James Orsen Bakker (; born January 2, 1940) is an American televangelist and convicted felon. Between 1974 and 1987, Bakker hosted the television program The PTL Club and its cable television platform, the PTL Satellite Network, with his then wife, Tammy Faye. He also developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and attended North Central University in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye LaValley. The two married in 1961, left college, and became itinerant evangelists, eventually having two children. In the late 1980s, Bakker resigned from the PTL ministry over a cover-up of hush money to church secretary Jessica Hahn for an alleged rape. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about felony charges, conviction, imprisonment. Convicted of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, he served nearly five years in prison before being paroled in 1994.