Word: dortch
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...Jerry Falwell, the Lynchburg, Va., politician-pastor, TV personality and university head, was firmly in control of PTL, having taken over the organization at Bakker's behest. At an emergency meeting of the reconstituted PTL board at Heritage USA, Bakker's No. 1 aide, the Rev. Richard Dortch, was installed as president of the organization...
...very day of Dortch's ascension, the Charlotte Observer, which first broke the news of Bakker's dalliance, wrote that Dortch had helped negotiate a deal with Hahn. To buy her silence, the paper charged, PTL raised a package of $265,000 for Hahn and her advisers...
...notified PTL of Hahn's story, and when no reply 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...
Bakker, meanwhile, has resigned not only from PTL but from the ministry of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination (membership: 2.5 million) based in Springfield, Mo.; he remains on the clergy rolls pending the church's own investigation of the scandal. Dortch has also resigned as an Assemblies minister because the PTL congregation has become independent of the Assemblies. Meeting with Falwell in California last week, Bakker pleaded with the Virginia preacher to assume the chairmanship of PTL's board. Falwell, who is already fully preoccupied with politics, pastoring and his own struggling cable-TV network, said...
...headquarters near Charlotte, officials were putting on an optimistic face. Said Dortch: "We really believe there is a tremendous future for this ministry. Our telephone calls have been overwhelmingly supportive." Yet to be determined is whether those expressions of verbal support will translate into the flow of gifts from trusting supporters that are constantly needed to keep any ministry like PTL in operation...