Jim Bakker was probably hoping he would be remembered for his evangelical TV work and founding The PTL Club, a show that seemed to be on almost every station for years. Instead, he will be best known for a scandal that cost him his ministry and exposed his hypocrisy. 

Bakker has died at the age of 86, after virtually disappearing from the airwaves. 

"PTL — short, variously, for Praise the Lord or People That Love — collapsed in 1987, when The Charlotte Observer reported that PTL had paid more than $250,000 to Jessica Hahn, a church secretary with whom he had a one-time tryst years earlier. Bakker confirmed the encounter to the Observer but said he had been “wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate."

Further reporting disclosed lavish spending on the Bakkers’ behalf, including an air-conditioned doghouse at their lakefront home and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. The Bakkers resigned from PTL, and in 1989, Bakker was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years in prison; he served just less than five years before he was paroled."

His wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, became almost a comedy cliché with her excessive make-up, and crying on camera followed by overly cheerful pronouncements. The couple broke up after his infidelity was revealed and she remarried. She passed away in 2007.

Jim Bakker, whose globe-spanning PTL ministry fell to scandal and fraud, dies at 86