Background and career
Tamara Faye Messner (previously Bakker, née LaValley; March 7, 1942 – July 20, 2007) was an American evangelist. She co-founded the televangelist program The PTL Club with her then-husband Jim Bakker in 1974. They had hosted a puppet-show in local television programming, in the early 1960s; she also had a career as a recording artist. In 1978, she and Jim Bakker built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park. During her career she was noted for her eccentric and glamorous persona, as well as for moral views that diverged from those of many mainstream evangelists, particularly her advocacy for LGBT persons and reaching out to HIV/AIDS patients at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She released three autobiographies during her lifetime, I Gotta Be Me in 1978, Tammy: Telling It My Way in 1996, and I Will Survive and You Will Too! in 2003. Jim Bakker was exposed for sexual and financial misconduct and was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, resulting in the dissolution of The PTL Club and the closure of Heritage USA. She supported Bakker throughout his trial but divorced him while he was in prison in 1992 and married Roe Messner, a church property developer who had built Heritage USA and had been involved in Jim Bakker's payment of hush money to cover up the sex scandal. Roe Messner was then convicted of bankruptcy fraud a few years later in 1996. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, from which she suffered intermittently for over a decade before dying of the disease in 2007.
Tamara Faye LaValley was born in International Falls, Minnesota, to Pentecostal preachers Rachel Minnie (née Fairchild; 1919–1992) and Carl Oliver LaValley, who married in 1941. Shortly after she was born, a painful divorce soured her mother against ministers, alienating her from the church. Both of her parents remarried, her mother to Fred Willard Grover, forming a large blended family, in which she was the eldest child.
In 1960, LaValley met Jim Bakker while they were students at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. LaValley worked in a boutique for a time while Bakker found work in a restaurant inside a department store in Minneapolis. They were married on April 1, 1961. The next year, they moved to South Carolina, where they began their ministry together, initially traveling around the United States; Jim Bakker preached, while Tammy Faye sang songs and played the accordion. In 1970, she gave birth to their daughter Tammy Sue "Sissy" Bakker, and in 1975 gave birth to their son Jamie Charles Bakker. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had been involved with television from the time of their departure from Minneapolis until they moved to the Charlotte area via Virginia Beach, Virginia, where they were founding members of The 700 Club. While in Portsmouth, they were hosts of the popular children's show Jim and Tammy. They then created a puppet ministry for children on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which ran from 1964 to 1973.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker co-founded The PTL Club (Praise The Lord) in 1974, a televangelist Christian news program that they initially hosted in an abandoned furniture store in Charlotte. The series mixed "glitzy entertainment with down-home family values" and preached a "prosperity gospel", which put a divine seal of approval on both the growing affluence of American evangelicals and the showy lifestyles of their television ministers." The PTL Club soon grew into its own network and a corporate enterprise within a year of its founding, generating $120 million annually in the 1970s. In 1978, the Bakkers used $200 million of PTL funds to build Heritage USA, a Christian retreat and theme park that, at the time, ranked alongside Disney World and Disneyland as one of the most popular theme parks in the United States. Throughout the series, Tammy Faye Bakker provided a sentimental and emotive touch to stories, and also often sang Christian songs. She was also noted for her candid discussion of topics considered taboo amongst many of her Evangelist peers, ranging from penile implants to acceptance and compassion for the LGBT community. At the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, she conducted an emotional interview with Steven Pieters, a gay Christian minister with AIDS on "Tammy's House Party," a segment of The PTL Club, during which they discussed his sexuality, coming out, diagnosis with AIDS, and the death of his partner. During the program, Bakker addressed her viewership, saying: "How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care." Throughout the AIDS epidemic, she advocated for viewers of The PTL Club to follow Christ and show compassion and pray for the ill, and also invited drug addicts onto the show to interview them about substance abuse. In 1987, it was reported that Bakker was herself being treated for a prescription drug addiction. Bakker's friend, the Reverend Mel White, commented on her presence on The PTL Club:
Her fans were people who grew up in a very fundamentalist tradition, not being able to wear make-up, or dance, or go out in public. So here comes Tammy, with her dyed hair and make-up, her ebullient spirit and outspoken ways with both men and women. She talked about sex, and flirted with Jimmy. She took on the caricature of an obedient wife, and blasted it. You have never seen Pat Robertson's wife, or Jerry Falwell's wife. They stay at home, doing what those wives do.
The Bakkers' control of PTL collapsed in 1987 after revelations that $287,000 had been paid from the organization to buy the silence of Jessica Hahn, who claims Jim Bakker raped her. In his 1997 book, I Was Wrong, Jim Bakker disputed Hahn's account, claiming that he was "set up" and that their sex was consensual. The revelations invited scrutiny of the Bakkers, and charges made about their opulent lives, including media reports of an air-conditioned doghouse at their Tega Cay, South Carolina, lakefront parsonage as well as gold-plated bathroom fixtures, dominated newscasts in the 1980s. When asked about her income, Tammy Faye told reporters in 1986: "We don't get what Johnny Carson makes, and we work a lot harder than him." The couple's Tega Cay home was later sold by the ministry and burned to the ground not long thereafter. Jim wrote in his book I Was Wrong that he watched the home burn on live television while incarcerated. The Charlotte Observer subsequently ran exposés of PTL's finances and management practices. PTL went bankrupt after being taken over by Lynchburg, Virginia-based Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell, who offered to step in following the scandals in 1988. Tammy Faye Bakker stood by her husband through the scandal, including several instances when she cried on camera. In 1989, Jim Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts (he served five). In 1992, while Jim Bakker was in prison, Tammy Faye filed for divorce, saying in a letter to the New Covenant Church in Orlando, Florida: "For years I have been pretending that everything is all right, when in fact I hurt all the time... I cannot pretend anymore." On October 3, 1993, she married property developer Roe Messner in Rancho Mirage, California, after he divorced his first wife. They moved to the Charlotte suburb of Matthews, North Carolina. Roe, who had a contracting business, Messner Enterprises in Andover, Kansas, had built much of Heritage USA as well as many large churches and had been a family friend to the Bakkers throughout the PTL years. Roe was the one who produced the money for the $265,000 payment to Hahn, later billing PTL for work never completed on the Jerusalem Amphitheater at Heritage USA. In the Bakkers' fraud trial, Roe Messner testified for Bakker's defense, saying that Bakker had no knowledge of the payment to Jessica Hahn, and that Falwell had sent him to the Bakker home in Palm Springs, California, to offer generous compensation "if he kept his mouth shut."
