tammy Faye.
Five years after marrying Lori, he launched “The Jim Bakker Show” on the PTL Satellite Network, returning to the daily-television habit that had defined his rise. Other notable death stories on the same beat, including coverage of Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and Ms. Magazine co-founder, dead at 92, show how legacy fights and public memory travel with famous names long after their peak years.
Show copy on his website described the program as an hour-long daily broadcast built around “prophetic and Biblical revelations” aimed at current events and what it called end-times urgency.
Bakker’s later ministry was not free of legal trouble. In June 2021, Bakker and Morningside Church Productions Inc. settled a lawsuit that accused him of falsely claiming a health supplement called Silver Solution could cure COVID-19. The settlement called for $156,000 in refunds to people who had paid money or given contributions for the product early in the pandemic.
He had suffered a stroke the year before that settlement. His wife’s statement this week did not name a final medical cause for his death at 86.
Just The News also reported the death of the scandal-marked televangelist at 86, placing the same core facts before readers: the PTL fame, the collapse, and the end of a long, public life in religious media.
Across decades he sold a vision of faith on television, raised serious money from ordinary viewers, and then faced a jury, a prison term, and a later civil fight over pandemic-era health claims. The record is not complicated. It is a pioneer’s story and a fraud case in the same file.
American pulpits on camera still raise cash and command trust; Bakker’s life remains a hard lesson in what happens when that trust is spent like loose change.