Jessica Hahn – Nostalgia Central

Jessica Hahn was fourteen years old, a timid, overweight girl growing up Catholic in a small Long Island town, when one day she walked into a Pentecostal church in her neighbourhood. “I felt like I had fallen in love,” she said.

“1 felt like I was home. I had finally met God. I could finally have a personal relationship with him and not go through all these rituals to get to him.”

She went eagerly to work cleaning toilets at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Massapequa and, after graduating from high school in 1977, she was promoted to church secretary.

While Jessica’s friends discovered boys and rock & roll, her own life revolved around the church. It was a time of total faith and happiness.

In that world, PTL minister Jim Bakker was the reigning superstar, a man she revered in the same way that other girls might look upon a rock star.

“I used to watch him on television every day, she says. “He was the closest thing to God for me.”

So when an evangelist named John Wesley Fletcher invited her to Florida for a PTL Telethon in 1980, Hahn accepted, thrilled at the chance to meet her idol. “I felt special,” she says. “Jim Bakker was going to be there in person.”

But the meeting turned into a sexual encounter in a hotel room, one that left 21-year-old Hahn feeling bitter and betrayed, and that ultimately led to the downfall of Jim Bakker.

According to Hahn, on the afternoon of 6 December 1980, she was drugged and raped by Bakker and another preacher, John Wesley Fletcher.

She was given a $279,000 pay-off for her silence, paid with PTL’s funds to Hahn through Bakker associate Roe Messner.

While her accusations of sexual misconduct led to Bakker’s resignation, it was his alleged illegal misuse of ministry funds that eventually led to his imprisonment.

He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison, but the sentence was reduced to eight years on appeal. He ultimately served about five years, and he was released in 1994.

A bit player in the PTL scandal, Jessica Hahn was catapulted overnight from obscurity to celebrity. Dozens of people, from producers to publishers of pornographic magazines, telephoned her, wanting her story and promising enormous sums of money for it.

While she was overwhelmed and confused by all the attention, she was not an entirely reluctant celebrity.

Hahn made a visit to Manhattan for an appearance on the Donahue show, and even allowed film executives to fly her to Hollywood, where she spent five days listening to book and movie offers.

Hahn posed nude for Playboy (in November 1987, December 1987 and September 1988) and appeared in several television shows, including Married… with Children.

She was also known for her frequent appearances on The Howard Stern Show.

Bakker has always disputed Hahn’s account, claiming that he was “set up” and that the sex was consensual.