Word: hahn
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...Fort Mill, S.C., appeared on his TV network to explain why he had relinquished the reins of his $129 million-a-year PTL (for Praise the Lord or People That Love) empire. It was not because he had confessed to one afternoon of sin in 1980 with Jessica Hahn, a comely New York secretary who was then 21, he insisted. Instead, flanked by his forgiving wife Tammy Faye, Bakker said he had resigned to stop a "diabolical plot" for a rival evangelist's takeover of his church, which includes not only the cable network but a glitzy theme park, Heritage...
...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...
...creation began on a warm December day in 1980 at a hotel in Clearwater Beach, Fla. At the time, Jim and Tammy, although sunny on camera, were going through a chilly time offstage. According to some accounts, Evangelist John Wesley Fletcher arranged for Bakker to meet young Jessica Hahn, a secretary for the Full Gospel Tabernacle, a Pentecostal church in Massapequa, N.Y. According to Bakker's official statement in resigning as head of PTL, the brief encounter was a setup: "I was wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female...
...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...
Roper repeatedly 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...