AndyinPA wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 5:58 pm
Bakker clearly learned nothing from a few years in prison. He just got crazier.
The demographics of their victims has changed. They need crazier and crazier stories to compete with all the other grifters peddling outrageous lies to separate viewers from their money.
Back in the day, when he and Tammy Faye were holding forth on their PTL tv show, my mother in law was a huge fan of his. This was about the time that it was revealed that Baker had sold something like 1000 percent of the hotel at their "Christian" resort. The deal was, if you donated $1,000, you got a free week's stay at the hotel, every year for the rest of your life.
If even half of the people who pony'ed up the $1k took him up on his offer, he couldn't have fulfilled all of the requests, and he wouldn't have had any rooms for paying guests. My MIL refused to believe it was fraud.
I also pointed out that he lived in a $250,000 home in N. Carolina and owned several Rolls-Royces. At the time, and in that place, a quarter mil bought an awful lot of house. I tried to point out that the bible says it is "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven", and that with that house and those cars, he was definitely rich. She just said I didn't understand. She was right, I didn't understand why a so-called christian didn't spend all the money his church raked in on, oh, helping the poor or other tending the sick.
My wife and her siblings always suspected, but never were able to verify, but they believed that she and my FIL gave $1,000 that they couldn't afford.
