American Scandal - Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker | Bringing Down the Bakkers | 4

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

When investigative reporter Charles E. Shepard began covering televangelist Jim Bakker and his ministry, Praise the Lord, he knew it could be the biggest story his paper was following. Throughout the 1980s, he documented Bakker’s extraordinary wealth, financial crimes, and sexual assault of a former PTL secretary named Jessica Hahn. Shepard’s efforts helped win his paper a Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service. Today, he joins Lindsay to talk about his book, Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry, and the discoveries that helped bring Bakker and his ministry down.Need more American Scandal? With Wondery+, enjoy exclusive seasons, binge new seasons first, and listen completely ad-free. Start your free trial in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or visit wondery.app.link/IM5aogASNNb now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, this is Lindsey Graham, host of American Scandal. Our back catalog has moved behind a paywall. Recent episodes remain free, but older ones will require a Wondery Plus subscription. With Wondery Plus, you get access to the full American Scandal archive, ad-free, plus early access to new seasons and more. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal. In December 1984, investigative reporter Charles E. Shepard was working at his desk at the Charlotte Observer Newsroom in North Carolina. He was writing an article about a new hotel

in Jim Baker's nearby Christian theme park called Heritage USA. But he was interrupted when a woman rang the newsroom and said she wanted to speak to someone about Jim Baker's Praise the Lord Ministry, PTL. She wouldn't give Shepard her name. She talked about a friend of hers who she said had been forced to sign a statement protecting PTL from legal action. She said her friend had met Jim Baker in a Florida hotel room and that she had been,

quote, brought into a situation in which she had no control. Charlie Shepard suspected that there was no friend, the woman was talking about herself, and that her name was Jessica Hahn. He was right, and this phone call opened up a whole new angle on the reporting that Shepard had been doing about the lavish spending at PTL. Reporting this story took Shepard on what seemed like a wild goose chase at times, with dead ends and even threats, both to the paper and himself, but Shepard stuck with the story and convinced people to talk to him. He documented the $265,000 hush money payment made to Jessica Hahn, and he exposed Jim Baker's lifetime partner hotel scheme at Heritage USA.

His persistence paid off. Jim Baker eventually resigned from PTL, was prosecuted, and went to prison. Shepard's coverage of PTL and its misuse of funds helped win the Charlotte Observer a Pulitzer for meritorious public service in 1988. Joining me today is the same Charles Shepard, former investigative journalist at The Washington Post and Charlotte Observer, and also author of Forgiven, the Rise and Fall of Jim Baker and the PTL Ministry. Our conversation is next. next. millions or popular games like blackjack baccarat and roulette with our ever-growing library of digital slot games a large selection of online table games and signature bet mgm service there's no better way to bring the excitement and ambiance of las vegas home to you than with bet mgm casino

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that have dented its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. The latest season of Business Wars explores how Boeing allowed things to turn deadly and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Make sure to listen to Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Charlie Sheppard, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal. Glad to be here. Now, in your book, Forgiven, The Rise and Fall of Jim Baker and the PTL Ministry, you wrote that even as a teenager, Jim Baker, he liked nice things. What kind of family background did he come from? I mean, did he come from a family of money?

He didn't. And that's one of the really interesting aspects of his life and life story, I believe. He was from a working class family in very industrial Muskegon, Michigan. He was born in January 1940. He was the youngest of four children. And he shared a bed. Somehow this detail always seems important to me. He shared a bed with his next older brother for the first seven years of his life, which tells you how wealthy or not wealthy this family was. His dad was a machinist. His mom had been a stenographer. The family raised him and had come from the Assemblies of God denomination. So they were a multi-generational Assemblies of God family. And the Assemblies of God is a

conservative Pentecostal denomination that frowns on dancing, drinking, television, denomination that frowns on dancing, drinking, television, all the fun stuff Jim Baker would complain later on as an adult. But it's a denomination that Baker was part of and a minister in until his fall from power in 1987. He was not a good student. He had to repeat his senior year of high school. And when he went on to college, he wasn't a very good student then. And he dropped out to get married to Tammy Baker or Tammy LaValle at the time after about a year and a half. He did have some striking talents. He was self-assured. He was determined.

And he was creative. And he had a knack for sales, much like one of his grandfathers. And we'd go around as a kid selling stuff from a wagon and said at one point his ambition was to be a shoes salesman, like his brothers, his older brothers. And he did sell shoes as a kid, and he just had this gift for selling to people. And it's a gift we saw demonstrated throughout his career. So how do you suppose these talents, this salesmanship developed? I don't know that I have an answer to that question, but he did have a grandfather who was quite a gifted salesman.

And in high school, he studied photography, journalism, and sold advertising for the school paper. And the school paper was a very important place for him, ironic in hindsight, because he came up with the idea of offering each year a variety show as a fundraiser for the newspaper. So what he became, and even at that early age, was sort of an Ed Sullivan in the making. He would recruit talent, an Elvis impersonator, Miss Michigan, and even a summer church camp friend from Detroit, whom he billed as a concert pianist. And Baker was on the side, also a DJ. He couldn't necessarily dance at a school dance, but he could be the DJ. He worked on his performance skills, his speaking skills. And his friends tell of him seeming to be captivated by show business.

And they thought that was the career he would go into in life, which I guess we could argue he did. Yeah, and it probably started when I guess he decided to leave his college after meeting Tammy Fay and then gravitating towards TV evangelism. Now, you have watched Jim Baker on TV a bunch of times, but many in our audience may not have. So here's a clip to give everyone a sample of what he might sound like. And if all the demons in hell and all the bureaucrats in the world could stop me from building, when I go to heaven, he'd let me work on mansions. You can't defeat me. You cannot defeat a child of God. So, Charlie, what do you think was his appeal as a televangelist? What kind of things bound his supporters to him? as a televangelist? What kind of things bound his supporters to him?

Well, it's a great question. And if we look at the start of his career, one of the sort of interesting details was the puppet shows that he and his wife performed for Assemblies of God churches around the mid-Atlantic East Coast. And people noticed that Tammy seemed to have a creative spark, maybe even more than Jim Baker did. And so early on, arguably, it was Tammy's kind of wacky, funny talent with the puppets that caught the attention of the people who would become Jim and Tammy fans over time. Now, Jim had his own gifts. He had an instinct for his people, the Pentecostal audience that he had grown up in as a boy in Muskegon. He was a polished performer in the young medium of TV. He was charming on the air. He had a knack for taking ideas, borrowing ideas from the secular world and making them his successfully. A good example of that was in 1966. He's working for a struggling Christian TV station in Portsmouth, Virginia that would become today's Christian Broadcasting Network. And he proposes a TV show, a variety show for the evening patterned after Johnny

Carson's Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had sort of inherited the Tonight Show mantle about four years earlier. And that show, called The 700 Club, was a great success, and it was a fundraising vehicle for that TV station. He had a gift for making his TV audience feel what he felt, and feelings were huge for Jim Baker. But one thing he wasn't was particularly faithful to the truth. He could bend the truth in a way that worked with his audience, but would get him into trouble later. Now, your professional interest in Jim Baker and PTL was, I guess, came in 1984 when you inherited investigative duties at the Charlotte Observer. A colleague had previously been following PTL, and I guess you decided to keep following the story. What was it about the PTL story that made your alarm bells ring?

PTL was clearly, to me, the best story of that newspaper on a continuing basis. It was located in Charlotte or close to Charlotte. It had a national profile, a national following, a national TV show. Baker already had gotten into trouble and our newspaper had done a great job of disclosing that. And there was certainly reason to think that would continue since it seemed very much part of how he worked, which is he was happy to raise a lot of money, not necessarily use it in the way that he had promised. And I was also interested in covering not-for-profit organizations. I felt that they were a part of the world that didn't get enough attention from the press. And that's exactly, of course, what PTL was. It was a church,

at least in title, operating under the not-for-profit status of a church. And now that you've inherited this story, you receive what I suppose is a pretty big tip that kind of indicated that your work on following PTL and Jim Baker might lead to a real story. There was a phone call, a tip, that said the Bakers had luxurious homes and fancy cars in Palm Springs. Tell me about this call.

Was it anonymous? How did you respond? My recollection is it actually wasn't anonymous, but came from a former PTL employee who was a pretty loyal source for us, frustrated with what she had seen happen at PTL and with the behavior of the Bakers. And she said the Bakers had bought a house in the Palm Springs area and two luxury cars, the Palm Springs area, and two luxury cars, one a Rolls Royce, an antique Rolls Royce for Jim, and the other a new Mercedes sports coupe for Tammy. That was the first PTL story that I worked on. At that time, I was working with another reporter, John Wildman, who was a great public

records guy and a joy to work with. And so we went to work just using standard investigative techniques, using public records to find the house that's not terribly difficult if the house hasn't been hidden in someone else's name, and in this case, it hadn't been, and then to find the cars, which was a little trickier. After we sort of made those initial discoveries, we took a trip to Palm Springs to go visit the house, take pictures, and do whatever in-person reporting we could that might strengthen the story. And then, of course, word got back of your investigation to Jim Baker and PTL. What was their response? Well, that was a fascinating experience, and it established a habit that PTL would demonstrate in the subsequent years of my coverage of the organization. What you do as a reporter is you gather your facts. In this case,

we wrote up a draft of the story. Then you have to go to the focus of your story, the target of your story, if you will, and ask them questions. Give them a chance to tell you if you got it right, to explain what they've done. And so we did that and sent them a bunch of questions, and we heard nothing back from them, just sort of delay, delay, delay. And what was happening behind the scenes, as it turned out, is they were preparing their counteroffensive, if you will. The first thing they did before the story was published was to start sort of softening up or preparing, perhaps we should say framing the facts for their followers. So they might talk about, as they did in this situation,

Tammy was exhausted or they've given everything that they can to the ministry. So basically getting their followers to react to the story we would publish in a way that would be positive for the organization, that is for PTL, and would facilitate fundraising off of that outrage, the outrage of what the newspaper had published. That was one thing they did. Another thing they did was to send a crew out to California to make footage of Jim and Tammy at the house, of Jim driving the Rolls Royce out into the desert. Jim and Tammy at the house of Jim driving the Rolls Royce out into the desert as we were preparing for the story, preparing to publish the partners to it and assuring them that, of course, that it's not really a secret, which, of course, it had been. So, you know, touche to them. They had done a good job. We had done what we should have done to be responsible journalists, but they exploited that. And what did this teach you about Jim Baker and PTL and how you might cover the story from then on out? I think maybe obviously it taught me to be very distrustful of what they

were telling us and what they were saying certainly publicly as well, to try to be prepared tactically for whatever they might do. And of course, now we have their playbook, so we were particularly prepared for that. And just more generally, to be prepared for a chess game. We were trying to do our job, and they were going to do their best to protect the organization, keep the pipeline of contributions coming into the organization, even if we were going to write some tough stories about them. some tough stories about them. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life.

You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge,

but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant, Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX, the latest season of business wars, explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of

safety concerns and public mistrust. The decisions, denials, and devastating consequences bringing the Titan to its knees and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Now, follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Business Wars, the unraveling of Boeing, early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. By the mid-1980s, Jim and Tammy Faye were being broadcast on television stations across the country. They owned their own satellite network. But Jim Baker wanted more. across the country. They own their own satellite network. But Jim Baker wanted more. He wanted a Christian resort, a theme park, a hotel, an entire compound called Heritage USA.

Now, you've been there. What's it like? I'm not a religious person. I'm not pro-religious or anti-religious. I thought, as an objective reporter, I could appreciate the folks who supported Baker, found it satisfying to them, found it a nice place, a lovely place to go. And the grounds were terrific. They were well-tended generally, unless it was some construction project going on. Baker was actually very finicky about that and would write daily notes about, you need to clean this up or clean that up. It had some fun things to experience for a family. I would bring my young family there just to kind of keep track of what was happening

and feel connected to the physical place. They had an over-the-top Christmas lights display. You could experience staying in your car and driving through the campus, which was quite large. The campus was just quite large. Then in 1984, they opened a 500-room hotel coupled with a Main Street enclosed shopping mall and a conference center cafeteria. And I remember going there to eat with my family. And again, lovely experience.

They had a miniature railroad for the kids. And of course, you could go see Jim Baker tape his TV show. So there was this sort of celebrity component and experience for those who had come there. One of the classic tenets of journalism is to follow the money. And I guess I'm wondering if you could give us a kind of overview of how Jim Baker and the people around him raised money for PTL and his building projects, and then how did it actually flow? The story changes over time. When Baker comes to Charlotte in 1974 to start what becomes his ministry, they start first with a TV studio located in an old former furniture store

with phone banks and people calling in for prayer, and Jim Baker saying, you know, help support the ministry, and I'm sure having, knowing him, periodic financial crises that he needed his followers to help them with. And of course, there was an old-fashioned direct mail, you know, send so many dollars, you get this tchotchke, this record, this book from Jim and Tammy. this record, this book from Jim and Tammy. And then in the late 70s, so about four or five years in, they start pushing their missions work. Now, the Assemblies of God denomination very much devoted to mission work overseas. Baker's twist on that was TV shows that were going to be cited in different countries, Brazil, Korea, Cyprus, for instance, and we're going to have a sort of PTL-branded host and program.

And he raised a good bit of money in the late 1970s for those plans, which were never particularly realized and ended up getting him into trouble with the FCC for raising money for one thing and using it for another. The other that he would use the money for often were buildings. And that clip we heard earlier in which he talked about going to heaven to build mansions is very telling. Baker was, at his core, a master builder. He loved buildings, I think, not just because they were a great way to raise money, but also because he was passionate about creating something that was edifying to him, that sort of documented what a success he was. I mentioned that the Bakers started their program in a furniture store, an old furniture store in Charlotte. Well, pretty quickly, Baker decided

that wasn't good enough, and he identified a mansion in South Charlotte that was on about 25 acres of land. He was able to buy that inexpensively and then created his first retreat center for his organization. It was called Heritage Village, which interestingly is the name that his old neighborhood in Muskegon had been given a few years earlier. But then after running into some resistance from the neighborhood, he came up with a grander plan, which was to buy land south of Charlotte, actually most of it in South Carolina, just over the border. And that was what would become Heritage USA. It was sort of something to behold as he built it out. You mentioned the tip that led you to Palm Springs and the discovery of the Baker's lavish lifestyle there. But what else did you find

out about how Jim Baker and PTL were spending their money? In addition to his passion for building at Heritage USA, which was a very expensive passion, I might add. He and Tammy cared deeply about where they lived and never seemed particularly satisfied with the current home and always wanted something better. So a striking amount of spending went into buying homes, adding on to those homes, and then often buying a new home. It was something that opened him up to some very negative press coverage, typically by the observer, and also created pushback within the organization

because you had a lot of people who were devoted to this not-for-profit organization and the work that they thought it should be doing, and yet you saw Jim and Tammy spending lots of money, or the organization spending lots of money on Jim and Tammy. There was a house here and then it seemed like six months later there was a new house or there was a big renovation plan for a house. And indeed, in the last couple of years he was running PTL, he purchased three different second homes. Baker wanted to build homes and mansions not only in heaven, but also in South Carolina or North Carolina or California. I think this infatuation with buildings,

with homes, with real estate is interesting. And he built out the Heritage USA complex extraordinarily. What are some of the things he built out on that property? He started out with an idea of a Christian retirement center and the university. The university failed pretty quickly. There was a campground. There was some permanent housing. But the big change came in 1984 when he decided to build this Heritage Grand Partner Center, as he called it, with the 500-room hotel, the enclosed Main Street shopping mall that felt very, very much like Disney, and then a conference center and cafeteria. And he soon would add to that a huge mountain-like water park just outside the Heritage Partner Center.

problem with this is it cost enormous amounts of money. The projects were invariably poorly managed and subject to Baker's impulsive changes. What you're getting to, one of the cruxes of the scandal here, is in that trying to pay for the hotel, Baker invented this scheme. Why don't you explain to us what the lifetime partnerships were? It's a really important question because it's the seeds for the failure of PTL for the downfall and imprisonment of Jim Baker. At the time, I think he thought it was a brilliant maneuver. Basically, okay, I need to pay for this tens of millions of dollars for this new project. Where am I going to get the money? I have difficulty borrowing money in the secular world because of my track record. The idea he came up with is what he called the lifetime partnerships.

And they're very similar to a timeshare, except the way they were executed by PTL, they were not regulated in any way. He promised his followers, or those who chose to pay $1,000 initially for a lifetime partnership. We'll give you a hotel room for three nights a year for the rest of your life, three nights, four days in this property that we're building. You're getting what looks like a pretty good deal. And he made a promise too that he would only commit or sell half of the space in the hotel. He'd leave the other half of the hotel space for paying customers in order to make sure he could pay the bills necessary to keep that operation running.

And that, of course, led to the overselling of these partnerships. It took a couple of years, and it wasn't evident to the people who were buying these because they were being deceptive or cagey about how many they had sold. And they were coming back to this sort of promise that we've got to make sure we don't sell too many. We've only got a few left. We've only got a few left. But it became the elixir of life for PTL. It was the only way they could keep building these buildings and also have a chance to keep the organization running and also have the money that Jim Baker needed to buy a new house or to take a new trip to get a new secret raise in his salary or bonus. And the bonus money was flowing in the final years

in a staggering way. You met and interviewed Jim Baker, and I'd love to know how that interview came about, how it went. What'd you learn, if anything, about the character of Jim Baker? It was an interesting experience. I met Jim Baker once before that interview, but it was sort of a peace treaty meeting between the newspaper and PTL, arranged by Baker's number two man, Richard Dortch, who was very pained, I think, to see the kind of coverage that PTL was getting. And what we agreed after this meeting or in this meeting was we would try to do a better job of covering more routine events at PTL. And the next big routine event that was happening, although I know in hindsight, I'm not sure it

was routine, was the opening of this hotel, the I know in hindsight, I'm not sure it was routine, was the opening of this hotel, the 500 Room Heritage Grand, which was opening at Christmas time in December of 1984, even though the building actually wasn't complete yet. My colleague, John Wildman, and I went to PTL in early December and met Baker in the hotel lobby. There was a lot of construction going on. It was a little hard to believe it would be ready for the opening later in the month. And then Baker toured us around the property as I'm sure he did for many people. And it was the master builder role that he loved so much. And then finally, we went to a hotel room in the hotel. He sat on a bare mattress while we asked him a few questions. And I don't know that I felt I really learned much more about Jim Baker than I already knew

because I had been watching him on TV carefully. We had been taping and transcribing every show for months and I would watch him regularly. What I've encountered or what we encountered was the same kind of Jim Baker you'd see on the air. So he complained about being really tired. And that was a narrative we often heard from Baker on TV, how hard Jim and Tammy worked and how exhausted they were. And he may well have been tired, by the way. I can't say he wasn't. And then he went into his standard pitch for Heritage USA that Christians want something nice. Why do the nice places have to just be for the secular crowd? I think by that point, he was deeply suspicious of the press, generally the observers specifically.

He was, as he said in the interview, he's a bashful person. And I think that's true. He kind of kept to himself. There was a very happy, warm, social Jim on the air, but a very private, reclusive Jim off camera. He was soliciting enormous amounts of money from working people who probably could not afford it and doing it over and over and mismanaging it and spending it on himself. Why do you think Jim Baker thought this was okay? How could he rationalize it? I think that's an excellent question and part of the Jim Baker puzzle. What makes someone tick? I think the situation he was in was one where a normal person, a person with a sound set of

values would reassess and stop and say, I can't do this anymore. And there were people at PTL, and this is really an important part of the story, who said that, who watched what was happening, believed in what PTL could be and had been, but were deeply, deeply saddened and turned off by what they saw happening. But that was not who Baker was. He was not a person for genuine regret. I sort of see a clue in his personality type, which I, as I argue in my book Forgiven, is sort of classic narcissistic personality disorder. He was very focused on what he wanted to achieve, what his needs were, including his own need to succeed and be the star. And he was convinced, I think,

privately of what the world owed him, including his supporters. And that gave him sort of license to justify making decisions, spending money in a way that was really criminal, as it turned out, in fact, criminal. An interesting quote I reread the other day from Baker after his fall, but not too long after his fall in May of 1987. He said on Nightline, I should have been more attentive to the details, but I had a vision and a plan, and I was a man with a fire inside of me to do something for the Christian world. So that sort of sums it all up, I think. That's how he rationalized it.

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What was this phone call like? What did she say was happening to her? We had heard the name Jessica Hahn before. An unnamed, unidentified person at the time, although we later found out who that was, had called another reporter, a religion reporter, ironically, and said, you need to talk to Jessica Hahn or you need to find Jessica Hahn. We didn't know how to spell her name. We didn't know any more than that. We didn't know why we needed to talk to her. In fact, I had made some sort of rudimentary effort to find a Jessica Hahn up in New York where we thought she lived. So we get this call and she said she was calling for a friend and this friend had been

forced to sign a false statement to protect PTL from legal action. And then she said that this friend had been invited to Clearwater Beach a number of years earlier, four, to see Jim Baker at a telethon and had herself been housed in the hotel where Baker was staying and then had been brought into a situation in which she had no control, which was essentially a sexual encounter with Baker. So what am I thinking as I'm having this phone call? I suspect the person calling is the actual person who experienced this situation. And indeed, it did turn out to be Jessica Hahn telling her story to me, which she acknowledged at some point in the call. I had two calls with her, one long one that day, another week or so later.

And she told me the story. It didn't really necessarily all make sense because she wanted, most of all, she said, to stop rumors about her behavior. I think that she was suggesting that the word was out she was a party girl in the Pentecostal circles. She was a church secretary, by the way, at this time, and just 25, 26 years old, I believe, at the time. So it's odd. She's calling a reporter and telling them this very intimate experience. And yet she says she's doing it because she wants to stop the rumors. So I knew instinctively that this might not be a story I would be able to write in the Charlotte Observer, but I wanted to find out anything I could. About a week after my second conversation with her, Jessica called my home and talked to my

then wife, who was also a reporter at the Observer, and said everything she had told me was a lie, and she would sue if we printed it. And that was the end of the conversation. But the difficulty of this story for you didn't really stop there, because even with Han contradicting herself, we had Jim Baker denying Han's story altogether. She claimed she was raped in that hotel room, and Baker claimed that nothing of the sort happened, that the encounter was consensual. I suppose that leaves you with one part of the story you can follow up on, and that's the hush money payment. Tell us how you track that down. Sure. And I should just clarify that I did not talk to Jim Baker about this event. I didn't want him to know I was talking to her, and I didn't know what his explanation would be.

I also didn't hear from her in those conversations that she had been raped. She didn't use that language. So I made some efforts to try to figure out kind of what next steps to take, to talk to some sources at PTL to find out what they knew about this woman. I didn't really get very far. But I got a second stroke of good luck about a year later, about almost exactly a year after Jessica's calls. I get a call from a man in Southern California who identifies himself as John Stewart. And he tells me about being involved in drafting a lawsuit about a year earlier for a woman who said she had had an unwanted sexual encounter with Jim Baker in Florida. He's basically telling me the same story or some variant of the same story that Jessica

told me exactly a year earlier. But he goes on to tell me something that's really important, that this woman has received money in response to the pressure, the threat of a lawsuit, and negotiations that have gone on out in California involving Baker's number two, Richard Dortch. Now I know, because I know PTL was always the bank roller for money that Jim Baker needed for any of his needs. So if there's money going to this woman, that money

very, very likely came from PTL. And like some of your stories previously, PTL got wind that you were on the trail of the Jessica Hahn story, and again, PTL tried to preempt it. They struck back on the air. What did they do to both you and the Charlotte Observer? I should just say that a good reporter tries to work from the outside in on a story like this, so I tried to be fairly stealthy for the weeks that followed. And in fact, it would take another year to really get the critical breakthrough. But in January of 1987, I make a breakthrough and am able to persuade a former executive assistant to Baker's number two, Richard Dortch, to talk to me about Jessica Hahn and what he knew about it. And he knew a lot. As PTL became aware that I was aware of this story,

they started to maneuver at a number of different levels to try to push back. One thing they did was to start to put pressure on our publisher and pressuring our parent corporation, which at the time was the Knight Rail Corporation in Miami, to try to restrain our coverage, to say that we are, your reporters are acting irresponsibly, they're spying on us. And indeed, ironically, BTL hired in 1986, as this was all starting to heat up, they hire their own private investigator who makes calls misrepresenting himself, trying to get us to make comments on the air that are critical of Baker and show a lack of fairness. I get some threatening phone calls, anonymous calls, fortunately not too many of them. And we got one letter, which is perhaps

worth reading from. You will have boils, tumors, scurvy, and itch, for none of which there will be a remedy. You will have madness, blindness, fear, and panic will come over you. You will have madness, blindness, fear, and panic will come over you. You will watch as your loved ones are taken by dope, booze, or maybe prostitution. You will eat the flesh of your sons and daughters in the days of siege ahead. This is not something I thought up. It is the word of God. So you see, this is a passionate group of people, and if Baker is successful in riling them up, that can be great for fundraising.

It can make it difficult for the newspaper as it tries to do its job. As we mentioned in our series, right before the publication of your article that broke the Hahn story and precipitated this backlash, you had a phone interview with Jim Baker. And during it, he delivered a bit of a surprise, stating that he was resigning from the PTL. That news must have hit you pretty hard. Put us there in the moment, in the room with you. What was that call like? It was really an out-of-body experience from start to finish.

First of all, just to give you the setting, in this interview, I was sitting at the desk of the editor of the newspaper, Rich Apple. And sitting in that office as we prepared for the call is the editor, the managing editor, my editor, the newspaper's outside lawyer, and the newspaper's publisher. So Baker comes on and he's speaking from his new home in Palm Springs. So Baker comes on and he starts to read. And it's pretty clear right from the gecko and he says it, I'm resigning. And he goes on to defend himself to say that he had had a sexual encounter, but he felt he was manipulated into it, that money had been paid and that he regret that. But then is the biggest surprise of all. Okay. I mean, not that his resignation isn't stunning news and doesn't make this a national story.

But as he leaves the call, he says, I want to ask my friend, Jerry Falwell, to help me as the new chair of the new board of directors at BTL. And there, within seconds, is Jerry Falwell's, now the late Jerry Falwell, but at the time very much alive, Jerry Falwell's booming voice on the line talking to us. And why was this stunning? It was stunning because Jerry Falwell and Jim Baker were not cut from the same cloth. They were not friends, a mistake that he will regret pretty soon thereafter. But wow, that begins an amazing six weeks of national news, of Nightline holding up our front pages. The newspaper sold 20,000 extra newspapers the day of publication, had to restart the presses three times to meet demand. The only bigger story in the history of the Observer up to that time was the death of Elvis. The observer up to that time was the death of Elvis. What I think is important is that this shook the confidence of the people who had been at Baker's side for so long, because now they realized he was not the man that he had pretended to be. And unfortunately for Jim Baker, this was only the beginning of his descent, because

not only was the IRS interested in his finances, the federal government at large was. They indicted Baker for mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiring to defraud the public through the sale of these never-ending lifetime memberships. Baker went to trial, and you covered it. I'd love for you to give us a sense of what it was like to be inside the courtroom. I'd love for you to give us a sense of what it was like to be inside the courtroom. Well, of course, for a reporter who had kind of lived this story for so many years and whose work had helped result in the indictments and in this trial I was watching, it was, again, somewhat of an out-of-body experience. My book, Forgiven, came out as the trial was beginning as well, so it was a particularly intense time for me. This trial was the flip side of the world that Baker had lived in for so long. He had lived in a world where he was adored, he was pampered, he was surrounded by people who met his every need, by fans who couldn't think more highly of him. Instead, here he is going through this trial. His former employees and

many of his partners are detailing his failures, his lies, his greed. And you can imagine for the narcissist, this is sort of their worst nightmare, where all of the things that make them feel good about themselves kind of vanish. I'm wondering what you think this Jim Baker scandal might say about America today, beyond the superficial. I'll read you a clip from the introduction to my book, Forgiven. It's an odd marriage, God and television, and too often its progeny mimic the worst secular hucksters, their slick salesmanship and rationalized deceit cloaked by the disarming glow of godliness. I'm struck by the power of television to do harm. It elevates people who may not be honest, but who happen to be gifted performers in front of the camera.

And we saw that with Jim Baker, and the consequences were devastating. Charlie Shepard, thank you so much for giving us your firsthand insights into this case, and thank you for joining us on American Scandal today. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. That was my conversation with former investigative journalist Charles E. Shepard. His work helped the Charlotte Observer win a Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in 1988. To learn more about this story, we recommend his book, Forgiven, The Rise and Fall of Jim Baker and the PTL Ministry. From Wondery, this is Episode 4 of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker from American Scandal.

In our next series, in the early 1920s, two of the richest oil men in the country are looking for exclusive rights to drill on federal land, and they find a willing accomplice and Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fulm. But after word gets out about secret deals, the resulting Teapot Dome scandal will leave a lasting stain on the legacy of President Warren G. Harding, and put one of the wealthiest men in America behind bars. If you're enjoying American Scandal, you can unlock exclusive seasons on Wondery Plus. Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app,

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