Word: bakkers
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Those on Hahn's side portray her as a devout follower of Bakker's who was spiritually and emotionally "shattered" by the tryst. Hahn told her pastor, the Rev. Gene Profeta, about the incident. Profeta consulted his friend Paul R. Roper, a business consultant in Anaheim, Calif., and self-appointed monitor of clergy skulduggery. John Stewart, a Christian broadcaster and teacher at ! the Simon Greenleaf School of Law in California, became Roper's partner in the project. Hahn told Roper that Bakker had pressured her into sex. Roper says, "She was overwhelmed by being in the presence of this...
...resulted, he and Stewart sent PTL officials a draft of a civil complaint on Hahn's behalf, claiming emotional distress, as well as Hahn's account of her Florida tryst. Within ten days that document got the attention of Dortch, an Assemblies of God minister who was installed as Bakker's top administrator in the wake of press allegations of misuse of PTL moneys. Dortch met Roper in tony Newport Beach, Calif., in 1985 and soon hired as PTL's representative Criminal Lawyer Howard Weitzman, whose clients have included ex-Motor Magnate John De Lorean...
...rest went to Roper and Stewart and for expenses. In addition, PTL established a $150,000 trust fund, with interest to be paid out monthly. In 1985 Hahn collected $10,046. Under the deal, if Hahn filed no lawsuit and kept quiet about the Bakker liaison for the next 20 years, she would receive the $150,000 as well...
Swaggart was not the most disinterested recipient of such news. Although something of an entrepreneur on his own, Swaggart had made no bones about his contempt for Bakker's "Christian Disneyland"; what's more, Bakker had taken Swaggart's show off the PTL cable network. (Swaggart says the squabble was over time slots; PTL defenders insist Bakker wanted to eliminate Swaggart because of his sharp attacks on Roman Catholicism...
Swaggart asked to meet with Bakker. Instead, Dortch flew to a Baton Rouge hotel to talk with Swaggart and two officials of the Assemblies of God. As Swaggart tells it, "I confronted Dortch about the Jessica Hahn thing. He flatly denied it. He lied to me." Swaggart did nothing further until the February convention of National Religious Broadcasters, the trade association for radio-TV preachers. Swaggart was about to speak when the Rev. John Ankerberg, Southern Baptist proprietor of a weekly TV show, approached, knelt down and whispered to him that the Charlotte Observer was hot on the Bakker- Hahn...