Jim Bakker Fraud Case (PTL Ministries) | Mental Health & Personality

hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can't analyze the mental health and personality factors that may be at work in the chimp Aker case Jim Baker was a famous televangelist who defrauded people out of millions of dollars just a reminder not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about what could be happening a situation like this if you enjoyed this video please like it subscribe to my channel and consider supporting me on patreon I'll put a link to patreon in the description for this video so first we'll look at the timeline of the crimes in this Jim Baker case and then move to the mental health and personality factors so starting with the timeline Jim Baker was born on January 2 1940 in Michigan according to the website of his current show the Jim Baker show at age 19 it was prophesied that he would go where no one had gone before which is interesting because other people have gone to federal prison it's really not a place no one's ever gone before but maybe they were referring to some other type of prophecy I find it interesting how these prophecies are never really mundane like they didn't predict Jim would have an interest in stamp collecting or something like that they're always significant they're always grand when somebody says I have a prophecy no one ever thinks of something boring also they're never dependent on doing something I've never heard a school guidance counselor tell a student I have a prophecy that you're going to drive an ice cream truck if you don't get your grades up it's always just something that will happen no matter what it's a given what a prophecy has talked about no one has to really do anything for that prophecy to come true so kind of interesting nature to that construct after dropping out of Bible College he married Tammy Faye Baker on April 1 1961 and they decided to pursue careers as evangelists Jim Baker would later admit he didn't read the Bible until he was in prison in 1966 they started working for the Christian Broadcasting Network CBN owned by Pat Robertson on that network they hosted a variety of shows including the 700 club in 1972 they left CBN and in 1974 they hosted the PTL Club those initials stood for people that love and praise the Lord the show featured interviews with various people including so politicians and religious leaders while PTL was on the air Jim Baker builds heritage USA which is an amusement park in South Carolina the Baker's raised a significant amount of money to invest in that amusement park now this is not actually what caused trouble for Jim Baker rather it was the fact that he raised money that was supposed to be used for various outreach efforts and used that money to fund heritage USA in addition Jim and Tammy Faye were using money from the PTL ministry to cover personal expenses they were investigated by the FTC for these violations but the investigation didn't go anywhere in a sense it actually helped them because they were able to raise money making it look like they were victims of an overbearing government that did not like organized religion after this we see the Jessica Hahn scandal Jessica Hahn had accused Jim Baker of sexually assaulting her during an encounter in a Florida hotel room in 1980 when she was 21 years old her silence was purchased for over $350,000 over the period of some time using money from the PTL ministry Jim Baker covered up this expenditure by using some creative accounting in March 1987 the information about this payoff became public Jim Baker admitted that he had sex with Jessica Hahn but denied there was any type of assault he said it was consensual it was part of a scheme to set him up and he only did it to make his wife jealous revealing a new meaning for the letters PTL pretentious terrible liar Jim Baker resigned from the PTL ministry Jerry Falwell took over as the CEO so the plan here from Jim Baker's perspective was to hope that this scandal would fizzle out people would lose interest in it and he would slide back in as the leader of PTL ministries instead Jerry Falwell banned Jim Baker from PTL before eventually resigning himself when he realized that he couldn't make the organization work due to the financial problems Falwell did not have a high opinion of Jim Baker he called Jim Baker the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2000 years of church history so it appears that Jim Baker may have read that relationship wrong Baker thought Falwell will let him back in and it turns out Falwell thought he was one most evil people in history so a little bit of a disconnect in terms of Baker's ability to read people Jim Baker's problems were not over at this point some of the methods he used to raise money were scrutinized specifically what he did between 1984 and 1987 during this time PTL sold lifetime memberships to stay at a hotel at Heritage USA somebody could stay there 3 nights every year for a single $1,000 contribution there were some other contribution levels there as well but for the most part it was $1,000 Baker collected over 170 million dollars worth of these lifetime memberships even though he only built one hotel that had just 500 rooms in 99 Jen Baker was convicted of 24 criminal charges including 15 counts of wire fraud he was sentenced to 45 years in prison on appeal Baker had a sentence reduced to 18 years then later it was reduced to eight years in 1992 he divorced Tammy Faye Baker she would die in 2007 he was released from prison in 1994 after serving under five years in 1998 he would get married for a second time to Lori Baker one would think that being convicted of multiple felonies and going to prison would end a career Intel vandalism but it did not Jim Baker started the Jim Baker show at a studio in Missouri in 2003 the focus of the show was a little bit different from what we saw from PTL his new show was really about the end of the world in March of 2020 the Attorney General of New York sent Baker a cease and desist letter because Baker was making claims that supplements he sold could be used to treat coronavirus he received warnings from other agencies as well in May 20 20 June Baker suffered a stroke at the time of making this video eight-year-old Jim Baker is taking a break from his show now moving to the mental health and personality factors behavior like we see with Jim maker could be explained by something like narcissism and that's a theory I've seen many times when reading about this case there are two items mentioned related to mental health in Jim Baker's history outside of personality I want to touch on these quickly before moving to analysis of personality first allegedly Jim Baker had a nervous breakdown in 1969 when he was working for Pat Robertson as I've talked about before in other videos the term nervous breakdown is not well defined but it typically refers to a disruption of mood so something like being depressed or anxious second during his trial he allegedly had hallucinations in his lawyer's office saying please don't do this to me now one could argue that they weren't really talking about loosen nations rather another nervous breakdown type reaction so perhaps he couldn't handle the stress of facing all those decades in prison although again he didn't serve decades in prison but he probably thought he was going to at that point now moving back to personality Baker has been described as charismatic manipulative devious arrogant rude cold and distant so it's safe to say he didn't always make a positive impression on the people around him when challenged by his subordinates he would claim that he was a prophet so when they were challenging him they felt like they were challenging God he was no stranger to playing the victim after being forced to resign from PTL he said he was wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends who victimized him with the aid of a female Confederate of course referring to Jessica Hahn he repeatedly lied to millions of people on a regular basis about his activities he committed a number of felonies he was reckless and some believe he has not been remorseful because of his behavior after prison like trying to sell fake treatments these behaviors align with many features of grandiose narcissism like being extroverted having a sense of self-importance being dominant having fantasies of success in power arrogance a sense of entitlement being condescending believing oneself to be special having lack of empathy and being manipulative there is also some alignment with psychopathy like sensation-seeking pathological lying a failure to accept responsibility and criminality so in a way these behaviors align with the classic con-artist personality profile as well as some overlap with the cult leader profile Baker received satisfaction from being the center of attention he enjoyed having power but he wasn't necessarily physically dangerous for the most part his mission was to steal and a fraud rather than gain money through violence now if Jessica hunts accusations are factual then Jim Baker certainly was able to escalate to violence in certain situations now look at his personality I'll use the five factor model I remember the big five traits through the acronym ocean openness to experience conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism so with openness to experience we see a low level here Baker is not intellectually curious and he has rigid thinking conscientiousness is more mid-range he was organized enough to hide expenditures in terms of his accounting abilities but impulsive enough to have an affair and steal money he had extremely high extraversion he was assertive and sensation-seeking low agreeableness we don't see much in the way of empathy and probably mid to high neuroticism partially based on the reports of those nervous breakdowns but we also see indications of anger depression anxiety and difficulty resisting temptation so how did Jim Baker get away with his crimes at least for the time that he did Jim Baker obtained success in a way that's been seen before as it relates to leveraging narcissistic characteristics he was able to bring people in around him who believed in his vision who were happy with their small part of his enterprise and they repeatedly looked the other way when they saw wrongdoing because they didn't want to lose their a little bit of power that Jim Baker allowed them to have furthermore they believed in his mission they believed that he was a prophet that he was offering something that no one else in the world could offer Baker was very effective at fooling the population he was able to see where people needed safety where they needed answers where they felt insecure here and he provided a solution for all those concerns he realized that there's an unending supply of people who would believe him again how can somebody be released from prison for fraud and then defraud people isn't that one of the points of going to prison now people should look at him and say we can never trust him again yet people have trusted him again and even though it's on a smaller scale he resumed questionable activities I mentioned Jim Bakker is a little bit like a cult leader cult leaders invariably gravitate to talking about the end times like Jim Jones from Jonestown David Koresh from the Waco tragedy and Marshall Applewhite from the Heaven's Gate cult there's something quite attractive for a small group of people about that narrative for example getting ready for the apocalypse like doomsday prepping being aware of something that other people are not aware of like having secret inside information about the end of the world and thinking about what life or existence will look like after the world s so I find this interesting when people originally trusted Jim Baker his message was positive you can be successful you can be prosperous you can have the good things in life when he was identified as a con artist he reinvented himself to appeal to a smaller audience undoubtedly a subset of his initial audience they were highly focused on the apocalypse a subset that he realized were particularly gullible and willing to support him no matter what he did now his message is about preparation being ready for the end of the world so this is really his core group of supporters these are people who continue to give him money when everyone else realizes that he's a criminal his attention is now focused on people eating during the end of the world and of course he makes money selling these food products so again I think it goes back to security that small group he appeals to feels insecure they feel afraid and for them Jim Baker is comforting when to most people he is frightening and repulsive another theme here is that he's appealing to a small group that believes they are being targeted by the government or other evil groups so there are a lot of conspiracy theorists that follow him it really comes back to fear at this point his appeal is at that most basic level con artists who are not discovered can't cheat people based on the idea of hope but when they're exposed they have to defraud on the basis of fear because fear blocks logical reasoning more effectively than a desire for a promising future people will believe a lot in order to maintain hope but they'll believe almost anything to alleviate themselves of the feeling of fear so those are my thoughts on Jim Baker please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

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Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020