In 1996, a mall developer paid Swaggart Ministries $10 million for a slice of Swaggart land. An additional $2 million came from the sale of unnamed assets and $2.3 million from rental income. Direct public support accounted for $6 million, according to the 1995 return. Still, the ministry in 1995 reported income of $11.3 million. More recently, however, the Bible college had only about 40 students, Swaggart told CNN in an impromptu curbside interview last fall. Instead, his devotional programs appear to air exclusively on local independent television stations and on local cable channels.Īt one time in the mid-1980s, the ministry was so rich it put up nearly $70 million in new buildings during a four-year period. His name tied for 19th in Nielsen Media Research's list of non-cable devotional programs. His American audience numbered 2 million.īut today he is nowhere in the lineup of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the nation's largest Christian broadcasting network.
#WHERE IS JIMMY SWAGGART NOW PROFESSIONAL#
He blamed "demon spirits" for his sexual relapse," paid a $205.50 fine and took a leave of absence to undergo professional counseling and other medical care.Īt its peak, Swaggart's ministry was taking in $150 million a year.
#WHERE IS JIMMY SWAGGART NOW TV#
They believed in him, do or die."īut three years after his TV confession came a coup de grace of sorts: Swaggart was stopped in a car with a prostitute in Indio, Calif. "Among the people who were left, there was tremendously high morale," she said. 21, 1988, the enduring national image of Swaggart is his upturned, tear-stained face filling the TV screen.īut the defections that followed didn't deter a core of true believers, said Barbara Nauer, a Baton Rouge English teacher and writer who worked for Swaggart from 1988 to 1991. Ten years after that remarkable television confession on Sunday, Feb. Yet Swaggart is clearly off the stage, the rising arc of his ministry shot down in 1988, the year he was photographed with a prostitute in a seedy motel zone in suburban New Orleans, 80 miles from his home. Publicly available tax data filed by Jimmy Swaggart Ministries that year, the most recent data available, reported that the two collected about $360,000 in salaries. To be sure, Swaggart and his wife, Frances, seemed - as recently as 1995 - to be doing well, personally. The ministry now relies heavily on rental income from corporate tenants in buildings that were planned as college classrooms and dorms. As a rule, neither Swaggart nor anyone in his ministry speaks to the news media, secular or religious. It's much less promotion-oriented and much more spiritually focused now, said one researcher who monitors televangelists.īeyond that, he is in a bunker mode. The answer: Swaggart still preaches - but to much smaller audiences and on many fewer television screens.Īnd his message seems to have changed. "When someone like that just vanishes off the screen, people wonder.
"For so long, he was a major fixture in the Pentecostal community," said Lee Grady, editor of Charisma, a Florida-based magazine covering the Pentecostal movement. Gone are most of the 1,500 employees who shared Swaggart's vision, the 1,500 students who studied in his schools, and the nearly 7,000 worshipers who arrived on Sundays to hear the Pentecostal evangelist and musician rock Satan back on his heels.Įven Swaggart, 62, is not much in evidence now. It might as well have been the Ebola virus that swept through the sprawling, once-thriving Jimmy Swaggart headquarters here 10 years ago.Ī decade after Swaggart tearfully confessed to an association with a prostitute, the $144 million campus that once bore his global hopes is an eerie, almost empty place.