#uncle angelo

[goldengirlsobsession]

[butterqueen]

[snowlessknitter]

Picture it, Sicily, 1914. I promise our dear sainted mother on her death bed I'm gonna join the priesthood. On my way to the seminary in Palermo I stop off at a local trattoria for a glass of Chianti. The waitress bring drink to the table, is a vision, luscious lips, full bosom, and a behind so round, so firm, you've got to fall down on your knees and cry out at its magnificent regal beauty. [pause] I'm a butt man.

Uncle Angelo (Bill Dana), The Golden Girls (episode, “My Brother, My Father”)

I guess even the most devout have their biggest weaknesses.

[butterqueen]

[pjmonte]

[snowlessknitter]

Uncle Angelo: Please, I’m begging you as a man of the cloth!

Dorothy: Now I know how Jessica Hahn must have felt.

Welcome to another edition of “snowlessknitter Explains the a Golden Girls Joke”!

In this scene from the episode “My Brother, My Father”, Dorothy’s uncle Angelo (played by Bill Dana, who was added as a recurring character after the actress who played Sophia’s sister Angela, Nancy Walker, retired) who was supposedly a Catholic priest, was begging for Dorothy to sleep with her ex-husband Stan (and Dorothy and Stan were pretending to still be married for Angelo’s benefit, as not to upset the “priest” with news of their divorce). Ultimately, it was revealed that Angelo never actually entered the priesthood due to falling for the booty of a Sicilian beauty named Filomena; he only pretended to be one so that he wouldn’t break a promise he made to his mother on her deathbed. Turns out Angelo never liked Stan to begin with, he’s a yutz.

So, in order to understand the joke, let’s set up a little background:

Before we talk about Jessica Hahn, we have to talk about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye LaValley married in 1961 after meeting at a Bible college in Minnesota the previous year. (A Bible college is a Protestant Christian-affiliated institution that usually focuses on seminary studies and preparing students for ministry.) They ended up dropping out of college after marrying so that they could pursue careers as evangelists. In 1966 they began working for the Christian Broadcasting Network, which was founded by Pat Robertson (yes, that Pat Robertson), and their entertainment-based approach to ministry helped to grow the fledgling channel’s viewing audience. They left CBN in 1972 over philosophical differences with Robertson, and then helped to launch another televangelism network, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, before launching their own network, the PTL Television Network (PTL being an acronym for “Praise the Lord”) in 1974. Two years later, PTL’s parent company changed its name to Heritage Village Church & Missionary Fellowship. Around this time, the company started purchasing properties in South Carolina to develop into a theme park and resort complex called Heritage USA.

From Jim Bakker’s Wikipedia article:

In 1979, Bakker and his PTL ministry came under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for allegedly misusing funds raised on the air. The FCC report was finalized in 1982 and found that Bakker had raised $350,000 that he told viewers would go towards funding overseas missions but were actually used to pay for part of Heritage USA. The report also found that Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker used PTL funds for personal expenses. FCC commissioners voted four to three to drop the investigation, after which they allowed Bakker to sell the only TV station that he owned, therefore bypassing future FCC oversight. The FCC forwarded their report to the Justice Department, who declined to press charges, citing insufficient evidence. Bakker used the controversy to raise more funds from his audience, branding the investigation a "witch-hunt", and asking viewers to "give the Devil a black eye".

A confidential 1985 Internal Revenue Service report found that $1.3 million in ministry funds were used for the Bakkers' personal benefit from 1980 to 1983. The report recommended that PTL be stripped of its tax-exempt status but no action was taken until the Jessica Hahn scandal in 1987. Art Harris and Michael Isikoff wrote in The Washington Post that politics may have played a role in the three government agencies taking no action against PTL despite the evidence against them, as members of the Reagan administration were not eager to go after television ministers whose evangelical followers made up their base.

Here’s where Jessica Hahn comes in. In 1980, she was working as a church secretary. She alleges that on the afternoon of December 6, 1980, Jim Bakker and another pastor working for PTL, John Wesley Fletcher, drugged and raped her in a 15-minute encounter in a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida. Bakker and Fletcher both admitted to having sex with Hahn, but claimed that the encounter was consensual. In 1981, Fletcher was defrocked by the Assemblies of God (the Pentecostal group the Bakkers belonged to) for alleged homosexuality. Fletcher pleaded guilty to perjury for his role in the Hahn scandal and was sentenced to three years probation in 1990. Fletcher died in 1996, reportedly from AIDS. The Hahn incident wasn’t made public until 1987, when reports of multiple scandals involving the Bakkers surfaced, in which it was revealed that Hahn had been paid $279,000 in hush money (with the transaction handled by Roe Messner, who was a church builder and property developer who would later go on to marry Tammy Faye after she and Jim divorced in the wake of the scandal) and that Jim Bakker had been keeping two sets of books in order to hide his financial indiscretions. Jim Bakker resigned from PTL as a result. The Charlotte Observer published several articles exposing the organization’s fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 and found the following (from Bakker’s Wikipedia article):

Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 "lifetime memberships", entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA, during that period. According to the prosecution at Bakker's fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships were sold but only one 500-room hotel was ever finished. Bakker sold "exclusive partnerships" which exceeded capacity, raising more than twice the money needed to build the hotel. Much of the money paid Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.

This led to a 16-month grand jury investigation and in 1988, he was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. A 1989 trial found him guilty on all 24 counts. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine, although the prison sentence and fine were later voided on appeal (although his convictions were upheld). His prison sentence was reduced to eight years, and he was released on parole in late 1994 after serving five years in federal prison.

Tammy Faye had divorced Jim in March 1992, while he was still in prison, and married Roe Messner the following year. She remained married to Messner until her 2007 death from cancer. Jim remarried to Lori Beth Graham (herself a former televangelist) in September 1998 after knowing each other only 50 days. They are still married today and she is frequently seen on his current TV show, The Jim Bakker Show. Bakker no longer preaches the “prosperity gospel” that made him famous in his early career and now is an apocalypticist. He focus most of his preaching on the “end of days” and has been selling doomsday supplies through his ministry, although his recent claims during the coronavirus pandemic have earned him a lot of scrutiny from state and federal governments alike and he claims his ministry is now on the brink of filing for bankruptcy.

As for Hahn, she pursued a career in modeling and acting for a while after the scandal, including posing for Playboy and being in a brief relationship with comedian Sam Kinison. She would make guest appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show for the next two decades, but ultimately retired from show business and now lives on a ranch outside of Los Angeles with her husband, former stuntman Frank Lloyd.

If you’re interested, the ABC series 20/20 put together a wonderful documentary special of the Bakkers’ rise and fall, which can be seen here. I don’t know if this is viewable outside the United States.

[butterqueen]

[strungonboddah]

January 16th 2012

Today my great uncle Angelo died. I feel really bad cuz the last time i saw him i barely talked to him. I was even telling myself to talk to him and i didn't. I hope he knows that i he meant a lot to me even if we weren't extremely close. He is part of my family and sometimes that little fact is enough to tie people to each other in way that you can't explain. Even though he and I weren't close, i still feel a little emptiness in my heart knowing that i won't ever get to see him or talk to him again. So many stories will go untold and I'm beginning to realize more and more how important it is to let the people you care about know it every chance you get. Im starting to get that when that little voice in my head starts to tell me something, as long as that something is good, i should listen to it. I don't think i'm ever going to be able to think of the last time we were together and not feel happy and sad about it, the whole family was together and we had a great time, i guess it is a good last memory to have of someone. 

Rest in Peace Uncle Angelo. Please watch over us all and know we will love and miss you, until we meet again.