Jessica Hahn: The Church Secretary, the Hush Money She Says She Never Saw and Life After Jim Bakker

9 hours ago

12 min read

Collage of Jessica Hahn on her 1987 Playboy cover and in other photos, with Howard Stern and Jim Bakker, under the article title

Before she was a headline, Jessica Hahn was a church secretary from Long Island who watched The PTL Club every morning before work. She was 21 when she was invited to Florida to meet her hero, Jim Bakker, and she's spent most of the years since being remembered as the woman who got rich bringing him down.

The money tells a different story. A television ministry agreed to pay $265,000 for her silence. She says $20,300 of it reached her. In 1988 a federal judge ordered $160,000 to be handed back, with her name on the judgment. And she didn't bring Bakker down, a newspaper and a jury did that. He died on 5 October 2026, and her side of it has always been stranger and sadder than the punchline.

Quick Answers

Who is Jessica Hahn? A former church secretary from Long Island who says the televangelist Jim Bakker forced himself on her in a Florida hotel room in 1980, when she was 21. The cover-up ended his ministry in 1987.
How much was Jessica Hahn paid? The deal was worth $265,000. She says she received a small fraction of it, and in 1988 a bankruptcy judge ordered most of the money returned.
Did she pose for Playboy? Yes, three times in 1987 and 1988. She says she had $40 to her name when she agreed.
What does Bakker say happened? He admitted a sexual encounter and always described it as brief and consensual. He was never charged over it.
Where is Jessica Hahn now? At last report she was living out of the public eye on a ranch north of Los Angeles. Her husband filed for divorce in 2023.

Who Is Jessica Hahn?

She was born on 7 July 1959 and grew up in Massapequa, on the south shore of Long Island. It wasn't a happy house. On Larry King's show in 2005 she described living in a basement with one window, with a stepfather who drank and a real father she never met. Church was the way out. She was there from 14, and before long she was working in the office of a Pentecostal congregation in the town.

Her escape was also on television. Before work she'd watch The PTL Club, the Christian chat show Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker hosted from North Carolina. She loved the family, the warmth and, in particular, the make-up. She later told the Charlotte Observer that she'd wanted to be Tammy Faye.

The Pastor Before the Preacher

The part of Hahn's story that gets left out comes before Bakker. Her pastor on Long Island was a man called Gene Profeta, 22 years her senior. The historian John Wigger, author of the standard book on PTL, reports her account of what that relationship was like: that the abuse began while she was still at high school, that Profeta had a private phone line put in her bedroom so he could check on her at night and that he punished her physically if she came home late.

Album cover for Gene Profeta and Heaven on Earth, showing the Long Island pastor preaching into a microphone to a huge outdoor crowd

Those are her allegations, made years afterwards, and her accounts haven't always matched on the details. In 1987 she told a magazine that she and Profeta had been lovers before she ever met Bakker, and she has also said she was a virgin that day in Florida. What doesn't change from one telling to the next is who held the power. And Profeta doesn't leave the story. He's there again when the money starts to move.

What Happened in Room 538?

On 4 December 1980 Hahn got a call from John Wesley Fletcher, a travelling evangelist who'd preached at her church. He was in Florida with Jim Bakker, who was doing a telethon, and he invited her down. She understood she'd be meeting her hero and babysitting his children. Two days later she was in Room 538 of the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater Beach.

Television still of evangelist John Wesley Fletcher in a dark suit and spotted tie — John Wesley Fletcher

What happened there has been disputed ever since. Hahn's account is that she was given wine she believes was drugged, that Bakker had sex with her against her will and that Fletcher then came in and assaulted her too. She was 21 and says she was a virgin. Bakker was 40. His account, set out in his 1996 memoir, was a consensual encounter of 15 or 20 minutes that he'd arranged to make his wife jealous. Fletcher told the Charlotte Observer much the same about Bakker's motive.

No court ever tested either version. Bakker was never charged with anything over that afternoon. What isn't in dispute is the imbalance: a 21-year-old church secretary and the most famous preacher on the television she watched every morning. She says the message she took away was simple: "Just keep your mouth shut, Jess, because this is a church."

Why Did Jessica Hahn Wait Four Years?

She did stay silent, for four years, and the reasons she's given since are the reasons of someone whose whole life was the church. She'd been told to keep her mouth shut for the church's sake, and she did as she was told. On Larry King's show she said she'd kept the secret because she loved God and didn't want to hurt God's people.

She also knew exactly how big the fallout would be. PTL had millions of viewers who sent it money and prayed along with the Bakkers every day. She told the Charlotte Observer that she'd known speaking out would affect every one of them.

Staying silent didn't make it go away, though. Southern Exposure reported that she was left emotionally troubled by an encounter she hadn't seen coming, and by 1984 she was complaining to PTL. She rang the ministry and said Bakker had raped her. Richard Dortch, Bakker's deputy, later told Christianity Today he thought the charge was preposterous. In an interview that year she said she'd met Dortch twice in New York, and at the second meeting, in November, she signed a document taking her allegations back.

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker holding microphones in front of a studio audience on The PTL Club — Jim Bakker with his wife Tammy Faye

She's never said exactly what changed in 1984. What she has explained is why, a month after that retraction, she picked up the phone again, this time to the Charlotte Observer. People behind the scenes were belittling her and using her like a pawn, she said, and the story was going to come out with or without her. She'd rather tell it herself than hide in a corner while everyone else did. That December she spoke to the paper's reporter Charles Shepard. It would be more than two years before the Observer printed the story.

Then the men took over. By Dortch's account it was Profeta, the pastor, who came after PTL for money, threatening on the phone that Dortch would be "torn limb from limb" if it wasn't paid. Hahn's side of the negotiation was handled by Paul Roper, a California businessman, and Dortch said Roper told him it was Profeta who'd brought him in. Whoever was driving it, it wasn't obviously the young woman in whose name it was being done.

The deal was signed in February 1985. PTL paid $115,000 up front to Hahn and her representatives and put another $150,000 into a trust in a Los Angeles bank. Under the terms reported by UPI, she'd get the monthly interest and, after 20 years of silence, the capital. The whole payment was hidden in a building contractor's invoices so that it wouldn't show up in the ministry's books.

How Much Did Jessica Hahn Actually Get?

On paper the deal was worth $265,000. Some later reports use $279,000, and by the time lawyers' fees were added an Associated Press report put PTL's total spend on her silence at $363,700.

Hahn has always said very little of it was hers. In her Playboy interview she put the figure at $20,300. The upfront money, she said, went to the people around her. The monthly cheques from the trust stopped in the spring of 1987, weeks after Bakker resigned. PTL's lawyer explained that the deal required silence and the silence was over. It was Bakker who'd ended it, by announcing the affair on his way out, but that didn't seem to count.

Charlotte Observer front page from March 1987 with the headline Jim Bakker Resigns From PTL; Jerry Falwell Assumes Leadership

Then it got worse. PTL went bankrupt, and its creditors wanted everything back. In July 1988 a bankruptcy judge, Rufus Reynolds, entered judgment against Hahn and the trust's lawyer, ruling that PTL was owed $160,000 in principal and interest. The lawyer had already agreed to return most of his $50,000 retainer. So the woman the hush money was meant to silence ended up on the wrong end of a court order to give it back. She told Larry King years later that she'd wanted it returned to the people who'd donated it anyway.

Her own first words in public were gentler than anyone else's. When the story first broke and reporters camped outside her flat, she told UPI: "I didn't want to hurt Jim."

What Happened to John Wesley Fletcher and Gene Profeta?

The two men who stood either side of Bakker in her story both ended up in court, and neither of them for what she says they did to her. Fletcher, a former cab driver and bartender who'd made his name raising money on PTL telethons, told the grand jury investigating Bakker that he hadn't known sex was the point of the meeting he arranged. That was a lie, and he pleaded guilty to perjury. In May 1990 he was given three years' probation and ordered to be home at his mother's house in North Carolina by eight o'clock every night for eight months. He was the last of the PTL defendants to be sentenced. Outside court he said that if he could turn back the clock he would. He died in 1996.

Profeta's turn had come earlier. In October 1988 a grand jury in New York indicted him for tax evasion, skimming money from his church and threatening Jessica Hahn, and the judge who set his bail also ordered him to stay away from her. He was sentenced to six months for tax evasion the following March.

"I Am Not a Bimbo": Why Did Jessica Hahn Pose for Playboy?

In 1987 Hahn was 27, unemployable in the only world she knew and recognised everywhere she went. By her account she had $40. Then Playboy called. She gave the magazine a long interview setting out her version of Room 538 and posed for it too, in the November 1987 issue. She says she was paid $1 million. Her lawyer, asked about that figure at the time, didn't deny it.

Jessica Hahn in Playboy (NSFW Gallery)

The reaction was vicious. Bakker's lawyer suggested she was after another million. Jerry Falwell, who'd taken over PTL, said she had lowered herself to Bakker's level. Her reply became the headline in papers across America: "I am not a bimbo." She posed twice more, moved into the Playboy Mansion for about a year and became, in the 1980s sense of the word, famous. It's the same bargain other women had struck with the magazine, and Margot Kidder's reasons for doing it make an interesting comparison. Kidder got to write her own words. Hahn got a punchline.

Howard Stern with his arm around Jessica Hahn as they pose together — Howard Stern with Jessica Hahn

Was Jessica Hahn on Howard Stern? A Decade as a Cartoon

The person who gave her somewhere to go was Howard Stern. She became a regular on his radio show and stayed one for years. She has been clear-eyed about why. Stern, she told Larry King, was the only person who'd talk to her when the story broke, and she summed up the arrangement in five words: "But we used each other." In February 1988 she was among the guests on one of his pay-per-view television specials.

In 1988 the comedian Sam Kinison, himself a former Pentecostal preacher, cast her opposite him in the video for his cover of Wild Thing. It was a rock star free-for-all, and not a kind one. Kinison's circle later remembered Billy Idol repeatedly spitting on her during the shoot until Kinison told him: "Hey dude, enough's enough."

There were small acting parts, including an appearance on Married... with Children, and a great deal of being famous for being famous. Looking back in 2017 she said she'd turned into something like a cartoon character and that she hadn't always made the best choices. It's hard to see which good ones were on offer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdLCAJqMrwI

Ron Leavitt

The sitcom did lead to one good thing. Ron Leavitt, who co-created Married... with Children, became her partner for about 15 years. She called him the greatest man of her life and told Larry King in 2005 that she thought they'd marry one day. Leavitt died of lung cancer in February 2008, aged 60. The Associated Press obituary described Hahn as his fiancée.

Where Is Jessica Hahn Now?

She left. When the Charlotte Observer's Tim Funk tracked her down in 2017 she was 58 and living on a 45-acre ranch about an hour north of Los Angeles, with horses, chickens, a bison and a pet turkey called Pearl. She'd married Frank Lloyd, a film stuntman. She had no children, and said that was a choice made out of shame, because she hadn't wanted a child to carry any of this.

She was still a believer. God, she said, was the most important thing in her life, and none of it had been his fault. She was still angry too, mostly that Bakker had written a book called I Was Wrong and had never once said those words to her. And she was still waking at three in the morning.

There was one unexpected kindness. Shortly before Tammy Faye died in 2007 the two women spoke on the phone for the first time, and Tammy Faye told her that if they'd been in the same room she would have hugged her.

Is Jessica Hahn Still Married?

It doesn't look like it. She and Lloyd married in 2009. In July 2023 People reported that he had filed for divorce in Los Angeles, citing irreconcilable differences and stating that the couple had been separated since 2018. That means the marriage was already over, or close to it, within months of the Observer interview in which she'd described her new life. Little has been reported about her circumstances since.

Bakker's death brought her name back into every obituary, usually in a single sentence. If she's said anything about it in public, it hasn't been widely reported. Jimmy Swaggart, the rival preacher who used her story to push Bakker out, died the year before.

How The Eyes of Tammy Faye Handled Her

In 2021 Hollywood told the PTL story again, and Jessica Chastain won the Best Actress Oscar for playing Tammy Faye as a wronged and warm-hearted woman. It did a great deal for Tammy Faye's reputation. It did nothing for Hahn's. One reviewer pointed out that she's only referred to in the film and never portrayed. Another noted that the script uses her "as a narrative shortcut" to alert Tammy Faye to her husband's behaviour and doesn't once say her name. Thirty-four years on, she was still a device in somebody else's story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMMLRnXPPJk

How the Story Looks Now

In 1987 the press had one role available for Jessica Hahn and it was the other woman. As late as 2011, when she went on the American talk show The View, Wigger notes, a host asked her what she'd seen in him.

Read the facts in order and a different story comes out. A teenager from a difficult home is drawn into a church. Her pastor takes control of her life. A visiting evangelist delivers her to a famous man in a hotel room. Other men negotiate a price for her silence and, on her telling, keep most of it. When the secret comes out she's the one who is mocked, and a court orders her to repay money she says she never had. The only people in the whole business who offered her a platform were a men's magazine and a shock jock.

Bakker went to prison, but for fraud. Nobody was ever held to account for Room 538.

FAQ

How old was Jessica Hahn when she met Jim Bakker? She was 21. Bakker was 40. The encounter took place on 6 December 1980.

Was Jim Bakker ever charged over Jessica Hahn? No. He was convicted in 1989 of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy for overselling hotel memberships to his followers. The Hahn payment came up as part of the picture of how ministry money was used.

Did Jessica Hahn and Tammy Faye Bakker ever speak? Once, by phone, shortly before Tammy Faye died in 2007. Hahn says the conversation was warm.