Jessica Hahn And Pentecostal Silence On Sexual Abuse

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PNEUMA 41 (2019) 26–30

Jessica Hahn and Pentecostal Silence on Sexual Abuse

John Wigger

University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri wiggerj@missouri.edu

Abstract

In 1980 Jessica Hahn was sexually assaulted by two pentecostal preachers, one of whom was one of the most famous televangelists of the time. Her experience reveals why our current dialogue about powerful men and the reluctance of survivors to come forward applies just as much to Pentecostals, and evangelicals more broadly, as anyone else. For nearly seven years Hahn was pressured into silence. When her story became the center of a national scandal in 1987, she faced unrelenting scorn in the press and silence from the church. Thirty years later she has retreated into obscurity while her most famous assailant, Jim Bakker, is still on television, preaching the gospel. Building on research for the recently publishedPTL:TheRiseandFallof JimandTammyFayeBakker’sEvangelical Empireand from a subsequent interview with Hahn, this essay challenges Pentecostals to re-examine her story, as a necessary step in responding to the #MeToo movement.

Keywords

sexual assault – televangelism – Pentecostalism – power – silence

In 1980 Jessica Hahn was sexually assaulted by two pentecostal preachers, one of whom was one of the most famous televangelists of the time. Her experi- ence reveals why our current dialogue about powerful men and the reluctance of survivors to come forward applies just as much to Pentecostals, and Evangeli- cals more broadly, as to anyone else. For nearly seven years Hahn was pressured into silence. When her story became the center of a national scandal in 1987, she faced unrelenting scorn in the press and silence from the church. Thirty years later she has retreated into obscurity while her most famous assailant,

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Jim Bakker, is still on television, preaching the gospel. Pentecostals, as much as anyone, cannot afford to miss this moment of change. They need to take a long, hard look within. Jessica Hahn’s story is a good place to begin.

For Hahn, the abuse started when she was in high school and attending a pentecostal church on Long Island pastored by Gene Profeta. The church was a refuge from her dysfunctional home with an alcoholic stepfather. She was amazed that Profeta’s family had “dinner at the same time every night.” She babysat his children and he became a controlling authority figure in her life. While she was still a teenager, Profeta, who was twenty-two years her senior, had a phone with a private line installed in her bedroom so that he could check up on her at night. If she got home late she knew there would be hell to pay the next day. “He would drag me by the hair into his office, throw me under his desk, and pull the earrings out of my ears,” Hahn says. “I was so desperate for attention and love and being a part of something that I put up with it.”1

Hahn was working as Profeta’s secretary for eighty dollars a week when he appeared on Bakker’s television show in the late 1970s. Bakker fascinated her. She watched his show every morning and read his book, Eight Keys to Success, published in 1980, “probably two dozen times.”That December an aspiring tele- vision preacher and frequent guest speaker at Profeta’s church, John Wesley Fletcher, invited Hahn to Florida to meet Bakker and babysit his children. It seemed the chance of a lifetime.2

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker started the PTL television network with half a dozen employees in a former furniture store in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1974. In 1978 PTL launched its own satellite television network, a year before ESPN. The satellite network expanded PTL’s reach, eventually extending into fourteen million homes in the U.S. and opening up enormous fundraising potential. By 1980PTLwas poised for spectacular growth and Jim Bakker, forty years old at the time, was a television star with a growing audience.3

When Bakker walked into the hotel room in Florida in December 1980, he was wearing only an “itty bitty” white terrycloth bathing suit, according to Hahn. Bakker told her that he and Tammy were “going through a separation.” He pulled her onto the bed and forced her to have sex with him. He “did every- thing a man could do to a woman,” remembers Hahn. It was not “consensual” and she did not “say yes.” “It just happened, it just suddenly happened and I

1 Author interview with Jessica Hahn, November 6, 2017; John Wigger, PTL: The Rise and Fall of

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017),

119.

2 Wigger, PTL, 119–120.

3 Wigger, PTL, 38–60, 77–106.

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didn’t run out of the room because I felt, to be honest with you, that this guy was like my idol and I didn’t know what to do,” says Hahn. After Bakker left, Fletcher returned to the room and brutally raped her. When Fletcher left, Hahn crawled back into bed. Blood from her back, rubbed raw on the carpet, stained the sheets.

Hahn struggled to make sense of what happened to her in that Florida hotel room. Her church offered little solace. When she confided in Profeta, he became angry, but not for the reason Hahn expected. Profeta told her “he should have been first,” according to Hahn. That July they began a sexual rela- tionship that lasted for six years and often turned abusive. “I became his prop- erty,” says Hahn.4

Profeta set Hahn up with two legal advisers, both students at an unaccred- ited law school in southern California, who negotiated a $265,000 settlement with PTL, which was represented by celebrity lawyer Howard Weitzman. In exchange, Hahn agreed not to go public with accusations against Bakker. The settlement included an upfront payment of $115,000 and $150,000 in a trust fund. Hahn’s legal advisers kept $95,000 of the $115,000 and Profeta got the rest. “I never saw any of that,” Hahn says. What she really wanted was an apol- ogy from Bakker, but when the final agreement was signed, none of the men in the room paid much attention to her. “They treated me like I was twelve,” says Hahn.5

Before the scandal broke, PTL had annual revenues of $129 million, 2,500 employees, a 2,300-acre theme park, HeritageUSA, and a satellite network that carried Jim and Tammy’s flagship talk show five days a week. After Bakker abruptly resigned in March 1987, reporters and satellite trucks surrounded Hahn’s apartment in West Babylon, Long Island. The media was brutal, at times referring to her as “the whore of West Babylon.” “I didn’t know how I was sup- posed to look, what I was supposed to say,” she later admitted, making it easy for reporters to mold her into a figure that would sell: the other woman who had shamelessly plied her charms on a powerful older man.6

As the scandal unfolded, fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell took over control of PTL and he and Bakker became embroiled in a media “holy war.” Bakker accused Falwell of stealing his ministry and Falwell called Bakker “a scab and cancer on the face of Christianity.” Hahn often found herself the only woman surrounded by male preachers, reporters, and lawyers, none of whom seemed interested in her story except as it related to the fate of powerful older

4 Wigger, PTL, 120–124; author interview with Jessica Hahn, November 6, 2017. 5 Author interview with Jessica Hahn, November 6, 2017; Wigger, PTL, 198–202. 6 Wigger, PTL, 279–280.

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men. She felt like a “pawn” and nothing more. “There was a lot more outrage that ministry money had gone to Jessica, that $265,000,” than over the sexual assault itself, remembers Mark DeMoss, Jerry Falwell’s young personal assistant at the time. Down to her last forty dollars, Hahn signed a deal to tell her story in Playboy. Hugh Hefner saw it as a way to take on “the very people who tried to shut me up,” as he told Hahn.7

HahnwasnotBakker’sonlyvictim.In1983JayBabcockwasayoungproducer for Bakker’s daily television show when he and Bakker began a three-year sex- ual relationship. Once, after Babcock refused Bakker’s advances, he demoted Babcock from producer to a job as a direct-mail writer, working out of a four- by-four-foot cubicle. After three or four months Bakker brought him back as a producer. By then Babcock was “too beaten down to resist,” and their sex- ual relationship resumed. Bakker warned Babcock not to go public, telling him “no one would believe you.” By the time Babcock ended their relationship in November1986,heknewof atleastfiveothermenatPTLwhohadbeensexually involved with Bakker, all of whom depended on Bakker for their livelihood.8

The coverage of Hahn’s story never really changed. As recently as 2011 she was challenged to explain her “affair” with Jim Bakker when she appeared on The View, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Elizabeth Hassselbeck, and Sherri Shepherd. “What did you see in him? He’s not exactly hot,” one of the show’s hosts asked her.9

When I first became interested in Jessica’s story, it took months to find her. After letters on university stationery went unanswered, I flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, and drove to her house unannounced. When I pulled up, her hus- band, Frank, was cleaning out their garage. He knew who I was immediately. He told me that Jessica had no interest in telling her story again. She had long since given up on anyone treating it with respect. Despite her misgivings, they agreed to meet me the next day at a deli off Mulholland Drive, the kind of place with Porsches and Ferraris in the parking lot and people I knew I should recognize inside. After that first conversation, we talked periodically, but it was only after my book about the rise and fall of PTLappeared that Jessica decided she could trust me. As with many survivors from earlier periods, respect was difficult for her to imagine.

For Hahn, her faith has been the one constant through all of her experiences. “The only thing I could depend on was God,” she says. She doesn’t expect to

7 Author interview with Mark DeMoss, November 9, 2017; author interview with Jessica Hahn,

November 6, 2017; Wigger, PTL, 2–3, 274–300.

8 Wigger, PTL, 283–284.

9 The View, February 22, 2011.

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understand everything that happened to her. “That’s where faith comes in,” she says. Yet, she still loses sleep over events stretching back more than forty years and the pain never really goes away. Today she lives on a farm and occasion- ally goes to church with her husband and friends. “By now, no one knows who I am,” she says. Church is only comfortable because few remember; silence the substitute for redemption.10

Evangelicals have largely remained on the sidelines at this moment of cul- tural reckoning. White evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump despite his well-publicized views on women and have supported political conserva- tives, including Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore, despite accusations of sexual harassment. Leadership in most ministries remains the province of men.JimBakkerrecentlycomplainedonhiscurrenttelevisionshowaboutmen being forced to step down after accusations of sexual misconduct without a trial, comparing it to lynching. “I don’t hug women anymore,” Bakker said, as if all the fuss was about nothing more than that.11

The gospel should challenge abuse of power, protect the vulnerable, and give voice to survivors. For Pentecostals, and Evangelicals more broadly, this is a con- versation too long in coming, a silence that denies mercy and justice. In the past, Evangelicals, including pentecostal and holiness people, have been lead- ing voices of reform, as in the formation of the abolitionist movement in the pre-Civil War north or the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Where are those voices now?

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Author interview with Jessica Hahn, November 6, 2017. Jim Bakker Show, Show # 3397, January 10, 2018.

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