Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Rise And Fall (And Rise) of Arch-Grifter Jim Bakker

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Robert is joined by Vic Berger to discuss Televangelist, Jim Bakker.FOOTNOTES: PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire Touching Empathy The “Real” Reason Televangelist Jim Bakker Went to Jail What happened to Tammy Faye Bakker after the PTL scandal? Jim Bakker is Still Here The Second Coming Of Televangelist Jim Bakker Where Are They Now?: Jim Bakker Jim Bakker's Christian amusement park is now a post-apocalyptic ghost town Jim Bakker Freed From Jail To Stay in a Halfway House 1987: Jim Bakker resigns from PTL; Jerry Falwell assumes leadership Interview with Jessica Hahn About Pastor Jim The scandals that brought down the Bakkers, once among US's most famous televangelists Televangelist Jim Bakker’s Road to Redemption Apocalypse Chow: We Tried Televangelist Jim Bakker's 'Survival Food' Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

That was not my best intro. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. We talk about bad people, and my introductions run the gamut from the sublimely brilliant to just going ahhh. And this was the latter, and I apologize. My guest today is Mr. Vic Burger. Hey, how you doing, Robert? I'm doing good. How are you doing? I'm all right. The best I can be during a pandemic, I guess. Now, Vic, I don't know how you describe what you do. I would describe you as a horror movie director who works exclusively in the medium of things other people have filmed. Yeah, I think so. I think that's a good way to put it. I mean, I'm working with the most depressing and upsetting footage, but I definitely

lean into the horror aspect of it, but I try to let people watch it and then leave with a little bit of humor to it. Maybe they'll be able to laugh at it in a way. And you have, among your many focuses, I came aware of you from Twitter, but you post your stuff on the YouTubes, as the kids call it. You have a real fascination with a fellow named Jim Baker. Oh, yeah. Definitely. If you were just going to summarize what you know of Jim Baker for our audience rolling into this, how would you describe the man? He's a food salesman. That's what he does. And then he now mentions God or Trump, stuff like that. But first and foremost, I think he's a food salesman, a prepper. That's what

he is today. But I guess he was pretty groundbreaking in the 50s and 60s as becoming one of the first televangelists. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good short summary of the career of Jim Baker. But there's a lot of details that I think you don't know. But before we get into this, because I'm very excited for you to learn some of this, because it's all horrifying. His whole life is a nightmare. What stands out about Jim Baker to you? What is it that makes him such a focus of your own work? He's pretty charismatic and he always has a wife or a woman with him who has a type. He has a definite type that he likes. And usually that means that she's highly medicated or she's on something. Doped up to fucking

back. Yeah. But it seems like the wife worships him. He just loves everything about him and wants to help him out and sell these buckets or whatever the grift is, selling hotel rooms or whatever it is along the way. But he's just interesting. I'm just fascinated with his whole entire life. Yeah. I, too, am fascinated by his life. And I guess, Vic, we should just roll into the story because there's a lot of Baker to cover here. So James Orson Baker was born on January 2, 1940. He was the youngest of four children by Raleigh and Fernia Baker in Muskegon, a city in Michigan that's apparently located on some big fancy lake, if you can believe such a thing. I've never heard of it before, but that's what they say. Big

lakes up in Michigan, apparently. So Jim was born premature and he spent the first days of his life on an incubator at the hospital while his mom and dad went home. His foot was burned by the device's heating element. And so he wound up having to stay there significantly longer than usual. So yeah, he was great at being born. Not the best at coming into the world. Yeah. And unfortunately, his parents were also really bad at nurturing. In his 1976 autobiography, Move That Mountain, which is like the first of so many autobiographies. This guy's written way more than a person should. Jim describes how, quote, mom and dad considered me so fragile that they didn't allow my brothers and sisters to even breathe

on me. As a result, during his childhood, he never experienced the sensation of my family members touched. Wow. Yeah, that's a bummer. That's a huge aspect. Yeah, it kind of fucks you. I'm not getting that. Yeah, like you just start to feel bad for him already. What? Yeah. No, you're going to. This kid's childhood is fucking rough. So it was understandable that Baker's parents would be extra worried for their little boy, but they seemed to have gone beyond mere concern. His stern Dutch family, as he later described them, let caution for their son's health lead to a complete lack of physical contact and even emotional warmth. His father once washed his mouth out with palmol of soap for saying, gee whiz.

So like, no one touches him. And there's, I'll say some unreasonable standards. Gee whiz was a curse word at the Baker home. Yeah, he said the GW word. So his mom was also a giant clean freak. And it was just, it seems like it, I mean, we're going to talk a lot actually about his childhood. It all was terrible. So there's echoes of this upbringing in the modern Jim Baker. I'm not going to get into a super long spiel about how a lack of touch and infancy damages children now that we're all quarantined. I think people probably, probably more or less get that. But I will say that, like, if you look at orphanages back in the day, like the Dakindian ones where they were actually just like having kids be alone in

a giant room, the death rate was 30 to 40%. And modern researchers think that a huge amount of that was not like disease or anything. It was the fact that no one was touching these kids. There was no like physical contact because they've long observed. Yeah, exactly. When you deprive infants of touch, they stop growing and they can even die if they don't receive sufficient physical stimulation. It's like an evolutionary thing, right? Like no sense in having the baby exist if there's no mom or dad around to take care of it. So it's a bummer. And even when their nutritional needs are met, children who are deprived of touching this way tend to grow up unusually small and they tend to score poorly on tests

and have massively elevated levels of stress hormones. And adult Jim Baker describes himself as as a child as slow, small and not particularly bright. Like this is how he describes himself and whether or not, yeah, it's a bummer. He still does have the boyish qualities though. He is a tiny little guy and he's got the kid face there. Yes, yes, he does. Yeah. And whether or not like, I don't know, some of that may be him exaggerating in his own head, but this is how he sees himself. And that's important. So making himself out to be the victim too. That's kind of, you know, that's a big part of it. That is a big part of it. But oh man, the part we're getting to is such a bummer dude. Before we get into that, his father

Raleigh was a machinist at a piston ring plant. And Jim later wrote that his dad, quote, made a decent living, but I thought we lived in poverty. And this is like a factor in his upbringing too is he was certain that he and his family were dirt poor and they really were not. They were pretty comfortably middle class. But this like longing for more money than he has is a very early thing for Jim Baker. Yeah. So there was something weird with his mom and dad's relationship, but the what is not clear. A family friend described that despite many visits to the house, she never heard Jim's mom say more than 10 words in all the years I knew them. So something something's going on there. Yes, something

is happening. Yeah, not probably not great. Yeah. So it's it's interesting that Jim describes himself as feeling as if he was impoverished as a kid. All of the evidence suggests that his family were full beneficiaries of the post war US economy in which a family of four could wind up owning a house by accident. Raleigh Baker worked at the same company for 42 and a half years. He bought used Cadillacs and used televisions, but the family never really wanted. When Jim was 15, they moved into an actual mansion with a grand piano in the living room because it was just really fucking easy to make a life for yourself in 1955 if you were a white guy. Yeah. Yeah. Not a hard time. So yeah, his first home though,

the home of his childhood was a boxy cement blockhouse that was painted a hideous shade of orange. And Jim would later recall that he felt a deep seated feeling of inferiority as a result of the fact that he had an ugly house. So yeah, interesting. Yeah, we're seeing some things come together. Yeah. Yeah. Plant the seeds. So the Baker family were Pentecostal Christians. Jim's grandfather, Joe, helped to found the Central Assembly of God, a very hardcore Pentecostal church. We're going to talk a little bit more about Pentecostals later. About 4.5% of Americans today are Pentecostal. And I don't think most foreigners or like city folks really know a whole lot about the Pentecostal church.

But the short description I would give is that whenever you hear something weird about American Christians like getting bitten by snakes to prove their faith or whatever, those are Pentecostals. There's a joke in the early Simpsons where Moe is like talking about his religion. He's something like, I've been a snake handler since the day I was born or something like that. And that's what that is, snake handlers. Yeah. So one of my sources for this episode was the exhaustively written book, PTL, The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Fay Baker's Evangelical Empire by John Wigger. His last name is Wigger. Yes, it's distracting. But it's a good book and it notes of Jim's religious upbringing, quote, the church often

failed to provide the comfort that Baker lacked at home. As a child, he was terrified by a three foot tall picture of a human eye that hung on the wall of his Sunday school room. As he and the other children saying, his eye is watching you, you, you. Oh my God. He said that it left him with the impression that the big eye was always looking and he would get you if you were ever bad. Very interesting. Oh my God. Not only did Pentecostals not go to the movies, they were not supposed to dance, bowl, play cards, shoot pool or listen to rock and roll. Another cultural touchstone for Pentecostals is the movie with Kevin Bacon about the town that doesn't dance. That's Pentecostals. Yeah. Oh, John Lithgow, so good

on that. The movie with Kevin Bacon where he doesn't dance. No, he dances, but the town doesn't. Yeah. Until they. I would write the flash dance. Yeah. Footloose, was it? Yeah. Not the Footloose movie. No, it is. It is. Oh, that is the one? Yeah, it's Footloose. Oh God, I've never seen Footloose. Yeah, I've got to cut loose Footloose. I'm just impressed with Robert actually knowing something that is. Oh no. Movie related. You got to watch Footloose. It is a great movie. I mean, you got to cut loose, watch Footloose, sorry. One of the two Kevin Bacon movies that are necessary pieces of culture. What's the second one? Trimmers. Oh yeah. Obviously. Yeah. So the word Pentecostal comes from an event recorded

in the Book of Acts, which is one of the, you know, Lamber books of the Bible. After Christ's resurrection, he came back to his followers as a zombie and was all like, the Holy Ghost is going to roll up on you and he's going to fill you with lots of power. And then later as the disciples were gathered for a feast in Jerusalem, quote, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind and it filled all in the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as a fire and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. So that's in every Christians Bible. And most

of them it's just like, yeah, it's just a thing that happened in the Bible, right? Like there's a bunch of moments in the Bible where like, there's some dudes that are friends of Jesus or a prophet and God comes in and he does some shit. It's just a thing that happened. But for the Pentecostals, that is like the core of some really critical theological do-ins starting in Los Angeles in 1906. That's where Pentecostalism began. Members of the church came to the belief that they could seek out this holy fire. And basically they believed that the Holy Spirit could fill them up in this way at any time. So there's that bit in the Bible where it talks about like they started speaking in other tongues as if the

Spirit gave them utterance, that's speaking in tongues. Like when you see Christians like going ecstatic and jumping around and like shrieking in fake nonsense language, that's speaking in tongues. This is where that comes from. And it's a big part of the Pentecostal faith. And it's really, it's really neat because they've actually done some scientific studies on people speaking in tongues. The claim is that you're basically talking in holy language that God throws into your head or whatever. Because there's Pentecostals all around the world now who are non-native English speakers or whatever. They all have different Pentecostals whose native language is different. Whenever people speak in tongues, they find that the

things that they're saying in tongues abide by the basic speech patterns of their native language, which suggests that, yeah, they're making it up. It's gibberish. Did you see when there's, I don't know what the name of the preacher is, but he was speaking in tongues. And then as he's speaking in tongues, he just starts checking his phone and scrolling through his Facebook feed. And then it's just, yeah, just like, you know, like, like, you know. I love shit like that. I had a really fun, I was at the, I was at this fucking big old celebration for Shiva when I was in India and somewhere in like rural Rajasthan. And

we're at like this big fucking festival and there's this like 30 foot statue of the God and everything. And there's this monk sitting in front of the statue of the God, like reading I don't know, chants or hymns or whatever from like a big book. But in the middle of the book, he has his phone. And as he's chanting, he's like scrolling through his text messages and stuff. And like, yeah, I love shit like that. So yeah, so that's, that's what Pentecostalism is. And I think that when your church hates fun as much as the Pentecostal church does, you kind of need something like speaking in tongues. You don't have a whole lot else. So thankfully for Jim, his dad was not as strict

as they were supposed to be. He let the family watch television and he took them to the movies. Jim's favorite show as a boy was I Love Lucy. As an adolescent, he took an even more casual attitude towards his faith restrictions. At his church, children were seated far away and out of sight from their parents. So Jim and his friends would sneak out during the service and hang out at the local soda fountain. There they would listen to forbidden music before sneaking back to retake their seats. Fats Domino was a favorite of theirs, which doesn't really have any bearing on anything. But I love the name Fats Domino. Right, right.

It's just unbelievably good name. Love him. Yeah. So when Jim was 11, he met a, yeah, sorry, this is, I shouldn't, this is a bummer. When Jim was 11, he met a young man from his church, an adult in his twenties or thirties who introduced himself as Russell. Russell approached Jim on Saturday after service and asked if he wanted to have a hamburger at a nearby drive-in. Now today, if a stranger walks up to a kid and says, you want to leave your parents behind and go get a hamburger, like that's a red flag. I'm not great at raising kids, but that's a red flag. But this was

the early 1950s. People trusted each other and his parents were like, sure, go off with the stranger boy. It's fine. And he did. So again, and this is going to seem really weird that a fucking 11 year old boy would go off with this guy in his twenties or thirties to get a hamburger. But Jim was, again, starved for attention. He later wrote that he was, quote, odd that this adult would want me. He gave me all his undivided attention. I felt wonderfully special. So yeah, after burgers, Russell drove off with Jim down a deserted dirt road and stopped. He unzipped Jim's jeans and started to fondle him. While he was being molested, Jim felt,

quote, almost proud that Russell would give me so much attention. I thought, so this must be what having a buddy is all about. This must be what big guys do. Yeah. Yeah. This got a little darker than I thought it would be at this point. Yeah, this is not a good. This is not a good one. No, it's a bummer. Yeah, it really is. So and it's like heartbreakingly, like you could it all completely scans like, oh, yeah, this kid is just so desperate for attention. Yeah. Yeah. So Jim didn't realize anything was really wrong at first and Russell became a frequent figure in his life, hanging out with the family occasionally and then taking Jim off to isolated construction sites or other places where he could park the car,

hiring him to mow his lawn so that he could like grab him in the middle of chores and molest him. And Jim never like fought this like he at the time he he he went along with it. And he later wrote, quote, I allowed Russell to do whatever he wanted to do to me. And I tried to comply with all his requests because he lavished attention and caring touches on me. Yeah, he's what 1516 you said? No, he's 11 when this 11. Oh, God, this goes on for a few years. Yeah, he's he's very he is the victim of a lot of abuse in this period. And it is the kind of abuse where at the time it's probably the most positive relationship in his life, which is further of a head fuck. It's a lot to deal with as an 11 year old.

Yeah, eventually Russell abandoned him, presumably because he got too old and Russell was, you know, a pedophile. And the whole situation was just a huge mind fuck for young Jim, as you can imagine, he never told anyone about it. You know, obviously he did later, but like as a kid, he didn't tell anybody. And yeah, like he just didn't talk about it for decades. His parents had raised a child that wasn't emotionally connected enough with himself to ask for a hug, like let alone confess to years of sexual abuse. Quote, I could keep up appearances, I could maintain a public persona even when I was falling apart internally. Jim began to nurse complicated and confusing homosexual feelings, which he still has never

come to terms with, but which he always found deeply shameful. He wasn't short a boy who was done very wrong by the adults in his life and by the society around him. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a real bummer. Yeah, poor fella. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's one of the rougher childhoods I've come across in all this. Yeah, I mean, geez. Yeah, so Jim's youth wasn't all trauma though. When he was 15, the family moved to a much nicer house in neighborhood and Jim did bloom somewhat in high school. He had an English teacher who really saw a promise on him despite his middling grades and encouraged Jim's creativity. And it turned out that Jim Baker had some incredible instinctive talent for showmanship.

Given the opportunity to DJ at a photography club dance, he developed a love for spinning records. And I don't know what it meant to be a good DJ in the mid fifties. God, I would have loved to see that. Yeah, I desperately want to listen to fucking 15 year old Jim Baker drops all these fats domino records. Hell yeah, man. But he was apparently good at it. This is kind of what he was kind of a loner, but then he starts DJing for parties and he starts getting invited places and it kind of like it makes him into a kind of popular kid. So this is yeah, yeah, he's cool now. He's a fucking DJ. Yeah, yeah. So that's pretty sweet. In 1956, he developed his first show. It was a 15 act vaudeville style reality

show meant as a fundraiser for the school newspaper. The show featured actual professional performances from a Miss Elvis Presley, which I'm guessing is some sort of celebrity impersonator. And this this person had been on the Steve Allen show, which was a popular TV show at the time. There was a Mambo Trial. There were Charleston dancers, the whole nine yards. It was like a big it wasn't just like he wasn't just like throwing together like a little skit before a thing. This was like a huge production. And it turned out popular enough that it became a regular event at the school and Jim would manage it and organize it for the next couple of years while he was in high school. The 1957 show was even bigger with

25 acts. It was also popular, Jim claims that 400 of his classmates showed up at his house for a party. And Jim later recalled something about this period of time that when I read it, I can only hear it in Nathan Fielder's voice. I was in the limelight completely, the center of attention. I was obsessed with popularity and would do almost anything to get it. Yeah. Yeah. All of this is just just scanned so disastrously. Yeah. Yeah. So his teacher William Harrison backs up this image of high school era. Jim quote, Jim love the limelight I have often thought had I been a promoter, I could have turned that boy into a rock star. And it does kind of sound like he had that sort of potential or at least

the ability he could have been like, you know, if this kid, if this kid embraces the kind of complicated emotional and sexual feelings and stuff that he's struggling with and embraces the artistic side of himself, he could have rolled to New York and had a great career in the theater or something. I mean, all his like monologues are like very theatrical. They're cool. They're like, you know, they build and they scare you. He definitely could have succeeded in like Hollywood or something. The fact that he's been so successful in this career for like 60 years now is all the proof you need of that. But he doesn't take that path at all. And the reason why he doesn't take that path, at least he will say that

the reason why he didn't take that path is because he hit a kid with his car. Oh man. Did you know that he hit a kid with his car? I did not. Did the kids survive? Yeah, probably. Another dark turn. Yeah, yeah. Well, I always love talking about when people hit kids with their cars. Usually it turns out better than it did for George Bush's wife. Yeah, which is look that one up kids. She killed a kid. Probably on purpose. I mean, that's just a blatant accusation with no, no evidence behind it. But it's always I love talking about that. Is it W's wife? Or was it W's wife? Yeah, W's wife. She killed her ex-boyfriend with a car when she was a teenager. Oh, wow. People don't talk about that. Wow. Gotta bring

that back into circulation. But you know who doesn't hit children with their cars often? No. The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, yes. Yeah. Very, very rarely, I will say. Yeah. If they do, they apologize. Exactly. This is all you read. That's almost word for word what's written on the ad document. Yeah. So listen to these products that almost certainly won't hit children with their cars. We're back. Oh, my gosh. What a what a product. Okay, so let's talk about the time that Jim Baker hit a kid with his car. So I'm going to quote again from the book P.T.L. which has a good description of this. The turning point in his religious life as Baker later remembered it was when he ran over three-year-old

Jimmy Summerfield. Baker had just dropped off Sandy Tyres, who's a girl who's dating at her home and was pulling up to church on a snowy Sunday night. Sandy Tyres? I think so. Yeah. That's a cool name. That is a cool name. Yeah. Sandy Tyres. Sandy Tyres. Yeah. And was pulling up to church on a snowy Sunday night. He was driving his father's 52 Cadillac with his cousin George in the seat next to him when he felt a bump. The boy had slid down a snow bank in front of the car. The front tire rolled over his chest, crushing his collarbone and puncturing a lung. At first Baker dispaired that the boy might die, but miraculously he'd survived without debilitating injuries. The miracle of Summerfield's recovery,

Baker would later say, convinced him to attend Bible College. Now, this is a story that Jim would go on to tell repeatedly for the rest of his life. And it definitely happened. He totally hit that kid with a car. But Jim also would go on to lie about it repeatedly in a very specific way. So in his first autobiography published in 1976, Jim claimed that the incident happened in his senior year of high school. And this obviously works well for structuring a narrative. So we can claim like, oh, I was a DJ. I was doing all this stuff, throwing all these parties and events and stuff. I was on track to like go into Hollywood or go to New York or whatever. And then, you know, I'm there at this tragedy. I hit this kid and seeing this boy survive miraculously,

like forces me, turns my soul over to God. And he claims that like after this happened, he quit all of the artsy stuff he'd been into DJing, dances and throwing parties and whatever, and started focusing on the Bible. But this is a lie because the crash occurred in 1956, two years before he graduated. And he continued making his variety show DJing, going to parties and entertaining people for the rest of his time that he was in high school. There's zero evidence that this event led to some sort of instant transformation in his life. Sure, maybe it was like bubbling under the surface and eventually, but he didn't, he lies about the way that this all works in a way that is pretty understandable to people who study this kind of Christian grifter.

Like they all need a story like this. You know, I was on this bad path and then this thing happened and it turned me over to God. So yeah, this is Jim's thing, right? Because he can't obviously, like honestly, if you're a modern day version of this guy, you lean into the fact that you were abused as a kid or whatever and you tell that story. But Jim doesn't like, you know, you can't really square with that. And so he turns to this other story about hitting a kid with his car and claims that that's what, what switched him over. So yeah, I don't know, that's what he, what he does. And he goes to North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he meets a young woman named Tammy Faye Lavalli in 1960. Now Baker had a restaurant

in the department store at the college and Tammy worked nearby. She was the oldest of eight children who grew up in a rural home with no indoor plumbing. The two fell instantly in love and dropped out of college together after their third date. They decided that they didn't need any more book learning and they were going to be traveling evangelists. So that's an important aspect of Jim Baker's thing is he starts going to school to learn how to be a Bible professional and he drops the fuck out. And he will later claim had never actually read the Bible when he started doing this. He just starts crisscrossing the United States with Tammy. And during this period, it's important to understand the real United States, particularly, and like a lot of

the South was regularly crisscrossed by this dense network of revival preachers. These were charismatic evangelical con men, grifters who gathered huge groups of worshipers together under colorful tents or hosted special preaching sessions at large local churches. Most of these preachers were men, but there were also a number of popular husband and wife couples. There was even a small child, Marjo Gortner, whose parents trained him like a monkey and had him reciting marriage ceremonies from rote when he was four or five years old. There's a really amazing documentary about Marjo that covers this whole subculture, this evangelical preacher-grift traveling thing. And the movie is just called Marjo at one in Oscar. It's great.

People should watch it if they want to understand kind of what Baker comes up in. Jim and Tammy Baker make this their life. And they're good at it. Jim has an innate talent for show business and a desperate need for approval. So he was really good at performing. His only weakness was that he couldn't sing for shit. And his wife Tammy had a beautiful voice and could play the accordion. So they were really a perfect match together. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. This works out great. So the two stood out enough from the pack that starting in the early 1960s, they were able to get a gig with one of the very first names in Christian television, the Reverend Pat Robertson. There we go. Yeah. Here's old Pat. So Pat had formed the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960,

which is the same year that Jim and Tammy met. And prior to the existence of the CBN, evangelical preachers had been dominant voices on the radio. The mid-60s sparked the first great wave of American televangelists, though, guys with names like Rex Humbard and Oral Roberts. Herang to their flocks with stories of an active and physically present devil. They warned of Christ's imminent arrival any day now and taught that the Bible had to be believed literally in order to avoid God's wrath. So these are the folks that Jim and Tammy, these are like the heroes of their era. Yeah. Yeah. So this is great. So Tammy and Jim created a children's puppet show for the CBN. It was a hit and they were contracted to start another show, the very first Christian talk

show in history. Now, this was not a very, particularly original idea. Jim at the time basically just said, I want to do the Johnny Carson show, but for Jesus. And that's basically what they did. As John Wigger writes in PTL, quote, Jim and Tammy created their own unique style, often doing two hours or more of live, unscripted television a day in front of a studio audience. Viewers came to believe that they were part of PTL's mission and the drama of Jim and Tammy's personal life. The Bakers became their friends in PTL, their extended family. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. All part of it. Yeah. Yeah. So this works out really well. And that family, Vic, that extended family would come to include, I'm just going to call him America's greatest hero,

Colonel Sanders. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now you've done a whole video about this, Vic, so you don't need to hear it again. Right. But you, the listener, need to hear Colonel Sanders and his friend laboriously tell Jim Baker about Colonel Sanders' fecal matter. Just because it's a little too much detail. Astounding detail. And when you think it's over, it goes a little deeper. It keeps on going. This is going to be like three minutes. And the listener, you need to know as we play this that the whole time this is going on, there's an absolutely massive bucket of KFC right in the middle of the room. It's awesome. This is such a good moment in history. All right,

we're going to play the clip now. Four or five years ago, as observation is going to be prepared for operation for taking a pot up out of the big colon. And that's the forerunner of the cancer, you see. Brother Rogers happens to come into my room and before he left, I even have a pastoral prayer. And I love that. The latest animal, I told him how simple the operation going to be. They just ripped the skin there, you know, the colon there that was right before he picked out. He laid his hand on my stomach in the prayer and prayed to God that he'd remove the malady that caused my trouble. Next morning, when they opened up, they had more polyp there or anything in the world. I remembered, I remember going to

pass, but I didn't think of anything. They gave you an animal the next morning to get the berry I'm all out of the colon, you know, for the surgery. And I remember doing that discharge of that berry. I heard something going plunk in the commode. Well, of course, it's milk and I couldn't see what it was. And I just feel might be some fecal matter out of the wrinkle of the colon, you see. And lo and behold, if I had nothing there, why is nothing, but the Lord's work took that poor boy. Do you remember that situation? I sure do remember that, Jim. This polyp had blocked the colonel's bowels and and it was a person quite large then. Yes, it was quite large. And the physician went ahead and performed the surgery. But when he performed

the surgery, he couldn't find the growth. And he searched in the intestine, 10 inches both ways and couldn't find it. And of course, when you operate on someone as famous as Colonel Sanders, and it looks like it's been a mistake. Well, the doctor is quite upset. And the the head of the surgical review board happened to be a famous surgeon who is a member of evangel tabernacle. He knew what had happened. But the Jewish attorney who performed the surgery didn't know really that that it was a miracle of God and that God had healed him. And so the colonel told him, he said, Well, God has healed me. And so that's the reason and said, I'm not mad at you for performing the surgery because he was doing what he thought was right, of course.

But God had beat him to it. Okay, we're back. And I hope you all I hope you all really enjoyed that. Plopping in the commode. It's so detailed. And I've never heard that like the wrinkle of the colon. I've never like, yeah, never. I hope I never hear it again, actually. No. But this is like this thing that we're making fun of the fact that he is this is just an old man talking, talking the way I have heard elderly people talk in that detail about bowel movements, before. And it's always been like family members, you know, right? And that's kind of what Wiggers talking about. We're talking about what makes PTL special is that this was something this like people sitting at home and fucking, you know, bumfuck wherever in the middle of nowhere. And

they're like, it did this did make them feel like part of the family because they've got an old guy talking about his family. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's no nobody's polished in this. Nobody seems like a celebrity or anything. Like they feel like your friends and family. And that, you know, it's kind of like, it's kind of like a big part of like what makes modern, you know, YouTube celebrities and podcasts hosts and whatnot so attractive to their audiences is that they're they're just living their lives on camera. Like that that is now a thing that is a dominant aspect of our culture. People make millions of dollars doing that. And it's everybody's got pretty much got someone in that vein that they love. But, you know, Jim and Tammy, there's a lot

to talk about how, you know, influential they were in the history of like televangelism. But just in the history of like normal media, like they really predict something that is kind of the modern wave of our culture. I think that's pretty interesting. Yeah. So the Jim and Tammy show evolved over the next few years into an increasingly professional production, like Jim's old variety shows. There were a number of different acts. There would be theological lectures by Jim and guest preachers, musical acts, emotional stories of falls from grace and salvation. And of course, there were regular pleas for donations. Jim and Tammy switched from Pat Robertson's network to Trinity Broadcasting Network in 1974. They picked up a new name to the PTL club. And depending on

who gives the answer, PTL stands for praise the Lord or people that love or to their critics, pass the loot. Yeah. Yeah. And PTL grew into an extravagant affair, which BuzzFeed describes ably in this write up, quote, Jim and Tammy Fay acted as hosts to famous ministers and artists like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Mickey Rooney and Mr. T. On each episode, they would enter the stage to rapture a saplaze, holding hands and waving to their fans. On set, the couple would be flanked by a full choir on one side and a backing band on the other. The spotlights were bright, often reflecting the shine off Jim Baker's forehead. The iridescent highlighter surrounding Tammy Fay's big, big eyes and the shiny tears bleeding down her cheeks as she sang or backed up Baker's religious

testimony. Baker would speak slowly, his cadence even and just slow enough to draw viewers in, making them feel as though he and Tammy Fay were delivering private messages to them, sent directly from God. Yeah. This is good. This is all good. And it should be noted. You're going to expect, I think, in a story about this kind of guy, especially someone who's gone into a major Trump surrogate, some tales of racism, that does not appear to have been a factor. And in fact, PTL was renowned for having a huge, being very popular among Black people, having a large Black audience. And also like one of their most popular guests was a former Black Panther who would talk about like getting into shootouts with the cops and stuff. Sure. Like

they were, from the beginning, really good at, I guess you would just broadly say not being racist. So good for you, Jim and Tammy. Yeah. That is one thing. They were accepting of others. I mean, I guess they like anybody that has money too. That's it. Yes. Yes. But I know the only color they see is green. Right. I know Tammy was very supportive of the gay community, like later in her years. Later. Was it not early though? No. They were profoundly homophobic. Homosexuality is evil. It is the devil. They talked about that frequently on their show in this period. We'll talk about a little bit about, yeah, that happened much later. That is not happening now. Right. Yeah. One of the things that separated PTL from other shows of the same format was,

again, the unpolished nature of the content. No matter how dressed up like the set got, the focus of the day was always just Jim and Tammy and whatever they wanted to talk about. And they talked about real issues, drug abuse, depression, exercise, diet, anxiety, like their own struggles with all those things. These were all regular topics. And this realism, yeah, kind of foreshadowed reality TV as well in some ways. Sure. The show's other piece of brilliance was Jim's decision to broadcast on a satellite network. This was groundbreaking at the time. ESPN didn't even start broadcasting satellite until 1979, a year after the PTL show did. Satellite allowed Christian programming to reach people all over the world, even folks in

very isolated rural areas who would otherwise not really have access to TV at all. PTL started selling airtime to other churches and built up a whole network of Christian content. No one had ever done this before. So, yeah, they start as just the Jim and Tammy show, and it turns into like this network with a very large and dedicated cult following. Jim was smart enough to lean into this too. He began airing testimonials from viewers at the ends of episodes. The book PTL highlights one from 1979, quote, a woman in her twenties or thirties smiles at the camera and says that having PTL in her home was like friends being there. When other people couldn't, I know PTL would be there every day. Baker ended his shows by looking right at the camera, smiling and telling

his viewers, God loves you. He really does. So really leaning into speaking to the lonely, making the lonely his audience and then getting pumping them for cash, that's the PTL strategy. And Jim Baker knows how to reach lonely people because he's a profoundly lonely man. Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. So from 1974 to 1977, the PTL network grew from three TV stations to more than 200. In 1979, it made $1.5 million a month. By 1985, it was making more than $10 million a month. They started experimenting with foreign networks and different local hosts, and the money brought changes. In 1976, they went from renting a single studio to buying a 25-acre compound and constructing a $3 million church and a recording studio upon it.

By doing this, PTL almost immediately pushed itself well beyond its financial means, but this was fine and actually part of Jim's intention. See, Jim's particular brand of Pentecostalism had a strong entrepreneurial bent to it. We call it the prosperity gospel today, and Jim is kind of part of an ancillary chunk of that. If something was meant to succeed in this particular branch of the faith, God would make the numbers work. So you don't worry about not being able to afford something. You leap into things that you can't afford to do and you trust that God will find a way to make it possible. And if you're doing things like try to be like, okay, well, no, we can't afford it. We can only afford a $5 million church now. So let's build

that now. And if we need to expand later, we can. That's actually sacrilegious because you're not trusting that God... You know, trust God is going to take care of you. Exactly. Yeah, we got to get the bigger private jet. Yeah, exactly. It'll make it work for us. If I was just buying first-class flights, that would be angering God. He wants me to... It's literally the theology. It's kind of fucking brilliant. And I want to steal it. Like, I do think I could probably, if I really committed, I could reinvent myself as an evangelical preacher. You know, I could claim that I learned my lesson from all the drug abuse and all the... Yeah, I think I could do it. And then you start going, you go bankrupt and you tell your followers, I'm going bankrupt. I need

money. Help me out. Help me out. You know? Yeah. And the worst... I mean, the best thing about it is, like, I could really... The worst things that I would... That I do on my fall from grace, the better I become at being a preacher later. Like, yeah, there's no floor. It really rules. So that's... Anyway, that's my retirement plan. Buckle into that, folks. It's going to be a ride. So, yeah. Yeah, literally in a jumbo jet. Yeah. When Jim Baker gives his own histories of PTL during this time, it's full of stories where, like, the church would need to make $100,000 in a weekend. Otherwise, they're going to go bankrupt and then suddenly a bunch of donations would flood in. And he leaned into this. In 1977, he wrote, some people think you need plenty of money in

the bank before you can begin to operate in faith. I never have. Are you currently debating over taking a step of faith in the Lord, or are you waiting until it looks safe to move? Remember, facts don't count when you have God's word on the subject. Which is the essential part of why this, like, liberal obsession with, like, facts matter and, you know, trying to argue or fact check or convince... It will never work. Right. It will never, ever work. They don't care. And it doesn't matter how many of them get diseases, like, crowding into churches and stuff. Like, that's not what this is about. Right. You're playing the wrong game. It's about stopping people from falling into these weird cults,

like, in helping them get out, but convincing them will never happen, arguing with them will never work. This is the facts don't matter. It's God's word on the subject. That's what we're fucking dealing with here. And it's awesome and good. So, as essentially the CEO of his own TV network, Jim never let facts get in his way. On one occasion, when his network found itself owing $20,000 with nothing in the bank, he wrote a bad check and sent it off to the station manager. Enough money came in the next day to cover the balance, so Jim kept on doing the same thing. And he would tell this story openly to people. And he would claim it as like, look at how good God is. Look at how great, you know, my faith is that I was willing to do this. But he was just

writing bad checks. Like, you're so brave. Come on. Which is a crime. Which is absolutely a crime. This is Czech fraud. He just got lucky. But yeah, he bragged regularly about Czech fraud. And he would always leave out the fact that like, this wasn't, he wasn't really just throwing himself into the wind and trusting in faith. He always had telethon's planned for the day that he would write these bad checks. So he knew that the money was going to come in. He had a pretty good understanding of how much he could bring in. But the fact that he was just throwing himself on God's mercy, you know, that drew people to him. That was part of the fucking appeal. That was part of the grift. So, yeah, it's good. Yeah. And it's awesome.

And Jim's message to his followers by doing stuff like this was that in their own lives, financial caution was an act of religious heresy. And even if they couldn't afford it, they should keep throwing money at Jim Baker and his, his operation, which they did. At the end of 1977, he wrote a short book titled The Big Three Mountain Movers. Now, it was angled as a book of like biblical financial advice and the like. He told his flock that God wanted them to have money and would provide it, but they had to provide God with testimony. It's a faith first. And this was essentially, this is not an original idea for Jim. This was an evolution of the ideas that Oral Roberts had started. And Roberts was maybe the greatest

preacher of this era. We'll have to do an episode on him at some point. His great innovation was the idea of seed money, which is money that you pay Oral Roberts that unlocks God's blessings. So, the idea of seed money is you want something, you need something, you're broke and you're desperate, you know, you can't make the mortgage, you can't make rent, you take all of the money you have. And rather than like using it to buy food or trying to like set up a payment plan, you, you give that to Oral Roberts and or whatever preacher is telling you and that that God will see that, that expression of faith and he will turn that expression of faith into a seed that grows a tree that will return more money to you. And that's because like Oral has

a direct connection to God. Is that what that is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, essentially the idea is that that's what it evolved into. Is that like, you know, I'm, I have such a great connection to God. I think initially it was just this idea that like, if you, if you prove to God that you really trust him by throwing all this money at his church and not thinking of your own financial needs, he will take care of you, you know? Okay. So that's good and healthy. Sounds legit. Yeah. Sounds legit. And this becomes the fundamental idea behind the prosperity gospel, which is today one of the most, I mean, all of the preachers Trump surrounds him with are our prosperity. His, his religious advisor tells her flock, yeah, you have to donate your first month's salary to my

church every year. Like even if you can't afford it, because that's how you prove. Do you know who she's married to? She's married? Oh yeah. Yeah. Fun. One of the, some fucking, one of the musicians from what is it? Yeah. Yeah. From Journey. Journey. Yeah. Like the guy that wrote all the hit songs. Yeah. Yeah. That's a real bummer because I have some great memories of drunkenly singing Journey in street class, but what a sad, sad tale. We should, we should execute people once they make a great song. Just get them out of there. Don't let them ruin anything. Just like, hey man, yesterday's a great tune into the chamber you go. Come on. Any last words, Paul? Yeah. That's where you draw the line. Last words, hey Jude. All right. Let him write one more song.

You know who else supports mandatory executions for great artists? Nope. Nope. They don't, Sophie? Nope. Nope. Oh, well, this is an ad plug. Here's some products. We're back. So we're talking about the prosperity gospel, you know, which is a child of Oral Roberts and Roberts was a regular guest on the PTL club and Baker shamelessly stole his idea for promising godly people blessings in exchange for cold hard cash. He'd held telethons before, but in the late 60s and early 70s, they'd been pretty normal, kind of like the stuff you see on NPR, you know, or whatever, not NPR, but like public television, like, you know, where they'll do these regular fundraising drives, give us money and we can keep doing this. That was how it started.

It evolved though. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it was pretty normal at first and it evolved into him promising his audience that they would get rich by making him rich. In 1978, he harangued his viewers. Many of you have never given because you really don't trust God. And there were regular, like one of the terms you'll hear a lot in these kinds of preachers is prove God by doing this, by this donation, like you prove the existence of God by throwing us money. It seems profoundly sacrilegious to me an atheist, but what do I know? What the fuck do I know? So he promised that God would reward their donations a hundredfold and he would also throw eternal life into the deal and said things like, I mean, that's about the best deal I've ever heard in my life.

But you get rich and you live forever. All you got to do is give me your rent money. Fucking awesome that this is legal. I can't, I can't overstate what a good thing it is that this is fine. God bless United States. Yeah, we're a perfect society. So Bill Perkins, an administrator for PTL, resigned his position in 1978 after he grew disturbed by the fact that money seemed to be growing increasingly central to the decisions that Jim Baker made. So a lot of the people who signed up with him early on will say that this was a legitimate religious enterprise at first and Baker really believed hard and it turned into a grift. And that's probably true. Like I'm not an expert on it. I'm so critical, I guess, of all of these guys that it's hard for

me to believe Jim Baker ever had good intentions, but he may have. A lot of people believed he did and there were folks in the 70s who were like, you have changed and I can't be a part of this anymore. Right. Well, I mean, especially earlier on, going after, you know, doing the puppet shows and everything, this seems pretty, you know, pretty legitimate. Yeah, I had trouble believing that the puppet shows were a grift, you know, nobody grifts with puppets. Hopefully he wasn't asking the kids to mail money to him. No, no. And Perkins later claimed, quote, Jim Baker had a knack with a microphone and I think he began with good intentions, but he let power and money get to his head. Now, Mr. Perkins later told the New York Times about the moment he realized

that something had changed with Jim, quote, Jim used to quote from Psalms 37 for delight thyself also in the Lord and he shall give you the desires of thine heart. I argue that the scripture does not mean worldly wealth and fame or fancy cars or big houses, Mr. Perkins said. It means inner peace and joy. The desires ought to be God's desires, not man's. Mr. Baker's defiant response said Mr. Perkins was to quote another bit of scripture, which he intended to end the conversation. Touch not God's anointed and do his profits no harm. So Jim has had a bit of a change at this point. You could say it's gone to his head, you know, whether however he started, he is now calling himself a prophet and using that to shut down

debate with his loyal followers. So that's not a great thing. Although I am going to get that tattooed on my chest and I'll just I will just point to it defiantly when Sophie tells me not to swing machetes around in the recording studio. Sure. I do. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Touch not God's anointed, you know, do his profits no harm when they're doing harm by recklessly endangering the recording studio. Whether or not he was a prophet, Jim was definitely profitable, which is a line I was proud of. So thank you. I'm proud of it too, Robert. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I desperately need praise as I as I grow into the cult leader that Jim Baker has convinced me I can become. Oh my God. So and by the way, if you want to really prove your faith

in the Lord, why don't you send $200 to bastards behind the back? Just put in the mail, address an envelope. No, Sophie, this is the only way. By the end of 1978, revenue was more than four million dollars a month and expenses were only around a million. So on paper, that's a pretty solvent business, right? Not bad. Yeah. You would think that you could you could do a lot of ministering with that kind of a. All tax free too, right? Yeah, all tax free. And for a while, Baker pumped the extra money into funding new shows and new hosts and local content in different communities around the country and around the world. And it looked like he was building PTL into the Christian equivalent of 21st Century Fox. Like there's a period where it looks like, oh my

God, Jim is going to create like a media empire on par with any of the major networks on par with something like 21st Century Fox. But then just as he's like on his way to becoming the prosperity Gospels, Rupert Murdoch, he suddenly pulls away and heads in a completely different direction. Do you know what this direction is, Vic? I think I do. I think he was watching what Walt Disney was up to. Yeah, he decides to become Christian Walt Disney. Yeah, which is an interesting move. In 1978, the Bakers broke ground on Heritage USA. Now this was Jim Baker's most ambitious plan yet, and it would eventually become the third most popular amusement park in the United States, right after Disneyland and Disney World. So this is a huge amusement park. Yeah. Yeah,

built on 1200 acres of Carolina land, Heritage USA was initially planned as almost a whole enclosed Christian society built in the twin images of Jim Baker and Walt Disney. As planning went along, Jim's ambitions expanded. He wanted it to include a university, a day school, a camp ground and even a hospital and a nursing home. The whole estimated bill for this was well over $100 million of 1978 money. Baker wanted the main work done in less than six months, which was just rank lunacy. He failed to secure the $50 million loan he needed to make his dreams come true. So Baker reigned in his faith and started small, promising the construction company that PTL would fall no further than $500,000 in payments behind during the construction,

which is like, it's incredible. They were like, yeah, you can be half a million dollars in debt to us and that's fine. And he can't even stick to that. By month three, they had blown past that by a factor of four and owed more than $2 million to the company. And this calamity was all caused by Jim Baker. Soon the finances of the network were an absolute crisis. PTL started laying off employees and making up the shortfall in labor by calling for Saturday work sessions, which were unpaid. Employees were told that showing up to work for free would be a vivid illustration of who was committed to God and who was not. Oh my God. I didn't know, I didn't know he fleeced his own workers too. Oh, he sure as shit did. Oh my gosh. Yeah. He absolutely, he's a big fan of unpaid

labor, which there are other terms for, but I have forgotten them. Now, at the same time, all this was happening. Baker talked the board of his company into tripling his salary. He argued that basically, he was the fucking big guy at the time, the Johnny Carson. He was like, Johnny, I work harder than Johnny Carson and he makes more than me. Like the fuck's up with that. So they triple his salary. And at the same time as they triple his salary, they stopped reporting on the church's finances to the press. They had once been a very open operation that would tell you where their money was going and being used on. And they just suddenly stopped doing that. And this has no effect on their followers. Money continues pouring into the Baker Pockets and

increasing denominations. When Jim needed to look magnanimous, he would write letters to the board and demand that they cut his salary by 40%. And then he'd use company money to buy himself fancy rich guy toys from the book Ptl. Only three weeks later, this is after firing a bunch of people, he used $6,000 of Ptl's money for a down payment on a houseboat, a 43 foot drifter with two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, television and gas grill. The total price for that houseboat was $30,000. So at the same time, Jim bought that boat, he's writing letters to his flock, begging them for donations and telling his workers that they have to work for free. And the terms he would use in these like please for money from his followers were imminent and apocalyptic. Unless God performs

a financial miracle, this could be the last letter you receive from me. So like these are the kind of things he's putting in his, yeah, he wind about the two and a half million dollar construction bill as if it had like something that had suddenly been slammed upon them rather than them deliberately going over budget. He lied that Tammy and I are giving every penny of our life savings to Ptl. And again, this is the same month that he uses Ptl's money to buy a houseboat. So this is total grift by this point, right? If it was, yeah. By 1981, Jim and Tammy had a thoroughly acclimated to their new lives as hideously wealthy monuments to God's generosity. Here's a clip from one of their episodes in 1981 that really lays the whole prosperity gospel thing out. And I think

this one may be new to you because this just, I mean, there's thousands of hours of this. No one can listen to all of it. But I want to play this, I'm going to send you this clip and I want you to, yeah, well, I'm going to shoot this to you via Skype and then I'll tell you the timestamps. Cool. We've got to start enjoying God again. I really do. I think we need to say, Lord, look at this beautiful lake out here. I look out this window here and I see that blue sky today and I see the beautiful water and I say, Lord, you made that lake for me to enjoy. Jim, can I tell you a little miracle? I just want to tell you a little people, a little miracle about what happened with this house. We shouldn't have this

house. That is really the honest truth because in all, in all human, when you think of it in the human aspect, it was impossible for us to ever get this home at all. And I had prayed and I'd said, now, Lord, you know, Jim and I had to have a new home. We needed to be out of our old one and within like three weeks and it was just, just didn't know what to do. We were just, and I said, oh God, you know, I said, I couldn't figure out if I want to swim pool or lake, but I knew we'd never had either and I wanted one please, Lord. So I said, well, Lord, I don't know what to ask for. We needed water. Yeah. So I said, you give us what'll make us happy. I knew we couldn't swim in the pool, you know, in the winter and yet I knew we could see the lake all

year round. So I couldn't make up my mind. You know what God did? He said, I want you to have both of them. And he gave us a beautiful pool out there, plus the lake out back to Jim. Isn't that just like the Laura? Yeah. Swimming pool or a lake? We need water. We know we need water. We know we need water. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Love it. Yeah. It's just so open about it. Just like she's so open about it. And no one bats an eye there. You know, like why didn't everybody just get up and walk out like after hearing that? Because this is how God works. He wants you to have this. He wants all of you to have this. I think people talk a lot when they like complain about, you know, the lack of like class consciousness in the United States, how every poor American

thinks of themselves as like a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. This really illustrates what that means emotionally. These people don't hate. You would think they would hate like people like in the fucking 70s as like stagflation is hitting and like the economy is in the shitter and they live in the middle of nowhere and like the Japanese economy is eating US manufacturing alive and people are like out of work and seeing this person talk about like, we just couldn't decide between and God provided us with a swimming pool and a lake. You would think that would infuriate them, but it's just like it hasn't hit them yet or hasn't, you know, God hasn't touched them enough yet. So yeah, sending the checks in and then yeah, this will be their life. Right.

It's only matter of time. Something else. It's really something else. But like, yeah, you have to understand how like blatant about it. Like they're not pretending to live humble lives. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's awesome. Now, yeah. So this is good. For her part, Tammy Faes seems to have had trouble with with some aspects of the the gigantic, grifty nature of all of this. She started taking massive doses of Valium for stress and became horribly addicted to a variety of drugs. She and Jim both put on weight because again, I think they are losing their souls in becoming monsters. And they start taking off that weight with what would become a series of different diet and weight loss programs. And they talk about all of this openly on their show,

their successes and failures and challenges. And of course, then they're able to like advertise for different like diet programs and stuff and books. And yeah, for me, you know, it always works for them. So the whole situation could have stayed this way probably forever if Jim Baker had been capable of even mild amounts of self control. But he was not. PTL's content was dictated almost entirely by his impulses, which is kind of the same thing with Alex Jones today. He would regularly announce new initiatives, new product lines, new tell it new shows for on his network live on the air. And then like his crew would have to live figure out how to like meet these things that he was introducing and like make them work. And this was part of the show's charm and dynamism. It was

part of why he was successful. But it also led to gigantic problems like Jim doubling the size of Heritage USA, while huge amounts of it were still under construction, you know, committing to building a 500 room hotel in a water park and, you know, then needing to find more money. So Jim would vlog his viewers mercilessly for more donations. As former PTL security chief Don Hardister recalled, quote, we had a cash office and at times there was certainly more money in it than I could imagine. People would send us mink coats, diamond rings, deeds. I mean, we got all sorts of donations. It's fucking wild, but this works. It's just the most artless grift in the world, and that's why it works. It's fucking amazing to me. Like Elron Hubbard has to make a fucking

religion to get your money. And Jim Baker's just like, no, send me the deed, dear fucking house. I need another lake. I'm going to build a hotel next to my lake. It's fucking amazing. Need more water. But it still wasn't enough. All this money wasn't enough. The demands of Baker's new empire were too high. And in the 1980s, he started asking his followers to pay $1,000 each for lifetime partnerships. Now, these lifetime partnerships would earn them a three night stay at the new hotel that he built on his land. And on the surface, this could be a great idea. It's basically a timeshare, but they barely get any time there, and they pay a bunch of money. But Jim couldn't even abide by like, this could be a perfectly

legal grift. But Jim had to break the law. He vastly oversold these partnerships until he wound up with more partnerships than his hotel could possibly host in a year. 66,000 of them. And again, this is a 500 room hotel. I can do the math. Now, there were other grifts too. He started offering David and Goliath statues to his viewers, and he would tell them these were an investment because the statues were like works of art that were worth $1,000 each, and he sold them for just $125. But they were really $10 pieces of like poorly crafted metal bullshit. It all works, though, it makes a shitload of money. But he is now committing fraud. Like up to this point, he was really all within the lines of the law,

other than writing bad checks, and they're never gonna like the money wound up being there. So it's fine. Right. I had to push it though. He has crossed a legal line now. And all of this blatant fraud earned PTL the attention of the Charlotte Observer, a local newspaper that locked its teeth onto the legs of the Baker operation and held on for years. Like they really some fucking world, they went a Pulitzer for this. Like they are they write, I think probably like way over 1000 articles by the time this is all done. Like they tear into Baker and like exhaustively detail every way in which he's breaking the law, every shady thing he's doing. It's a great thing that they do. But they didn't catch everything right away. And one of the things that they

didn't catch when they started reporting on the financial crimes was the fact that Jim Baker committed an even worse crime in December of 1980. Have you heard about the rape that Jim Baker committed? Yeah, is this Jessica Hahn? Jessica Hahn. Yeah. Yeah. So Jessica had grown up, you know, in the church or in the Pentecostal movement, she was 21 years old in 1980. And for her entire childhood, basically, Jim Baker had been her Mr. Rogers. He was the moral center of her universe. Like that is the way that she looked at him. Like he was he was a the right arm of God to her. And she was elated when she got a job as the church secretary, which basically seemed she basically was working as the Baker's nanny, right? That was like a big part of her

job. And one December day when Tammy was out of the house conducting a telethon, Jim called her into the office. Hahn later told an interviewer, quote, Jim Baker comes up and says, forget about the kids, the bodyguards are outside the door. He said, listen to me, Jessica, when you help the shepherd, you help the sheep. And he said, my wife is having an affair with the choir director, and I need you right now to make me feel like a man. And I was a virgin. And people find that hard to believe. But when you're raised in the church at 14 on, that was just the way it is. Now, Baker wasn't alone. One of his employees, a guy named John Fletcher was there too. Fletcher offered Hahn a drink, which had something probably GHB in it. And Hahn didn't pass out, but she was in a

very altered state when Baker made his move. Quote, so Jim Baker ripped off the bedspread and said, you know, my wife doesn't make me feel like a man anymore. And you know, when you help the shepherd, you help the sheep. And so it hurt like hell. And then after that, John Fletcher comes in, who was the middleman and said, you know, you can't just be with Jim Baker, you've got to be with me. He threw me on the floor, head back, I had blood coming out of my back. And you know, he just went nuts on me. Oh my God. So this is a horrific. Yeah, this is a horrific rape. Like this is holy shit. Not just like it's usually portrayed even by kind of like mainstream news today. Like CNN did the interview and like so a lot of mainstream news did a good job of covering

this. But like a lot of times they'll say like, you know, there were allegations that it was non consensual. There were allegations that this was a violent drug rape. Like this is as as bad a rape is as it gets, you know, this is a horrific crime committed by Jim Baker and his guy, John Fletcher. So it's bad. Oh my God. Yeah. Now, Jessica Hahn kept quiet for eight years because how the fuck like God's right hand man is raped. You know, how do you fucking begin to process that? Yeah, it's it's rough. And Jim Baker paid her $20,000 of hush money up front, which he told her was so she could get counseling. He would eventually pay more than a quarter of a million dollars of church funds to Jessica Hahn. And that Vic is where

we're going to end on part one. Right. How you how you feeling? That's a lot to take in there. This is a lot. The story of Jim Baker is a lot. It's been grifting a long time, you know. Yeah. And he's like the ultimate illustration of the fact that like hurt people hurt people like this kid. Everything scans, right? It's not hard to see. Yeah, I'm curious because I don't I guess nothing really came. I mean, I don't want to jump ahead here, but you know, but like just curious about what happened with that rape, if that like the bodyguard guy had to go to jail or anything like that. But oh, no, he died before Jessica. Oh, did he came forward? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So he really he really got easy. Yeah. Yeah. But also there's never criminal charges. I don't think

as a result of this. She doesn't like really press them, you know. Right. Right. She comes out in the media about it later. Yeah. So wow. Yeah. Fun story. Fun stuff. Fun story of the United States, a country crafted in a lab to allow bad people to avoid consequences. Exactly. Oh, my God. It's fucking rules, man. Vic, where can people find you on the internet? What are your what are your plug? You can check I would go to my YouTube. Check my channel there. You can see all my Jim Baker videos there and the endless amounts of Donald Trump videos, no grifters, got a lot of stuff there. There you can go to Twitter, Facebook, you know, just type my name in there I am. There we are. All right. Check out Vic. It's it's important.

Beautiful horror. I love it. And check out me somewhere. No one knows where no one's ever found me on the internet. But the legend say that if you if you hold a conch shell to your ear while standing on a frigid Oregon coastline in the dead of midwinter, you can sometimes hear me tweet. So no, no, no, we're done. So that's not accurate. That is I'm fairly certain that's accurate. That is not true. Okay. Well, unfortunately, no one knows what the truth is. So we just got a roll on and in the episode for the day. Thanks for having me on. I hope you hope you get your tult together in retirement. Yeah, we will jet. Yeah, I'll donate.