You're Wrong About - Talking Tammy Faye Bakker with Jessica Chastain

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Jessica Chastain and Sarah discuss Tammy Faye Bakker. Chastain is the star and a producer of the new film The Eyes of Tammy Faye. After Jessica and Sarah’s chat, they introduce this episode about Tammy Faye Bakker and Jessica Hahn from the early days of You’re Wrong About.—“She only said one thing her whole life”: Sarah tells Mike how two decent women became scapegoats for the actions of one terrible man. Digressions include Larry Flynt, NPR tote bags and Playboy back issues. This episode contains a detailed description of a sexual assault [01:02:40 - 01:17:05]Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase Links: http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good http://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Welcome to You're Wrong About, a show where sometimes we re-release an old episode with a new intro. This intro is with Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain. I am as surprised as you are. We're going to talk about The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a movie that I recommend highly and also if you are now or ever have been a Diet Coke drinker, you should guess in Diet Coke now because when you're watching this movie, you will want a Diet Coke. And this movie is based on the documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato whose names

I hope I'm not bookturing. This is so exciting for me because I felt in making this episode and I feel in the episodes that mean the most to me that I'm trying to understand who a person really was either because they're no longer with us or because we're trying to access a moment in the past. And often try to reclaim a story that the tabloids have found so sensational and lucrative because they present someone who the public can safely mock and feels they're able to hold it a distance and say, I could never be that and I could never do that. And I think something powerful happens when I am able to look at someone's life and at

the surprising things they did and to say, oh yeah, I see how I could do that. I feel like I understand how this person got here and also I feel fondness for them. I feel love for this person because the act of putting in that kind of work to understand what somebody was doing and maybe get some sense of what they were thinking, if only from listening to them when they say, this is what I was thinking. I think that that has to come from love in some respect. I remember people really liking this episode when it came out and hearing a lot of feedback about it from people, I think because this is Jim and Tammy Fay Baker and as we talk

about in this episode, Jessica Hahn are people who were impossible to not hear about and not hear mocked specifically in the late 80s and into the 90s, certainly in the period when I was growing up. And these are events that happened before I was born, but that were still part of the iconography of American culture. And so I think it does a lot for us to try and feel like we're back at the center of that and seeing how everybody ended up in the positions where we found them, like at Pompeii. I really loved this conversation with our new friend of the show, Jessica Chastain, actually

past friend of the show because she also heard this episode and apparently has sent it to a few people, which I think is pretty cool. I love to make things that people can send to make a point that they're trying to argue. I love to save time. I loved this movie. It made me cry. If you listen to the show, you know that most things make me cry, but like it elicited a special type of crying.

And I should also say that I think we're living in mostly apocalyptic times, but there are some exciting things happening. And one of them is that there are more movies and TV shows about maligned women of the past few decades. I really like that. This is one of the early episodes of the show. It happened in the first year that Michael Hobbs and I were making it. And in retrospect, I feel like this was one where I at least kind of figured out what

I wanted to be doing. And if you listen to this one and feel like more in this vein, you can actually do a Year of the Bimbo trilogy 1987 was christened the Year of the Bimbo because of the actions of Jessica Han, Fawn Hall and Donna Rice, three women who happen to be standing next to men who are actively imploding. And you can hear about Fawn Hall and the Iran Contra episode and you can hear about Donna Rice and the Gary Hart episode. Both of them are from around this period of making the show or Iran Contra is between

10 and 20 and Gary Hart is right after this one. I think those are some really good relatively early shows by Mike and me. It makes me happy to revisit them. And something we are also going to talk about in this episode is Jessica Han and her detailed sexual assault allegations. That's just going to get into a lot of detail and it's potentially very upsetting. I find it very upsetting. And so before that scene begins, we're going to play a sound.

It's going to sound like this. So that sound will play at the beginning of that discussion and again when that subject is over. And so that's when you'll know to get out of town and you can return after about 14 minutes and you'll be good to go. Okay, I think that's everything you need to know. Let's go talk to Jessica Chastain. Hello, very special guests.

Who are you? My name is Jessica Chastain. I'm very happy to be on the podcast with you guys. I'm so happy to have you here. And it's because of the passage of time, it's just us guy here today, me guy. Because this is an episode that Mike and I made together and Mike has now moved on to focus on his beautiful baby maintenance phase. But this was so funny for me to listen back to, especially thinking about a story that's

about performance and kind of performing being part of your life over time. Going to it, I can hear us figuring out some themes that we would return to constantly and kind of for the first time. And I feel like this story, I feel like it helps set us on the path to what we did. And it's because there's so much in it. And I'm so happy to talk about it with you here today. Oh, thank you. I was so happy to listen to your podcast and I'll tell you, I listened to it after we

made the film. So I had some trepidation because I was a little bit afraid of like, did we get it right? And then I listened to your podcast and I was like, oh yeah, we got it right. I feel exactly the same way, honestly, when I've tried my best to find my way through a story and then a new iteration of it comes on and I'm excited about it. But also I do, I would like to not feel this way about it, but I do this feeling of like, what if I miss the point entirely? And now I'm going to see that, which is like, if you've been to a certain level of

depth, I feel like it's impossible to perform someone's life story and completely miss the point. But I think it's much easier to do a podcast and miss the point. I know with our film, The Eyes of Tanami Faye, it was seven years from when I got the rights to when we were actually on set. So it was a ton of research, but I'm sure you, I mean, it was very clear to me when I listened to your podcast, how much research you guys have done because you were, I actually was sending your podcast.

I sent it to all of Searchlight. I sent it to so many people and when we were talking about our film and how to talk about Tanami Faye, I was like, okay, anyone that has these preconceived notions of her that have been put forth in our childhood from the tabloid media needs to listen to this podcast and actually understand, you know, how women are perceived versus how men are perceived and how often women are made to atone for the mistakes of the men around them. I always crook on the show that I learned everything I knew about the world growing up from reruns of Saturday Night Live.

Your movie has even a tiny little moment of a clip from the infamous church lady sketch of Jim and Tanami Faye, which is also so offensive because it assumes that she doesn't know how to wear tear-proof mascara, which like, wouldn't that be the first thing you'd figure out? Honestly, that's what she said in all the interviews where she was talking about her makeup. I mean, you could find things on YouTube where she goes through her makeup bags and her books and even our kids said she always wore waterproof mascara.

By having images of her or representations of her with tear-streaked face, basically you're implying that it's for show, that it's not an authentic response because someone who wears makeup to cry and to smear it all over their face is someone who wants to be known for crying. And I don't think that's really what she wanted to be known for. I think she was an open, sensitive human being. She was quick to cry because she was open and sensitive and empathetic. She was also quick to laugh.

Those are the two things about Tanami that I found the most moving. I mean, she could laugh and cry at the same time. She was so unguarded in terms of her earnestness. And I think for a society that celebrates cynicism, that's a hard thing to understand as authentic. There's something I find so depressing about the fact that people regard genuine shows of emotions so cynically. There are so many moments watching this movie and revisiting this episode where I really

find myself identifying with Tammy Faye Baker because there's something so incredibly vulnerable about performing and also about emoting publicly. And I have been accused of faking being sad about really sad things before. And I find that it's just such a bummer. Yeah, it is such a bummer because we are a society that we celebrate aloofness and coldness and someone who's super cool. When there's huge acts in declarations of love, like Tom Cruise jumping on a couch, it becomes a joke that is made fun of for over and over again.

We don't actually see it as something. It's like, how beautiful to have an expression of love so large that it makes you want to jump and celebrate it. We instead say, well, there must be something wrong with someone who feels that much because we always want to pretend we feel less than we really do. When I watched the footage of Tammy Faye Baker on PTL and the early years too, where she has the puppets, I have my notes from watching the eyes of Tammy Faye in front of me, by the way. And one of the first things I wrote down is just the word puppet.

And I have like two big questions that I'm going to give you in a second, but I would love to start with like, what was it like to do the puppets? Oh my gosh, it was so fun. I mean, I had to kind of understand, especially Susie Moppet, how do you get there? And I had hundreds of hours of unused footage that the documentary filmmakers gave me to study, but then also she is all over YouTube. And I found multiple interviews of her talking about Susie Moppet and actually slipping into the puppet voice and how she found Susie's voice.

And she described her as a little girl. She's a little girl, you know, as she did it. And that was something. I always had this warm up to do that. I listened to Susie Moppet and Ali, the alligator records to find those two different voices. And it was really fun. Actually, Susie Moppet helped me in some way find the joy in Tammy. I mean, I know it's so exterior her joy, but I also saw a lot of sadness underneath, you know,

the camp and the laughter that she portrayed. But it helped me in just the same ways. Like, I guess we can reveal our truths through puppetry or through story or through some kind of falsehood. I think she was revealing the little girl in her through Susie Moppet. And in the movie, we start off with her as a little girl and then kind of time skip to Bible College, which is where you appear. And my first thought watching her and kind of watching this childhood that feels exiled from love in some ways, because we open seeing her as a child who's essentially being hidden as evidence of the fact that her mother's

divorced and who's being kept even from a relationship with God because of that. To me, the first thing that's so striking is that you figure out that somewhere along the line, she responded to that by being this incredibly sweet, emotive, open, cheerful person. Yeah, it's fascinating doing all that research into her childhood because I had so many questions. I mean, you know, she wrote about meeting her dad, you know, as an adult and after she found success. And so it was very clear like the trauma of having the father leave the family and being the step child in the new family and having this Pentecostal church is incredibly conservative. And by the way, they're not allowed to wear makeup.

So there was all these telling things, this community that she constantly felt like she was on the outside of or not good enough for just because she's the embodiment of the shame of the first marriage. And also, how does she make herself more beautiful, more worthy to be looked at, more seen? Okay, red lipstick is nice. Or how about some mascara? I mean, she talks about the first time she put on mascara, she thought, how could God be against something that makes you feel so beautiful? You know, there was a sense that she was just always trying to go towards love and beauty. And I believe when she went into church and she started speaking in tongues as a child,

it might have been one of the first times I don't know if it was really the grace of God moving through her. I don't know what could have caused it. But what I do think, and very strongly after studying her for so long, is that Tammy connected grace with love and she had been denied the religious community. She'd been denied being seen by God or grace. And now all of a sudden she's in a church and people are looking at her. They're saying she's a miracle. And yes, maybe there's an act of performing, but maybe it goes beyond even what you think is performing.

You know, child actors are so great because they don't realize they're acting in many cases. And she might have just felt for the first time in her life what it meant to feel unconditional love. And I think that's why she was so obsessive about connecting to her faith and also connecting others to her faith. So they never felt the loneliness of being excluded and denied unconditional love. Yeah, and something that I thought about when researching this, what were they offering to their audience? What was the value proposition of PTL? And it's very clear to me that there was a lot of scamming going on at the end.

And there was also a very important addition to people's lives, which is some kind of actual sense of connection and connection with love and a real intimacy through television. Yeah, and also it was, you know, if you looked at the other preachers at that time, they were very conservative evangelicals who didn't preach faith in necessarily a joyful and loving way. And this is a true thing. The fact that Tammy interviewed someone talking about a penile pump is really, it's a different kind of religion because it's basically saying, listen, these are problems that people face and you may be feeling insecure about a part of your body

or about your intimacy in your life. And let's figure out how to help you. God for Jim and Tammy, especially Tammy, I can't really speak so much for Jim, but God for Tammy was a loving God. And I believe she was a very sensorial person in terms of wanting to just run into life with open arms. And so God for her was that. And I guess my two big questions that I want to just give them both at once, because maybe they combined to form a whole question is what drew you to this role,

which seems like a big decision. As a writer, my corollary is that I imagine choosing a role, especially if you're playing someone over the course of their entire adult life, essentially, it seems a little bit like writing a book where you have to pick something where you're like, I believe based on my knowledge of myself and this topic that I am willing to commit years of my life to this, if that's how long it takes. And to think very deeply and to have to try to have some kind of a relationship with someone who in many cases is no longer here.

And then how did you go about doing that? I'm so curious about, you know, how do you attempt to to access that truth and embody it? It is a big commitment when you decide to play a character, especially to do a film based on a real person, because there's a responsibility in that. And someone like Tammy Faye, you can find everything on YouTube. I mean, when I did the Steve Peters interview, I knew someone could go on YouTube and find the whole Steve Peters interview with Tammy

and check my homework, you know, something you can kind of just fake it and wing it through. I think the reason I was drawn to remember one was probably guilt. I grew up watching SNL. I grew up in a society that made fun of her that didn't acknowledge her. I mean, yes, it's a very homophobic society. I remember in 1985, the United States, the government's not even talking about the AIDS epidemic. I mean, we're not in the era of gay marriage and, you know, all of the LGBTQ community and rights. No one's really even talking about that.

So to have this woman do all these incredible things and then not be acknowledged for it, and for me not to even know that she did those things, I felt shame that I've been tricked. My memory was the mascara running down her face. And then I asked myself, well, wait a minute, why do I have that memory? And then I realized that's not the reality. That memory comes from tabloids and media. And media in some sense has implanted a truth that isn't a truth. So it was also an excavation.

It was an exploration to understand what the reality was. She's a joyful person. It was the excitement. If I'm going to study someone for seven years, I want to study someone who makes me laugh. I want to study someone who makes me feel good about being alive and makes me feel forgiven for making mistakes and committing sins and makes me feel unconditional love, no matter where I come from, who I love, what I believe in. Even if I believe in a God separate from her, she deems me worthy and loves me.

And you see in the documentary, she forgives Charles Shepard. She signs his books. I mean, it felt like a healing balm to study that kind of energy for seven years. So I think that's what made it exciting to do. It's like taking a job, I guess. I mean, it is a job, but it's more than a job. But if you're like, well, I have a new job in the Milwaukee field office, do I want to live there part of the year or all the time for years?

Well, yes, it's a nice city, I accept. It's 100% true. I mean, I'm always like, oh, this is a dark role. Okay, it's only six weeks. Okay, I can do it for six weeks. I don't know when I'm going to make this movie. I could be studying her for 20 years, but I kind of love studying her. So it's okay.

I feel like I keep maybe unnecessarily being like, that reminds me of my job, but like it really very much does. What I love about research is that you get to experience a person and it's often an extraordinary person who you, again, in my experience of it, especially reading someone's writing or I imagine trying to perform someone the way they behave, the way they reacted, you get to experience for a little bit what it is truly like to be someone else, just to be immersed in someone's thoughts or in their way of being in the world.

And I think, I do believe it makes us better people and also it feels really good. Yeah, it's an exercise in empathy, right? It's also an exercise in non-judgment, what I think in our society, we're so quick to judge, we're so quick to deem someone as having less value because of something that they do or done. And I truly believe like, you know, there's no really bad people, people make mistakes. And that's something I think about a lot when I'm acting. Listen, I don't believe in the prosperity doctrine. I find that money corrupts everything.

I think it can corrupt everything, but the reality is every, it's in every religion, money is closely tied with faith. And every Sunday that passed the plate around, when you're a televangelist, you have millions of people in your congregation, you hear about even the Catholic Church, you know, money from a congregation going to settlements to abuse survivors and you, you know, to cover up certain things that have happened. I find quite often you can't look at one aspect and not look at it as a whole. So to deem, you know, something like televangelism as an evil thing and not

understand actually it's prevalent in all kinds of faith where it's closely mixed with money, I think that's a not helpful way of looking at the world. I agree. I feel like the tabloid stories that we fixate on are often betraying a bigger story happening culturally. This certainly seems like one of them. And we have, we have a saying on the show. It goes, it was capitalism all along. It's true. Follow the dollar, follow the money. And that's usually what leads you to the story.

I loved this movie. I loved what you did in this role. I was so excited that this was happening and in kind of a window where it was possible to see a movie in a theater, which was very exciting. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for your podcast. I can't even stress enough how much I've used your podcast, especially the Tammy Faye and Jessica Hahn. And one thing I discovered, I'm not sure, I'm sure you read it because you've probably read everything. But I remember reading early on, I was studying everything I could. I came across an interview with Jessica Hahn and she basically said,

I don't want this to be a part of my life anymore. I don't want to be talked about in terms of this. And we were developing the film and it was like, oh, hold up now. How do we proceed forward without re-traumatizing someone? Can we make a film about Tammy Faye without creating more trauma to Jessica Hahn? And that really was just like, I'm sure your podcasts are ever flowing and fluid as you discover things that really kind of turned us a bit because I remember Jessica Hahn said something so beautiful in the interview. She said that she spoke to Tammy.

And one of the first things, years later, they never met, but they spoke on the phone. And Tammy Faye said to Jessica, oh, honey, if I was with you right now, I'd give you a big hug. And I found that such an incredible thing to have these women who were really put in very bad position by this man to find that love for each other and that sense of connectedness. And so I really appreciated your podcast focusing on both Tammy Faye and Jessica Hahn. I feel almost like there's something nice about podcasts being able to say tell the Jessica Hahn story and do that in inevitably a lower profile way than an entire large scale movie, which can then focus on the person who is in heaven now

and can't be affected by movies. Yeah, exactly. And also, it's not something like Jessica Hahn is not this little tiny, oh, let's have an actress play her in five minutes of this movie about Tammy Faye. That whole thing between Jessica and Jim Baker needs to be its own story and needs to have the respect for the time that it takes to tell that story. And so it's when you do a movie about the eyes of Tammy Faye from Tammy Faye's POV and she never met Jessica, why bring forward the tabloid media and these sensationalist stories that we all grew up with, that story has already been told. It's been told on the covers of tabloids. It's been told on SNL. And it was exciting to go, okay, well, how can we approach this in a way that may surprise people, but actually in the way that I

find to be the truth. Right. And I think the truth is often the thought I have about why this story became big as tabloid fodder at the time and why it's meaningful to revisit it now. One of the reasons it's meaningful is that it's a story of judgment in its tabloid format where you're like, I would never do that. I would never be that. I could never in a million years be or want to be this person. And then if you tell the story from the beginning by the end, you're like, oh, this is all understandable to me as a human being. Absolutely. But it's also when you say, I could never do that. It's like, I'm better than so and so, you know, I'm better. It's this sense of really not connecting on a human level and understanding that we are all capable of anything.

That's what it is to be human. And we need to acknowledge that in ourselves. Like when put under certain circumstances, we could be doing things we thought would never be possible. And that's what makes us human beings. Wow. That to me makes the idea so visible. It's like neon in the desert. Thanks for acting. I think the world really needs you. Thanks for your podcast. I was in so many situations and so many meetings and I still have them with interviewers who were like, what did she know? Oh my God, who knew what when I get asked that all the time, do you think she knew? And I'm like, honestly, at the end of the day, she wasn't charged. She wasn't convicted. The US government

doesn't think she was involved. Why do you care? We don't need to burn anyone at the stake. She wasn't convicted or charged. Let's move on and let's find a more interesting way into the story. And so I'm so appreciative of your research and your examination of both of those women and how society looked at them and treated them and how we still, to this day, I think one thing with our film when we first came out and it's starting to soften a bit. The very beginning, I noticed there was a lot of pushback because an audience was determined before they saw the movie that she was guilty. Wow. And so to show her as anything but they had been taught as a child by the media, they weren't prepared for. And I have seen slowly and I've, you know, I'm very

excited by this. I've seen slowly now people starting to understand there's more than meets the eye. And it's a wonderful story. We learn a lot. And then I think by just spending this couple of hours with this person, I think it changed me in a small and meaningful way. But isn't that beautiful what we get to do? I know I'm an actor and you're, you know, creating these amazing stories and look back through history and challenging what we think we know. But really all of it is an exercise in empathy because what we're doing is we're moving outside of ourselves to try to understand a human being that feels so different than who we are. And that to me is a really exciting thing when we still have curiosity for the other, I think we as a society are going to be okay.

All right. You heard it here first. We're going to be okay. We're going to be okay. Yeah. Well, thank you so much again. This was wonderful. And I really feel happy to have just experienced your relationship to art. It really is a no-bling going into the new year. It's going to make me a better artist for all of 2022. You too. It's a give and take. All right. Thank you so much. Can you talk about what the prosperity gospel is? This was another bullet that my family somehow avoided, which I'm really happy about. Yeah, this is why you spend your life railing about bike lanes. It's wonderful. They like raised a cranky Dutchman somehow. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we correct the past and build a better future.

That's terrible. It sounds like a campaign slogan. Well, it reminds me of the slogan of the space mega corporation and James Cameron's aliens, building better worlds. That's what I was going for. Yeah. I am Michael Hobbs. I am a reporter for the Hummington Post. I am Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer-in-residence at the Black Mountain Institute. And today we are talking about Tammy Faye Baker slash Mesner and Jessica Hahn. Yes. And by extension about Jim Baker, but you know, boys on the side. I mean, I just assume whenever we cover women on the show that there's actually a trash dude who's behind everything bad we ever said about a woman in history. So that's my guiding principle. Yeah. So let me start by asking you, we're talking about

Tammy Faye and Jim Baker, who are the king and queen of evangelical broadcasting in the 1980s. They ran, they ran PTL, which stood for Praise the Lord. They also stood for People That Love. They had a television station. They broadcast in dozens of countries. They made hundreds of millions of dollars. They had the third most visited theme park in America after the Disney's World and Land. No way. Yes. What was it called? Heritage USA. It was like a combination of like nostalgic Americana and a theme park of the Holy Land, basically. Wow. So you get like a Galilei smoothie or whatever. It's like frankincense crumbled on top of the next matcha. And then in 1987, their empire was brought down, or this is the narrative anyway. This is, I feel like,

the way that I've seen it described or the way that we remember it now 30 years later. The empire was brought down by a woman named Jessica Hahn. Oh, so she's the quote unquote home wrecker that took it all down? Yeah. She took down the biggest home in the world. So that's the story. That's the narrative. So what do you remember or know about all this? I grew up in a very religious household, as you know. But we were like Seattle Christians. My parents believe in evolution and stuff. They just think that God created evolution. So I was aware of all of these evangelical celebrities like Billy Graham growing up. They were a large fixture in my house and my parents had books by them. But we weren't really a TV family, so we never watched the 700 Club. One thing

that I totally remember from growing up was how evangelicals have this entire parallel universe with their own celebrities, their own rock stars, their own actors, their own financial institutions, their own theme parks. It's like the Sims. It's like there's a whole other world of evangelicals that most non-evangelicals don't really know about. And I only really kind of skated across the surface of. So let's start off in the great upper Midwest. Because that's where Jim and Tammy Faye Baker are from. Which is very surprising because they're the king and queen of 80s televangelism. Yeah, in my head she has a southern accent, but that's probably just my own biases showing. She kind of adopted a southern accent. Yeah. I mean, so Tammy Faye Baker was born in International Falls,

Minnesota. Okay. And so it's think of living inside of not a freezer that's not cold enough. I mean, just think of like growing up in a house where you're the oldest of eight children and everyone gets to have a bath once a week in water that is heated on the stove and poured into a metal tub. The children are lined up in order from cleanest to dirtiest and bathed in that order. No way. When is this? This sounds like 1800s. Tammy Faye Baker is born in 1942 and also grows up in a house with an outhouse. So they're poor, it's hella cold, it's a tough childhood. It's a tough childhood. Her parents got divorced when she was three. She's the oldest of the two

kids from that marriage and then her mom remarried and had six more kids. And she says her stepfather like didn't take much of an interest in her and the other children really because that wasn't what dads did so much back then and astronaut this guy and grows up the sort of second mom in the household and is taking care of everyone. Meanwhile, at the same time, Jim Baker is growing up in Muskegon, Michigan and is the son of a working class guy. Jim Baker in high school, like his family's devout. He's not particularly focused on God at this time in his life. Jim Baker, when he is a teenager, runs over a child who had slipped into his path from a snow bank on a dark night. Oh my God. And the kid survives. But Jim Baker later on will say that like this was when

he became serious about God and faith. It seems like the kid should be more serious about God and faith. Have you survived that? Jim Baker sees it as being about Jim Baker, perhaps tellingly. I think this is all relevant to this also being a story of Pentecostalism. Tammy Faye and Jim are both raised in the Pentecostal church. And that's something that's seen really up until their rise in the seventies and eighties as something that is like part of rural America. It's practiced by ignorant people. So Pentecostalism kind of has its formal origin story in 1906 with the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, where Christians in America begin speaking in tongues, which is where the name comes from. That whole thing. Yes. And so one of

the animating ideas in Pentecostalism is like you can have a direct intimate emotional connection with God. And like the Holy Spirit can come into you and fill you and animate you. Pentecostal also handles snakes. Oh, right. It's the whole theater thing. I remember as a kid, we had some Pentecostal, like visiting Pentecostal people come to our extremely not theatrical church and they did speaking in tongues and they did the kind of healing and shouting and this whole big thing and everyone because Seattle people are really reserved. We felt so uncomfortable. Yeah, it's that. So both Tammy Fay and Jim are growing up in this old school. Drop your crutches and stand up due to the power of the Lord, speak in tongues, work with snakes. I like how you say

that. Like it's like, no, there's a snake in HR. I hope you don't have a problem with that. Yeah. And Tammy, she's called both Tammy and Tammy Fay. It really depends on how southern you want to be. It seems like I do like saying Tammy Fay. Tammy Fay has her own kind of personal awakening as a teenager where she feels the spirit enter her and speaks in tongues. Oh, wow. And Jim's approach is more from the side. He doesn't have so much of a relationship with his parents and he specifically talks in his memoir, which he writes many years after all this happens. He was put in a incubator when he was first born and his mom left him at the hospital in his first days of life. And so he was considered so fragile even after his parents

took him home that they didn't touch him very much. And then he just grew up, he says, feeling kind of untouched and unloved and just like not having really, he felt much of a relationship with his parents and really just craving warmth and approval. And men who feel that way never do anything bad later in life. No, no. And he also had an experience that probably accounts for his distance from religion for a while, where when he was about 11 years old, a man from his church approached him and asked if he wanted to go to the drive-in and get a hamburger with him. And Jim Baker was like, yes, someone wants to spend time with me. Oh my God. And they went to the drive-in and then the man took the car down a deserted road and stopped it in molested Jim. And this

continued for several years. Oh my God. He did it. He kept doing it. And Jim Baker writes in his memoir about this first incident, I felt almost proud that Russell would give me so much attention. I thought, so this is what having a buddy is all about. This must be what the big guys do because he's 11. Oh no. And then later he writes, many people assume that child molesters beat their victims into submitting to their desires. I am convinced the exact opposite is true in most cases. The molester gives the child the love, attention, self-esteem, or kindness that the child may not be getting from his or her family and friends. Oh, that fucking sucks. Yeah. So did he ever tell anybody or does he only write about it in the memoir? Not a soul. So Jim Baker, as a teenager,

out of loneliness and lack of identity, I think too, becomes this great organizer and showman. So he puts on school fundraising events, which are huge successes. And everything he does is kind of on a larger scale than it needs to be. So he's sort of hiding in plain sight. He puts all of this loneliness and pain that he has into this public persona that he starts to build in high school. Yeah. And like being the guy at the center of everything. Right. And so he goes to Bible college in Minneapolis and there he meets a young lady named Tammy Faye. Okay. And they go out on three dates and he asks her to marry him. Oh my God. And she says yes. Oh, three dates? Yeah. Jesus. What do you think about? I don't know. I don't want to judge anybody's choices, but it seems like

you should spend a weekend in Vancouver with someone before you marry them or something to see what they're like when they travel. Like, do they know each other's middle names at this point? A good answer to that question is that Tammy Faye has been very evasive about her family or not evasive because hasn't talked about them much. So Jim assumes she's an only child. Oh, wow. Until they visit her house. And he's like, Oh, you have seven siblings. And then they go to Jim's house and his family has two inside bathrooms and a dishwasher. And she's like, Oh my God, like these people are loaded. No way. Yeah. My secret theory about why evangelicals and Christian people get married so fast is because they really want to get it on and they don't want

to admit that. Yeah, I'm sure that's also true. I read Larry Flint's biography years ago and he met a girl at a bar and she's like, I can't have sex before I'm married. And so he married her the same night and then they had sex. Well, it is like a Larry Flint logic. It's like, what do I have to do to have sex? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they get married and their college has a policy that students can't be married to each other. So they're like, fine, we're leaving college. We're going to go be traveling preachers now. No way. Wow. They really went for it. They went for it. This is a story about people who went for it. Also, they're not only very young, but they're like little tiny because Jim Baker is five, four. Oh my God. He's my size. I like him so much more

now. Yes. And Tammy is four foot 10. And when they get married, she weighs 73 pounds. Oh, her eyelash is way as much as she does basically. As a side note, though, I would also say that she did not wear lipstick until after she was married because she was raised to believe that like putting on lipstick meant you were going to hell. No way. You're like a hussy. Yes. She was raised in a very strict makeup free society and household. So knowing that makes me really enjoy knowing that like her makeup was her, her freedom. Yeah. But so how do they decide to become traveling preachers? They're both just so devout and so charismatic at this point that they're like, let's just go make a name for ourselves. Yeah. You know, Jim has had the experience

of feeling that God has called him to preach and it's like, yeah, you've done event planning. You understand that you got a rush when that works out well and you've become devout and you were raised in this culture. So you know how it works. Like this just makes sense as a job for you, Jim. Like if he grew up in some rich dick suburb, he would have become a Mercedes salesman. It's just like it's you have a certain skill set and then based on where you happen to be born, there are certain industries that you go towards and one of them is God. Yeah. I mean, they saw an opportunity, I guess. I wouldn't say that they were never in it for money. Like that seems irrelevant, but like they certainly took a long time to make any. Like they were traveling around the country

by car. They once got paid in a chicken. Oh, wow. Like someone gave them a chicken, a live chicken, which Tammy Faye made into a pet. So they're just like show up in towns and say, hi, we'd like to preach here, pay us some money. That's like that's the business model. Yeah. That's kind of the established model that they go into. Wow. Because the way a lot of Pentecostal preachers work is that they will be traveling around and they show up in town and stage your revival on the outskirts of town where people will come and invite the Holy Spirit and have this like ecstatic communal holy experience. Fascinating. And so they're seen as kind of disreputable. It's not a great grift at this time in American history. We will get there eventually, yes. We'll get there,

but like it's not like telemarketing. Right. They're paid, you know, as little as $30 a week and they travel all around America. Tammy, who's a wonderful singer, learns how to play the organ and they start watching the Tonight Show on the evenings that they have off when they're not summoning the Holy Spirit and they really like Johnny Carson and it's like the beginning also of the TV revolution in America because TV, they're becoming affordable. The TV is actually becoming a way to reach into the homes of vast numbers of Americans. Tammy also develops two little puppet characters that are going to become an important part of her alley alligator and Susie Moppet. It was a good time for puppets, 60s and 70s.

And so they were traveling around doing this puppet show that everyone loved, especially, you know, it was four kids, but it was very popular. Pat Robertson, who's another early televangelist, starts his own TV station, the Christian Broadcasting Network. Here's about it. And so he hires them and they become one of the cornerstones of the network. And so they do a kids show, Tammy Fadas, the puppets. They also have a sit down talk show that immediately becomes a big hit and is very much modeled after the Tonight Show. And they also essentially improvise most if not all of their material. They just like are themselves on the air. So just like their personalities is like the Today Show or something. It's like,

you're creating a platform of these personalities and everyone just kind of wants to hang out with them. Yeah, it's exactly like that. And as an example of the kinds of moments that were on it, an episode of the kids show, Tammy Fae, is giving a tip to mothers and says, now, if you want to make your soap last longer, you can take the wrapper off and then dry it out. And then it'll last twice as long. And you can also put it in your drawers, if you would like. And then like Jim starts laughing and she and I didn't realize for like weeks after first watching this clip that it was a double entendre. Oh, in your drawers. In your drawers. Oh, that's what counts is like risk a Christian broadcasting network content. Yeah. And then she got said

in giggles. And that's like, was something that wasn't controversial, but was kind of beloved. Right. You know, it's a Christian show, but it's about people being kind of human and fun and sweet. And they're this like lovely little newlywed couple that are so adorable. And they just want to talk about Jesus with you and do the puppets. And they're just like very lovable people. That's kind of the reputation that they build. And I've watched a bunch of their TV and I do think Tammy Fae Baker is like one of the cutest people who's ever lived like that reputation was earned. I guess I mean, a huge thing with this, like in all of these things, is that the technology change, right? I'm sure that they were lovely and charming, but it's,

it also seems like Christians were probably pretty thirsty for Christian content at that point. And so they're also super popular because they're just filling this niche that there's nothing else to watch if you're a Christian who wants Christian shows. Yeah. Because seventh heaven isn't on yet. Yeah, they happen along in exactly the right moment. Like they have a skill set that is exactly right for the technology that suddenly exists to capitalize on it. And so they become this popular cornerstone of Pat Robertson's network. He's basically threatened by them, it seems like, and forces them out. Oh, okay. They start working for another network, they get forced out again. Oh. So in 1979, they're like, fine, whatever, Jim is like,

we're starting our own TV network and Tammy being married to Jim, you know, that's her job is to go do what Jim says, which increasingly becomes the way things work. They have two kids at this point who have grown up being on TV with them. And so they move to Charlotte. And so in 1979, they start a satellite network, which means they can beam PTL praise the Lord people that love across the entire world. And the only people who are sending out TV transmissions from space before Jim Baker or Ted Turner and HBO. No way, really. So again, like they were in the right place at the right time. Yeah, they found this market niche. Yeah. And so they start broadcasting and it's an immediate hit. And they get all of these foreign contracts and they've been now doing

TV for 15 years. So they're very comfortable with it. They are recording or broadcasting rather two hours of live TV a day. Whoa. Isn't that incredible? What is their ideology at this point? Are they political? Are they socially conservative? Are they trying to be a political? Like what is their sort of what's the content that they're putting out there? So one of my favorite Tammy Fay Baker moments is in 1985, she had on a guest who appeared via satellite but was on the show who had AIDS. Oh, wow. And also said, don't you think that maybe you just haven't given women a fair try? Oh my God. Whoa. You know, confused about gayness. They talk about his AIDS diagnosis. And she says, how sad that we as Christians who are to be the salt of the earth and are supposed

to love everyone are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care. Yeah. And to me, that's amazing. And to me, the context that makes this amazing is like, not only is that remarkable for someone on the religious right in America to have said, but also that in 1985, the president hadn't acknowledged AIDS. So this was the year that Reagan finally did acknowledge AIDS after several years and after it had become, I don't know what term there is higher than plague. But it also like being like, you know, it's okay to touch people who have AIDS was a fairly radical statement in 1985, honestly. Well, it's also a bygone era in that that was a time when organized religion was in

some way a countervailing force for politics rather than a wing of politics. Rather than a booster jet. There was a long time when various denominations weren't really partisan. They had these principles of grace and charity and donations and selflessness. And but if it was Democrats that were doing that, if it was Republicans that were doing that, they would go back and forth. And so they were in some way a competing ideology to politics. They were another way of going about the world. It was just less of a monopoly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a freedom at that time where Tammy Faye Baker wasn't responsible for anyone getting elected. The bakers were many things, but they were not king makers. Right. Jim Baker met with Jimmy Carter

and then met with Ronald Reagan and liked both of them and was bipartisan. How did you end up feeling about them from watching these clips? Like, did you like them? Did they seem like nice people and like they were a force for good in the country? Or were they planting seeds of some of the things that would eventually become the much uglier parts of the religious right? With Tammy on TV, like I just like her. She's just a person who is on TV for the most part. And like her job is just to talk to whoever comes to her fake living room that day or do her puppet shows or whatever. Like she doesn't have an agenda. She likes entertaining people. She likes being America's fun mom. And you know, I'm sure that there's agenda pushing in some of the millions of hours that

PTL did that I would see and see is kind of growing into what we have now. But I see her really more as like an influence on Ellen. Yeah. She's a lot like an Instagram influencer because she was working in the economy of selling people access to your heart and soul. And that was what a lot of people watched for. Like people talked about, I turn PTL on every day and they're like my family and I feel like I have Jim and Tammy Fay in my home every day and using them as surrogate family. Not surrogate, but real, you know, a kind of like tele intimacy. Right. And it was a show that was watched not just by Pentecostals, but by, you know, it was watched by fundamentalists. It was watched by Catholics. It was watched by all kinds of Americans. It's interesting. It's

interesting thinking about like how the two of them worked as a couple. I feel like a lot of what people were responding to was just like how she was a very warm and genuine person. Like she delivered a consistent product also. And then Jim was more on the ministering side and he would close every broadcast every, every day by looking at the camera and saying God loves you. He really does. Yeah. And so the other thing that Jim does on TV, aside from the regular TV duties, is fundraise incessantly. He's doing the fundraising equivalent of the hard sell. He's doing like Pentecostal Wolf of Wall Street fundraising from the beginning. He's always been good at this. He's always been a good fundraiser. He's good at terrifying people and like he got his start. And I

think the first telethon he ever did where he came on, they needed to raise I think $50,000. And he was like, this is the end of Christian television. We have not met our goal and it is all over. And people were getting in their cars in the middle of the night and driving to the station so that they could hand cash to Jim Baker. And he raised, I think, $120,000 that night. So he's learned how to fundraise very well. That's another big part of his skill set. Are they just soliciting donations or are they also like selling merch like PTL, coffee mugs and mouse pads? It's the same way that I got all those NPR affiliate tote bags. Yeah, yeah. You sign up, you become a supporter, and then they send you like Tammy Faye's CD.

Or like their new book or whatever. And they're also doing a lot of just hard selling of like, we need this much money or it will be the end of PTL. We are counting every dollar. And it's like, they had plenty of money. They did not need to be fundraising as much as they were. And they're also fundraising like, we need to keep the lights on. And it's really because they were expanding like crazy because Jim Baker also loved real estate. Okay. It was also ambition. It wasn't just need. No, it was, it was ambition from the beginning because, you know, they got their feet under them very quickly as a Christian satellite network. And then

immediately started expanding. And then they start building their theme park, Heritage USA, which is like on the border of North and South Carolina. It was founded in 1978 and closed its doors in 1987. It was 2300 acres, which is three and a half square miles. It had a water park. It had a feature called the upper room. The upper room is a replica of the room in Jerusalem that is believed to be the site of the last supper. So you can go visit that at Heritage USA. Yeah. The idea became that like, it wasn't a replica of a holy place where miracles had happened, but it was a place where miracles could happen. Okay.

And so they also started putting out press about people came to the upper room at Heritage USA and their ailments were cured and their psychiatric issues went away. And like the miracle, like that Jesus comes to the replica room as readily as he does to the actual pilgrimage site that you can like make a pilgrimage site out of fiberglass next to a water park and Jesus won't discriminate. Which I, you know, is it like America at its best to me, honestly. The profiteering off of that is not so great. Yeah. I mean, there's so much fascinating metaphorical stuff going on there. I don't know. It's like the opposite of Muslims going to Mecca. It's like,

you're going to bring Mecca to America. Yeah. Right. You're going to create this artificial place where you can make a pilgrimage. Muhammad doesn't go to the mountain. Muhammad builds a little fiberglass mountain and charges people to see a little like Las Vegas version of the mountain. And it creates a space for devotion and like how many arthritic South Carolinian grandmas are going to go to Israel really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the placebo effect is of effect. We live in a country where a lot of people have chronic ailments and live with pain. And so I can imagine for those people the hope that they feel and the vibe in the whole place actually

gives them relief. I have no doubt that people went there and found relief for their health ailments. Yeah. That seems fine. Like it's better than spending $4,000 on an ER visit. Yes. On some level, it's totally harmless. Yeah. And there's this interesting thing where Jim Baker really did go down. Jim and Tammy Faye actually to an equal extent, which is what I find even more troubling. Jim and Tammy Faye Baker went down as personifications of televangelist greed and of everything wrong with the Christian church in the 80s and all its hypocrisy and all its abuses of power. And that certainly was earned. Right. But they weren't to that in a lot of other ways. Like Jim Baker was certainly obsessed with accruing money and power

as fast as possible, but he was doing it so that he could build a theme park. Right. He wasn't trying to choose the next president. He wasn't interested in taking over someone else's empire, which is what a lot of the other megachurch pastors were doing at the time and what he's going to become relevant to our story later. After all the chickens came home to roost, there was a public auction of a lot of their belongings. And the press came and crowed about it. And it was like, they have an air conditioned dog house. And it's like, well, they had a house in Palm Springs. Like it gets really hot there. You would want air conditioning for your dog house, honestly. Like that seems humane. Right. They're nice to their dogs. Yeah. Or like they had like a lot of stuff

Tammy Fay went shopping a lot. She had a lot of jewelry. She had a lot of designer clothes. They spent, they had a salary of a few million dollars a year, which is a lot of money. But PTO was taking in hundreds of millions of dollars. And what Jim Baker got in trouble for was fraud on a corporate scale. It had nothing to do with the money that they were taking home. And so this idea of like, they were conspicuously greedy. They're bad because they were greedy. Her makeup is somehow tied to the way that they abuse their power. It's like, no, they were like tacky people who liked stuff. And that was connected to it. But that wasn't really what they did wrong. Like the bad stuff we haven't even gotten to yet.

I guess, I mean, I guess it's not really a defense of them, but it's sort of like, well, on the scale of like shitty cult leaders. They're not that bad. They're also very willing to stay in their lane. Like it's interesting noticing that like Jim Baker for all of his flaws did not really seem to care about political pull. Like he just wanted to keep building his ridiculous, huge buildings. And so in 1980, the event which is referred to in 80s media as a trist or an affair takes place. I am so excited to hear about what the actual trist was. Okay, so just tell me like everything you know or think you might know about Jessica Hahn. Literally nothing. You said her name to me like three weeks ago and that was the

first time I had ever heard her name. Really? I know nothing about this. You didn't watch enough Saturday Night Live is what I really feel. I know. Or my entire grasp of 20th century America comes from Saturday Night Live. So Jessica Hahn is born and grows up on Massapequel Long Island, which is also the area where the Amy Fisher saga took place. Amazing convergence. So maybe that's like the spiritual home you're wrong about. And she grows up in a Catholic family. Her dad leaves the family before she ever can form a memory of him. One of the only things she knows about him is that her mother told her that he refused to hold her after she was born. Oh, what the fuck? Can you believe that? That's so like 60s dad. Like it's so shitty. And like if you were writing

a short story about someone and you were like, I want to show that they were like alienated from the beginning and they were, you know, never had a chance at love. And then you would write that. You'd be like, that's too much. That's a super hacky detail. Two on the nose. Real life is not subtle. Real life is not obvious. Real life does not have an MFA. So she also has kind of a distant stepdad. She has a younger stepbrother who she really loves and is also super protective of and is always taking care of and taking around with her. Because when she was 14, her best friend died very suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. And she had afterwards this memory of her mother was holding her when she told her that her friend had died. And she said, just like I'm holding you now,

God is holding your friend Carol. Wow. And so after that, she like got curious about God, basically, and had been going to church with her family, but not really connected with it. And so she went to a Pentecostal church in her hometown of Massa Piqua. She said that she thought to herself, this must be what falling in love is like. Wow. So she's 14 and she just like, she loves church. And in the way that people really bond with Christianity, it feels like it's an outlet for unconditional love and that you're able to truly believe like, I deserve to be loved. I am worthy of unconditional love. I am loved. Yeah. It's a way of understanding the world and a source of self-esteem and a community all at the same time. It's extremely appealing. Yeah. Yeah. And

when someone offers you emotional sustenance for the first time in your life and you've been hungry for your whole life and you don't believe that you can get it anywhere else, you will do anything for the person or entity that offers that to you. That's so like portentious, Sarah. That's so, this is very good foreshadowing, Sarah. I'm practicing for what I'm the new host of forensic files. She has a pastor who she becomes like a second member of the family too. She is a baby sitter for his kids. She's like in his house. Okay. And so in 1980, Jessica Hahn is 20 years old. She's working as a secretary for the church. She's been on two dates in her entire life. Oh my god. Her pastor kind of lunged at her and tried to kiss her in 1978, but didn't harass her any more than

that. Okay. And he's still her pastor and she's still his babysitter. Wow. And Jessica Hahn has also been watching PTL like since she was a middle schooler. Okay. So in 1980, when this traveling preacher named John Wesley Fletcher comes to Massa Piqua and is like, Hey, guess what, Jessica? We have a way for you to perform a service for God. You're going to come down to Florida and you're going to do something really great for God and you're going to help out Jim Baker. Okay. So she's like super starstruck. She's super in on this project. Yeah. Like someone who embodies like everything that you most respect and love in the world and like the part of the world that you most crave approval from. That's what Jim Baker is to her. Yeah. Yeah. And initially,

it's sold to her as like Jim and Tammy Faye are having problems. You can come down to Florida where they are right now and take care of their kids. Oh. And so John Fletcher is telling her in the car like, you know, yeah, Jim and Tammy are having problems and like, I can tell you that because your family fuck, we know that you won't tell anyone about any of this. It's like already sounding super bad. Yeah. Well, and also like she doesn't have any money. Like they fly her down there and buy her a ticket and she doesn't have any way of getting back to New York also. Oh my God. It's like every red flag. Yeah. John Fletcher drives her to this hotel in Clearwater, Florida. He takes her into a room, takes her out into the balcony and she looks out and down at the swimming

pool and oh my God, there's Jim Baker and his daughter Tammy Sue is there beside him. Oh, what the fuck. And he looks up and waves at Jessica and she's like, oh, his kids with them. This is, you know, it's like a family. Yeah. And he comes up and they tell her, Jessica, you're going to be doing something tremendous for God. Oh, no. You know, he says later on that this is the only time that he has been quote, unfaithful to Tammy with another woman. And that will be borne out by the fact that the way he tries to get something started is by asking Jessica to give him a back rub. Like so like immediately he just like is like touching me in a familiar way. Yeah. Jim is talking to Jessica and he's like, you know, things are really bad between me and Tammy. I don't want to

live. I can't go on. If you don't do this for me, I can't keep going with PTL like my fate is in your hands. This is a bad dude. This is bad. It's very weird behavior. It's extremely weird behavior because you're super asking to get caught too because you don't, you don't know what level of trust you have in this person. You don't know if she's going to run to the cops in five minutes. I mean, they have been grooming her for years. Right. I think they do know that she's not going to betray Jim Baker to the cops. It's just reckless. It is. It's, you know, utilizing all the power that you have. So then what happens? I feel like I'm watching a horror movie and I'm like watching through my fingers is like one of the protagonists like climbs up the stairs. You're like, you just

know something bad is about to happen. Yeah, it's horrible. So he asked her to give him a back rub. She doesn't. He starts talking about how terrible his relationship with Tammy is. He starts undressing. You know, it's the same Bill Clinton thing where like Clinton just like whips out his penis. It's just like, hello. Yeah. You know, right? Like, we both know what this is about. Like, I don't need to make a case for this happening. It's just happening. And then when she, of course, like a normal person is like, I did not sign up for this, then he's like, why are you trying to betray me? Yes. Or it's just this idea of like, look, either you have sex with Jim Baker or you will destroy everything that you love and everything that God cares about on this earth.

Nice. Okay. And so he just starts undressing her. So he takes her in his hands and takes her clothes off. And basically, like, when she's telling the story, there's no point where she says like, he like forced me down on the bed or pushed me down on the bed. It's just like, he starts undressing her and then she's on the bed, right? Because you don't really remember the mechanics of trauma necessarily. You just remember that you had no sense of volition. And it just sort of happened. So let me zoom out for a moment. I had a miraculous research experience. Okay. Because one of the things that I knew about Jessica Hahn from the beginning was that she had posed for Playboy. And this was something that was, you know, unilaterally used

to discredit her. Playboy paid her a million dollars to pose in an issue that came out in 1987. So all of this happens in 1980, but we don't know about any of this until 1987. Yeah. 1987 is when all the sexual assault and financial chickens come home to roost. It actually went on sale in North Carolina earlier than it did in the rest of the country in order to coincide with her testifying in a grand jury. Wow. And this is like one of the facts about her. And what no one talks about is that she also gave a very lengthy Playboy interview where she describes the entirety of this event in a way that no other outlet gave her space for. Cause Playboy, the Playboy interview in like the 60s, 70s and 80s was incredibly long. Like they've always had

really long interviews. They're like seven, eight, 10, 12,000 words long. And I have always loved Playboy. Me too. Really? Yeah. Cause they print like Ray Bradbury fiction. Like it's a cliche to say I read it for the articles, but like the articles were dope. The articles were amazing. Yes. And they, and I have a bunch of 60s Playboys and the like big centerpiece interview in them is like Jermaine Greer and Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson. I always look for them and use bookstores. I've been researching this for months. In that time, you can only read the tip of a research iceberg, but I have never seen any reference to this anywhere else. So they in 1987 gave Jessica Hahn the platform to talk about what happened between her and Jim Baker.

Oh, he like sits on her neck and she can't breathe and she feels like she's going to die. And it's just like lying there unmoving. And then, you know, he finishes and sees that she's crying. You've got to be kidding me. This is awful. It's horrible. And it's premeditated too, that he, he bought a plane ticket. He had to get her middle name and her birth date. Like, this is basically sex trafficking. Tell me if this is a terrible comment to make, but it also seems so much worse that like she's never done this before. Her first sexual experience now is this awful thing. I mean, not that this behavior is like defensible in any context, but it's also just so much more victimizing when it's like this is the first time she's probably been

around a naked man doing this to her. And it's just awful. It's like the difference between assault and aggravated assault. Well, and let me read you where Jessica says about that in her own words near the close of this very long playboy interview. The interviewer says, okay, let's wind down. And Jessica says, no, wait, let me go on a bit longer. Okay. So I'll just read you this little passage. For seven years, I had a battle with, should I let this thing get to me? Should I fight it? And my whole life has been caught up by it. And all these preachers have had a ball with it. Well, I've just realized just now that that day seven years ago was a day when two men stole my life and made me a slave to them emotionally. And the interviewer says, stole my life. What do you

mean? Jessica says, okay, let's really get down to what it's all about. They took for me what should have been for somebody I loved. They took for me that first experience, that first time when you love somebody and it's everything good. They took for me the chance to ever experience that they took for me the gift that God gave us of sharing the ultimate act of love. They stole that from me. I will never in my life get that back. I will never in my life know what it's like to make love for the first time with a man I love. And no money in the world can pay for that. No money in the world. Long pause. There's two interviewers and then one of them says, you know, at this moment, I just want to say, I don't see how this can run with the pictures you want to do. Oh my God.

And the other interviewer says, Bob's not on salary from Playboy. I am, but I agree. We can do this without the pictures. Look in journalists. Jessica Han says, relax guys, I know what I'm doing. I want this on the record. I fought a long time to feel like a woman and feel good about myself. And I'm almost there. And I don't see these pictures as being filthy. I see what they did as being filthy. Damn. Jessica Han. Yeah, that's like a mic drop moment at the end. She's also a big Trump supporter. And also in now today, and also in this interviewer, in this interview, we said some of the most articulate things I've ever read about the power dynamics of sexual assault. Like people contain multitudes. We make shields look like regular rocks.

You know, she poses in Playboy. It's a very lovely pictorial, by the way. It's like a lot of pictures of her like on the beach or like in kind of a see through outfit with like her big boobs like floating in water as she stands in the sea. It's just like wholesome, you know, pastoral, like, oh, I'm out in nature with my big boobs and I'm living my life. And here's a dog smiling at me. And this is, you know, the feeling of freedom. Sure. You sell that photo spread to run alongside this very, very long interview that you do describing the way that you were brutally raped. And that's the way you get America to maybe read about your rape, I guess, in 1987. Yeah. So he rapes her orally. He rapes her vaginally. He comes twice, which is pretty impressive for

a 39 year old who's been married to the same person for hundreds of years. And then he like has lost all two messings, but he just continues raping her with a limp dick. Wait, what? Really? That's what she says. This is her account. Everything I'm saying is based on her account. Jim Baker's account is that she was a prostitute who his fixer hired and then she undressed him and he was too scared of her prostitute ways to achieve an erection. And that's his story and he's sticking to it. Oh, wow. Okay. So this event just keeps going? It just keeps going. I mean, it's not a lot of time in minutes, but trauma doesn't work linearly.

And what Jessica Han talks about in the Playboy interview is just like just being completely limp the entire time. She's having trouble breathing and like think she's going to suffocate at one point because he's sitting on her neck. She describes, I tried to desensitize my body, so I stopped feeling pain. Yeah. There's also his dudes standing outside the door, presumably. She's there on his dime. I mean, there's a lot of other larger forces that would be telling her resistance is just going to make this worse. Oh, and also during the rape, he says to her, he's like talking the whole time because his guy spends his whole life on TV. And what he repeats many times is when you help the shepherd, you help the sheep.

Fuck you, Jim Baker. Isn't that the creepiest fucking thing you've ever heard? Oh, what the hell? She says, how do you know that I won't tell? And he says, because I know about you. I know what your life is about. You won't hurt me like the others. Jesus. And then Jim leaves. He pauses as he's leaving the room to pick up her hair brush and brush his hair with it, which is a detail I really can't get over for some reason. Yeah. Wow. And then he leaves. And then, and so Jessica's lying there and, you know, just like feels horrible and in comes John Fletcher. And he says to her, Jim is so happy. And then he says, you are mine. You're not going to remember Jim. You're going to remember me.

What? And then according to Jessica, he rapes her too. No fucking way. What? And then he sets an alarm because he has to do a telethon at four. No. And Jessica says she is watching the telethon in her hotel room after these two men have both raped her. And they're on this live telethon talking about, you know, God really ministered to us today. Didn't he Jim? Yes, he did, John. These two should be like in jail. Yeah. It's aggravated rape. I mean, the first thing that jumps out at me is that this does not sound like this is the first time they did it. If this was the first time they did it, it seems like they planned it

pretty well. Yes. It's also, and like one of the things I was thinking as I was reading this Playboy interview is this is like the years when the satanic panic was raging. Like this was the time when we were spending millions of dollars, millions of man hours on dredging confabulated memories of satanic ritual abuse out of preschoolers and then searching for human remains in forest. And we had a woman who just kind of put up her hand was like, I have been horribly sexually assaulted by someone very powerful. I remember it. I have always remembered it. I can tell you a very lucid story about it that has been consistent this entire time. And everyone was like, yes, what? And the reaction was either nonchalance or insults because she was in Playboy and so

she was a harlot and she had been paid a million dollars for posing for Playboy. And so therefore she was in it for the money. Right. So Fletcher rapes Jessica Han. He leaves. She calls room service and they send up a cheeseburger, which she can't eat because she's too sick, even though she knows she needs to eat something. And then Fletcher comes up with another guy and like comes up and is like, hi, Jessica, and starts eating her cheeseburger and is like here, third man who's never been identified. Here's a nice woman for you to rape. Like she also described Jim Baker's attitudes seeming to be like, this is like your one big free ride. So take advantage of it. So then she gets raped again? No, because this guy comes toward her and she says, if you think anything's

going to happen, you are sadly mistaken. And that works? That works. It's almost like, oh, whoops, sorry, you're right. Like that would be rude. It's also some random guy who she doesn't have like years of respect for. So I feel like she's able to, yeah. And, you know, John Fletcher flies her back to Massapequa. So I mean, I hesitate to ask this because it sounds like one of those what was she wearing type questions. But does she say in the interview why she didn't come forward before 1987? Like, I mean, it's kind of obvious why she didn't come forward. But does she say? I mean, yeah, initially, it just like didn't occur to her. Yeah. I mean, first of all, she feels pretty physically threatened because she's been violently assaulted by these two people.

And she knows how powerful they are. And she's aware that if they wanted to keep her quiet more violently than they certainly could, they tell her that day, millions of people will suffer if you don't keep quiet about this. Like you will bring down the PTL if you tell anyone, and she doesn't want to hurt people. She doesn't want to bring down this empire that makes millions of people's lives better. I mean, this is the argument that people always get about not standing up to hierarchy, I feel like, you know, look at all the good it does. How could you destroy that? Yeah. And they're millionaires and they're politically connected. And she knows that she's going to get trashed if she comes forward. She's also 20 years old. And she also she talks about

saying to herself like, well, like these two men were ministers. So ministers wouldn't do something wrong. So raping me can't be wrong. Oh, for fuck's sake. And another thing Jim Baker says to her is you'll appreciate this later. Oh, shit, really? Yeah. The day after he sexually assaults her, he calls her and is like, what happened between us was consensual. Well, goodbye forever. Oh my god. What happens next is that she eventually tells her home pastor about this, the guy who tried to assault her a couple of years earlier when she was a teenager. And he's horrified by this and furious, not because it happened to her, but because he wanted to get there first, which he tells her. Wait, what? And in one of the books about this whole narrative, which is

P.T.L. by John Wigger, there's this horrible heartbreaking little segue where he goes they then began a sexual relationship that lasted for six years. Oh, what? Yeah. Was it like a relationship relationship or was it like him just sort of victimizing her? I mean, you know, both. And so this guy decides, let's go after P.T.L. and hires not a lawyer, but a church insider who is in law school and is two years away from a degree. And he partners with a pretty high-powered LA law firm. And this is already after P.T.L. contacted Jessica in the early 80s and basically, according to her, brought her up to a LaGuardia holiday. And I think they gave her $10,000 and they got her to sign a document saying, I was the aggressor. If anyone was sexually assaulted,

it was Jim Baker and I take advantage of him. She signs the document, she gets to $10,000 the next day. She's like, I actually, I'd want to take that back. Yeah. No, I can't. Sorry. So after this happens, they once again, you know, they go into actual legal entanglements and she's awarded $265,000, which is what's repeated in the press in 1987 over and over and over again. She won $265,000 from P.T.L. and then she got a million dollars from Playboy. What $265,000 actually breaks down to is that $150,000 are put in trust for her to get a little skim off of monthly for 20 years. So in 2015, that's when she gets the principle. In 1985 of that settlement, she gets $115,000 now, of which her not a lawyer because he hasn't finished law school, but the guy her abusive

boyfriend hired gets $95,000 and she gets $25,000. Oh my God. Of course the details never get reported at the time. Yeah, because we can't fit like how a settlement actually breaks down into a headline. So what everyone knows is $265,000. Wow. Like the explicit transaction is we are paying you this money so that you don't tell anyone and like she's like, I don't want to tell anyone. My boyfriend is the one who's doing this. So the boyfriend basically finds out that she's been raped. He sees a profit opportunity and a dating opportunity. That sounds like an app pitch. But then it sounds like the hush money worked because none of this comes out until 87, right? I mean, she didn't really need to be paid is what she always maintained. Like this was like

undertaken on her behalf by other people. So meanwhile, they go their separate ways. And as the 80s progress, Jim Baker gets really fixated on Heritage USA, the theme park with the water park and the miracles. And they just keep expanding and expanding and expanding. And he's building residential buildings there. He wants to build a replica of a street in Jesus's Jerusalem. Nice. For people to experience like it's just everything they have is leveraged to a crazy degree. He has created this financial house of cards. And he's also done something that powerful people do an awful lot, which is that he's basically weeded out from his inner circle, anyone who'll argue with him. So he's surrounded by yes men. And Tammy Fay, it feels like has just kind of

veered off in a different direction. Like she is tired of working all the time she wants to spend time together as a family, which they don't do very much anymore, because he's always fundraising. He's always, you know, they have to do another urgent telethon because PTL will have to shut its doors if they don't raise, you know, however many millions of dollars by the end of the week. Or like organizing gang rapes at hotels on the weekends. Yes. And so they're putting out all these urgent calls for funds. And one of the ways that Jim Baker goes about securing funding that he needs to construct Heritage USA is he sells these packages where if you pay $1,000 upfront, you have a lifetime membership at Heritage USA. And you can

have three nights in a Heritage USA hotel every year for the rest of your life. Which seems like too good of a deal because it is. So he sells 115,000 of these memberships and makes $158 million doing so. $158 million. And the problem is that it's mathematically impossible. Right. There's not enough nights in the year. Yeah. They would need to bend space time. Right. And so the kind of big press intervention into this is that there is a reporter

in Charlotte, North Carolina named Charlie Shepard and Shepard takes it upon himself to be like the person who's checking up on PTL. So he parks his car in front of the house of a PTL employee named Al Kress, who's the assistant to Jim Baker's right hand man who did all the hush money arrangements and the kind of laundering of funds that led to her settlement. Like where did the $265,000 come from? Right. It came from donations. Right.

So it's not that he's an apostate. He's a true believer, but he thinks that Jim Baker isn't living up to his own values. Which, you know, he's not. Yeah. So Charlie Shepard talks to an inside man. The bombshell is being finished at the bombshell factory in spring of 1987. And then Jim Baker announces that he is resigning. And what has happened behind the scenes is that Jim is ridiculously overextended financially.

Jerry Falwell, who's the founder of the moral majority, says, you know, Jim, give me control of PTL for a few weeks and I'll take care of it for you. And you go and take care of your family. And then I will give it back to you. This was not his plan. That sounds shady as fuck. Yeah. And Jim Baker wants to believe this.

And so he does. And Tammy Faye Baker, who has never really liked Jerry Falwell and who at the time is struggling with prescription pill addictions and who if you watch PTL during this period, like there are parts where she's just clearly high as a kite and has no idea what's going on. Oh, wow. Tammy does not like this idea. Tammy Faye does not trust Jerry Falwell. She does not believe that he's just going to take PTL for a few weeks and then give it back.

And she's right, of course. Yeah. Because he takes it and then says no backsies and immediately has a press conference about how Jim Baker has betrayed his faith. He's betrayed everything his church stands for. He and his wife are living a life of unacceptable, indefensible extravagance. Wow. This is like Game of Thrones shit.

He just like came into the organization like a wrecking ball. Now I'm picturing Jerry Falwell in the wrecking ball video. And so that's the end suddenly. Like Jim Baker resigns, the PTL is gone. Wow. So Falwell installs himself and then snitches on Baker. And Falwell also comes in believing that PTL is like, he will continue Jim Baker's work. And what he realizes is that the organization is losing money in an arterial spray.

So he leaves a few months later and discussed. Oh, Falwell leaves too? Falwell leaves too. And of course, as Jim Baker is ousted from PTL by Jerry Falwell, Jessica Hahn is also in the news. The reporter comes out with the scoop about Jessica Hahn in the midst of all this. And then Jessica Hahn becomes what people know about this story. And it becomes in the public eye a story about Jim Baker was hypocritical. He had sex.

And so he's been forced out of his mega church. And what happens is that he goes to federal trial and he's convicted of wire fraud and mail fraud specifically for the lifetime memberships. OK, so that's that's what gets him. That's what gets him. He goes to prison for financial crimes. And he's in actually sentenced to 45 years. Whoa.

Serves five and is released on appeal after he's represented by Alan Dershowitz because of course he is. It's like a carnival of the worst people of the 1990s. It is. And another thing that happens, because this all goes down and hits the media in 1987, is that the Wall Street Journal christened 1987 the year of the Bimbo because this is the year of Jessica Hahn. Unbelievable. It's the year of Fawn Hall, who we recall from Iran Contra.

And then the third Bimbo in the year of the Bimbo that everyone cites and that Jessica Hahn herself mentions in the Playboy interview is Donna Rice, the Bimbo who quote unquote brought down Gary Hart's campaign for president. So Jessica Hahn ends up becoming the villain in all this as usual. Yeah, of course. So is this where we get to the narrative that Tammy Faye is like a gold digging whack job? Like where does the hatred of Tammy Faye Baker come in? Yeah, it comes in after the fall.

And I think there's the idea of like men will be men, boys will be boys. But for a woman to be greedy is worse than for a man to be a rapist. Right. The big coverage of her life afterwards. There isn't a lot of like, what did she knew? Who knew what went? Yeah. Because I feel like the media kind of accepts like she didn't really know anything.

I mean, is that the evidence that we have? Like she didn't really know about the depth of the financial problems? No, she didn't. Everything that I've read, it seems like they were really drifting apart. She was not particularly involved in the infrastructure of PTL after the first few years and was just like, you know, they would bring her out. She would sing. She wasn't doing the nitty gritty.

He was running the business. Right. So she becomes kind of the on camera talent and he's like the one pulling the strings behind. Yeah. And then post scandal, it's like she becomes the face of everything that was wrong with PTL. Yeah. Because she wore the extravagant outfits and the jewelry and she had, you know, the shopping sprees and the fancy home decoration and like no one's taking them to court for spending the money that

they earned. It's only the memberships that they sold for something that didn't exist that make them subject to a wire fraud investigation. But it becomes in the public eye, what is a case of like a rape that is never prosecuted in a white collar crime that is becomes in the public eye a case about sex and greed. Right. Jim Baker had sex and Tammy Faye was greedy and that's why that's what caused their downfall. And it's like, no, like you can be as sexual and greedy as you want in the United States.

It's just that he committed fraud. And like what bothers me most about all this is that even in the Playboy interview, Jessica Hahn describes herself and is described by the interviewers is like the woman who brought down Jim Baker. Oh my God. Yeah. How would you describe that? It's like you mentioned with a number of our episodes now that we give people way more agency

than they really had in these situations that they're basically subject of these much larger forces and victims of much larger forces. Yeah. And so it's not that she brought down anybody. It's that she was the victim of him bringing down himself. Yeah, that he did bring himself down and she just rather than seeing that the public wanted to see that he was brought down by a woman. It's also weird like that the contempt got thrown onto Tammy Faye when I imagine Jim Baker was

probably also spending money on stupid shit. Oh God. Yeah. He had a lyric shot. He had two lyric shots. Yes. We tend to frame women's extravagant purchases as frivolous and men's extravagant purchases as somehow okay, right, that like a corporate jet is way stupider than makeup and costs a lot more.

Yeah. You have to buy a lot of mascara before you get anywhere near like the fuel costs of a private jet. There's also the thing that Tammy Faye is a little bit tacky, just aesthetically, right, that she's got the eyeliner and the clothes and the hair. And she was middle aged by the time she became famous. And it's also so much easier in those situations to just be like, oh, she's tacky and then use that as a reason to go after her for all this other stuff. Like you love these little details about the air conditioner and the dog and stuff because it seems

kind of tacky. It's like the actual tackiness is more offensive to us than the wastefulness or then the greed or then the rape or all these other things that Jim Baker was doing. And I guess cannot get over that, that we're more offended by eye makeup than sexual assault. It is weird that this Playboy interview was publicly available and that no one was like, hang on, everybody. Let's let's listen to her for a second. Yeah, it's amazing to me because there was just this attitude of like, who can say what is inside

the mind of a bimbo. Science someday will be able to communicate with them, but not today. If only bimbos had the power to communicate through words. Yes, this is a story when we remember it at all. It's the shorthand is now like Jessica Han, woman who brought down PTL 15 minute twist with Jim Baker. And it's like, right, she had sex with him and then she used it to blackmail him into stepping down from his empire.

And it's like opposite. Yeah. And there's all this stuff too. You know, after this is all public, Jim Baker is saying Jessica Han is so greedy that PTL is saying she's greedy. She did all this for money. And it's like, who's greedy in this scenario? Right.

Well, how do you end up feeling about Tammy Faye after all this too? So Tammy Faye Baker divorced Jim Baker while he was in prison and then married another former PTL higher up named Ro Messner, which is why her name was Tammy Faye Messner for the last years of her life. And then Ro Messner also went to prison for white collar crime related to PTL. Wait, seriously? Yeah, she had her life had some high highs and some low lows. Man.

Yeah. So she gets married again. Her second husband goes to prison in the 90s. She's diagnosed with cancer. It goes into remission for a while, comes back. And a few hours before she dies, she has an interview with Larry King Live where she's just like this skeletal, just this tiny, tiny person talking about the pain that she's in and the cancer and faith and love and kind of her constant message of just being thankful,

loving others. Like she really, she only really said one thing her whole life. And then she died a few hours later. And Jessica Han talked about, you know, not long before she died, she talked to Tammy Faye on the phone and Tammy Faye said like, you know, if I, if I were there, I would give you a hug. You know, they had this very, this very warm kind of last act of their relationship because they didn't, you know, they obviously didn't know each other when all of this was happening. And they're sort of both victims of the same guy.

I mean, they're victims of the same guy and of the same culture. Yeah. And Jim Baker got out of prison after five years and now lives in Missouri and sells extremely expensive apocalypse supplies. Oh, no way. He's one of those people now. Yeah. Wow.

What is Jessica Han doing now? You said she's a Trump supporter. After this all happened, you know, she went to live at the Playboy Mansion. She was essentially adopted by the Playboy Mansion, you know, it was reported in the news at the time that she had had sex with Heffen, broken up his relationship with his long-term playmate squeeze. And it's like, okay, can we just like allow Hugh Hefner to take responsibility for his own sexual choices? It's like this whole scandal in microcosm that's like, oh, the victim of this evil,

hearty Hugh Hefner. Right. She was on Howard Stern continually in the nineties. And it's that thing you've talked about of like, okay, like if I'm at the point where like, I'm unhireable, right, I can't get a regular job. The only way I can make money and support myself is to capitalize on this scandal. Yeah. Then like, what else are you going to do?

Yeah. And she now lives on a farm basically is out there with her husband who's a stunt man. So what, what is the, I don't know, what is, I mean, I guess the takeaway. What to you is the takeaway? Well, just the ways in which like women are held responsible for the terrible actions of men. And there's also the sense, I think, in mainstream media at the time of, oh, isn't this amazing that this circus is happening in this little nether world that we don't really notice or care about.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And the sense that it wasn't implicating American power structures generally, because it was a Pentecostal, because it was evangelical. They're sort of weirdos anyway. Yeah. Right. And it's like, this is a story about over leveraging real estate and committing

fraud. Right. This is very relevant to people outside of the Pentecostal world. And there's also this belief, I feel like, in conservative Christianity in America today, and in the sort of spawn that it's created with American conservatism generally, that all sex is immoral, right? All premarital sex or extramarital. And therefore, it's all equally immoral.

Right. So raping someone is immoral, and having extramarital sex is immoral, and in a way, they're both on a level playing field. Right. It's like, did you steal from a store or did you rob a bank? Right. I don't know. It feels to me like there are certainly pockets of culture in America today and in

Jessica Hahn's heyday, where rape is immoral because it's sex, not because it's rape. Right. Either that or the Christians just weren't reading Playboy. I feel like the Jessica Hahn story is like, I've seen this story enough times that I'm starting to find them depressingly identical. It is depressing, yeah. Yeah. My takeaway would be, if you encounter a story in the media where the woman is the villain,

maybe stop for a minute and think, what if people are seeing this because she has been inconveniently brutalized? I just think before we pass judgment on anyone, we should wait seven years and read the Playboy interview. And you know, at its best, the internet is like a big Playboy interview. Yeah. How about let's do that? Let's make the internet the Playboy interview that it could be.