After PTL declared bankruptcy, the cable network was sold in 1989 to Morris Cerullo World Evangelism of San Diego, California, and was eventually named INSP, now headquartered at facilities that were constructed in Indian Land, South Carolina.
INSP is now a Wild West network In 1960, Jim Bakker met Tammy Faye LaValley while both were students at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Due to the success of Come On Over, Robertson made Bakker the host of a new prime-time talk show called The 700 Club, which would gradually become CBN's flagship program, and become syndicated on numerous cable channels and network affiliates.
From 1984 to 1987, Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 "lifetime memberships," which entitled buyers to a three-night stay annually at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA.
The $279,000 payoff for the silence of Jessica Hahn, who was mistakenly supposed to be a Bakker staff member, was paid by Tammy Faye's later husband, Roe Messner.
[6] Later that summer, as donations sharply declined in the wake of Bakker's resignation and the end of The PTL Club, Falwell raised $20 million to help keep Heritage USA solvent, including a well-publicized waterslide plunge there.
[7] Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.
[4][10] In 1989, after a five-week trial which began on August 28 in Charlotte, the jury found him guilty on all 24 counts, and Judge Robert Potter sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison and a $500,000 fine.
[3]: 52 [11] Bakker served time in the Federal Medical Center, Rochester in Minnesota, sharing a cell with activist Lyndon LaRouche and skydiver Roger Nelson.
[3]: 104 In August 1993, Bakker was transferred to a minimum security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia, and was subsequently granted parole in July 1994, after serving almost five years of his sentence.
[13] On July 23, 1996, a North Carolina jury threw out a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 160,000 onetime supporters who contributed as much as $7,000 each to Bakker's coffers in the 1980s.