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Falwell and his board plan to meet this week at Heritage USA. According to a Falwell spokesman, the audit that unveiled the PTL pay structure will be high on the agenda. On the PTL television show, of which he is now host, Dortch announced that for the next twelve months "I will not accept any salary whatsoever, nor pension benefits or any other benefits." Dortch remains under fire for his role in helping to negotiate the settlement with Hahn, and he may be dismissed at this week's PTL board meeting. One major concern of the board's is that angry viewers of the ministry's cable network, which reaches 13.5 million households, may stop mailing in the contributions that last year swelled the ministry's revenues to $129 million. In recent weeks both Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart, the Baton Rouge, La., preacher who passed along rumors about Bakker's sins to Assemblies of God officials, have sent out letters telling contributors that the PTL scandal has hurt their own fund raising. Last week three members of a Columbus family filed a $601 million class- action suit against PTL. They say their donations were used for illegal purposes rather than good works.
For Bakker, who has been in seclusion at his Palm Springs, Calif., home, there were even more damaging revelations at week's end. They were made by John Ankerberg, a Southern Baptist TV preacher from Chattanooga, Tenn. Interviewed on CNN, Ankerberg accused Bakker of involvements with prostitutes and homosexuals over at least the past nine years. Said Ankerberg: "From the people I have heard, from the evidence I have seen, it is more than talk." He described a pattern of persistent misbehavior among top members of the PTL staff, involving "wife swapping" and "diversion of funds," that he said had been condoned by both Bakker and Dortch. At week's end, Tammy Bakker released a statement from her husband, denying that he had ever been with a prostitute or was homosexual. She also said that "99%" of what the media had printed about the Bakkers "bears no truth whatsoever."