Reveals Reason for Quitting : Bakkers Broke Word, Bodyguard Says

When Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker decided to leave the exile of their Palm Springs home and return to PTL’s Heritage USA complex in Ft. Mill, S.C., last week, their bodyguard of 11 years said he thought it was to “pack up their things and say goodby.”

“We had an agreement that we would look around for one last time, say goodby to our friends and head back to California,” Don Hardister, 36, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “I told them that if anything went wrong, I was going to resign.”

Instead, no sooner had the couple arrived at the $172-million complex on June 11 than they decided to defy an eviction notice and remain at a “parsonage” in nearby Tega Cay.

“I begged them, ‘Let it go . . . if we had a ministry once, we can have one again,’ ” Hardister recalled. “But they didn’t see it my way. They were being influenced by bad advice from friends . . . who were telling them to fight, to take back the ministry.”

Final Straw

The final straw for Hardister came Wednesday when Tammy Faye Bakker appeared before a gathering of reporters and tearfully explained that the family planned to file a lawsuit to retain ownership of the home purchased with more than $400,000 in charitable donations.

“I wasn’t going to follow them into a legal battle,” Hardister said. “It just didn’t seem worth it fighting for those things: the ministry, the lake house, the furniture, the cars.”

So, he said, “I quit.”

“I’d had enough. . . . I think they have lost touch with reality,” the bodyguard said.

Hardister, who had been a family spokesman since Jim Bakker was forced to leave the PTL in disgrace in March after admitting that he had committed adultery six years before and then paid money to prevent a public disclosure of the tryst, is still on the PTL payroll. Hardister said he planned to meet today with PTL officials to discuss his future with the ministry.

“I want to make it right at Heritage from this point on,” he said. “That’s why I am going public with all this.”

‘Dog Story’

Hardister admonished Tammy Faye Bakker for “going through the dog story again” on Wednesday when she told reporters that the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who took over as chairman of PTL after Bakker left, was responsible for “getting rid of the family’s dogs.”

“I told them more than once that one of my people was responsible for that,” Hardister said. “A PTL member told me that the dogs were making a mess and tearing up the yard and he wanted to get rid of them.

“I said take them to the pound but tell Tammy Sue (the Bakkers’ 17-year-old daughter) first. For some reason he didn’t tell Sue about it. It was all a misunderstanding.”

Most disturbing for Hardister, however, is the way in which he said the Bakkers have surrounded themselves with a group of 25 to 30 zealous followers, who insist that the couple fight to regain the PTL ministry.

“It is getting easier for me to understand how people could drink . . . (a poison-laced soft drink),” he said, in reference to the 911 followers of cult leader Jim Jones who committed mass suicide in 1978 in a Guyana village.

“It’s kind of like they are on a Kamikaze mission,” he said.