Word: swaggart
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Shortly thereafter Swaggart alerted Assemblies of God leaders to the impending scandal. Then, on March 19, Bakker beat the Observer to the punch. He confessed to the newspaper his adultery and the payment of "blackmail," quit PTL, and to the surprise of his followers handed control over to Jerry Falwell...
...hamper than the laundry he thought was in Rev. Bakker's." A mysterious allusion to people living in "glass churches" suggested that Grutman was slyly fingering Televangelist Robert Schuller of Garden Grove, Calif., and Crystal Cathedral fame. Grutman eventually confirmed that the mysterious plotter was not Schuller but Jimmy Swaggart...
Denying that there was any plot or that he coveted control of PTL, Swaggart said that in early March he and Ankerberg, along with Falwell and other televangelists, decided to send a letter to Bakker asking him to tell the truth and repent. Swaggart later wrote Ankerberg a letter asking that his name be kept off the letter. Apparently that letter leaked to Bakker, who interpreted it as a "takeover" bid by his rival...