Antigay Preacher Jim Bakker Sued for Selling Fake COVID-19 Cure

Disgraced anti-LGBTQ televangelist Jim Bakker is being sued over false promises of a cure for COVID-19.

State officials in Missouri, where Bakker and his Morningside Church Productions are based, filed a complaint Tuesday seeking to prevent Bakker and his company "from advertising or selling Silver Solution and related products as treatments for coronavirus," as the complaint reads. It was filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in Stone County, Mo., Circuit Court.

Bakker and Morningside "are violating the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act ... by falsely promising to consumers that Silver Solution can cure, eliminate, kill or deactivate coronavirus and/or boost elderly consumers' immune system and help keep them healthy when there is, in fact, no vaccine, pill, potion or other product available to treat or cure coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)," the complaint says.

Bakker has been hawking Silver Solution products as a cure for the new coronavirus strain at least since February 12, when it was featured on his TV program, The Jim Bakker Show, the filing notes. He has also been selling the products on his website. The Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission sent him a letter March 6 warning that the products are not FDA-approved and that the claims they cure or mitigate COVID "are not supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence." It ordered him to cease making the claims. The New York State attorney general has sent him a cease-and-desist letter as well, CBS News reports.

Bakker became famous and then notorious with The PTL Club, a TV show he hosted with his then-wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, in the 1970s and '80s. In 1987 he was involved in a sex scandal with a younger woman, and he was involved in financial scandals as well, eventually doing time in prison for defrauding viewers out of millions of dollars. He was also rumored to have had affairs with men, which he denied.

He is best known as a proponent of the prosperity gospel, but he has preached against LGBTQ rights. In 2016, for instance, he said the U.S. is incurring God's wrath because "we don't know the difference between boys and girls" and are allowing "grown men" in girls' restrooms, obviously a reference to transgender people.

Tammy Faye Bakker, who divorced Jim Bakker in 1992, was in contrast an LGBTQ-friendly figure and became something of an icon with the 2000 documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye by gay filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. She married Roe Messner in 1993 and died of cancer in 2007 at age 65. Jay Bakker, her son with Jim Bakker, is an LGBTQ-supportive Christian minister. Jim Bakker is remarried as well, to Lori Beth Graham, who appears on his TV show.