Bakker Talked of Suicide, Preacher Says

An Oklahoma City evangelist introduced former PTL leader Jim Bakker to the woman with whom he had an affair because Bakker threatened suicide unless he found a way to make his wife jealous and win back her affections, according to a report published Sunday.

Bakker, 47, and his wife, Tammy, have been the focus of an old-time religion soap opera since he admitted to a sexual liaison with a church secretary seven years ago.

In an interview with the Charlotte Observer newspaper, evangelist John Wesley Fletcher said he introduced Bakker to church secretary Jessica Hahn because he feared the PTL leader was about to kill himself.

“He just indicated to me, unless he could find some way to make Tammy jealous, that his life was over,” Fletcher said. “He would leave suggestions with me that I was going to find him dead, that nobody cared about him.”

Fletcher said he arranged for Hahn to fly to Clearwater Beach, Fla., on Dec. 6, 1980, to meet Bakker.

Fletcher said he had known Hahn since she was a 15-year-old who sat for his children during revival services at Massapequa Tabernacle Church near her home in Long Island, N.Y.

“She was just an innocent church secretary,” Fletcher said.

The Bakkers have been in seclusion in Palm Springs for the last week and have declined to answer questions about the affair.

Fletcher, by his own admission, was an alcoholic at the time he arranged the liaison and the next year was booted out of the ministry by an Assembly of God panel headed by then-Illinois district superintendent Richard Dortch. Fletcher said he told Dortch--recently named president of PTL--in 1981 about arranging the Bakker-Hahn rendezvous.

“I did feel Dortch was fair with me at the time,” Fletcher said. “But, as I look back on the $265,000, I wonder what his motives were. It seems to me that he would cover up for Jim.”

The $265,000 was the amount of the settlement paid to Hahn and her representative, Paul Roper of Anaheim, to forestall a lawsuit over the sexual encounter. Dortch, reportedly the one to arrange the payments, will be interviewed this week by another Assembly of God panel about his request to withdraw from the ministry.

Dortch submitted his resignation as an Assemblies of God minister before assuming the PTL presidency March 19, but the resignation has been put on hold by church officials who want to question him about his role in the Bakker affair.