Word: scandale
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...these entrepreneur-preachers have been hit hard, at least temporarily, by the PTL scandal. Swaggart says that in April and May he ran a $3 million deficit; the June gap was a little over $1 million. In June, Robertson's CBN reported $12 million in lost revenues for the three-month period ending in May and projects a $21 million shortfall through next March. The Roberts organization has admitted that monthly donations to the ministry dipped from $4.5 million to about $3 million in April and May. Falwell has reported a $4 million deficit in the wake of the scandals...
...confidential board minutes for November and December 1986, subsequently obtained by TIME, no numbers are listed for the bonus granted to Jim and Tammy and to Richard Dortch, a top aide who joined PTL in 1984 and was defrocked along with his boss in the wake of the Hahn scandal. Instead, on an attached piece of Jim Bakker's stationery are listed bonuses totaling $800,000 for the preacher, $175,000 for his wife and $175,000 for Dortch...
...Bakkers' high living had caught the eye of the IRS long before the PTL scandal finally broke. In 1981 the agency launched a two-year inquiry into the ministry. Then, in a confidential 1985 report, the taxmen recommended revocation of PTL's tax-exempt status, retroactively to 1980. Reason: the IRS believed the organization did not operate exclusively for tax-exempt purposes and that part of its income personally benefited the Bakkers and others...
Nothing, including the PTL scandal, seems about to change televangelism's practice of financially secretive one-man rule. None of the current crop of big-time TV preachers seem eager to follow the example of the most famous of modern evangelists, Billy Graham, who still gets the highest TV ratings of any preacher for his occasional prime-time crusades. Decades ago Graham pioneered a cleanliness campaign among evangelists by taking a straight salary (currently $59,100, plus housing allowance and expenses) rather than living off unaudited gifts. Graham led the way in giving control of his ministry to an independent...
...Falwell spoke, the PTL scandal continued to cast a pall across the entire secretive big business of televangelism. As never before, "skeptics have fuel for their fires," said David Hubbard, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "They may see this as reflecting on the excesses of the whole evangelical movement...