Biography and the early yearsAccording to Tilton's autobiographical materials, he had a conversion experience to Christianity in 1969[3] and began his ministry in 1974, taking his new family (including wife Martha "Marte" Phillips, whom he married in 1968) on the road to, in his words, "preach this gospel of Jesus."[1] Tilton preached to small congregations and revivals throughout Texas and Oklahoma.[4] Tilton and his family settled in Dallas, Texas and built a small church in Farmers Branch, Texas called the "Word Of Faith Family Church" in 1976.[4] The church also started a local television program then known as Daystar (not related to the Daystar Television Network though both were started in the Dallas area).
The church was growing steadily, but Daystar failed to expand beyond the Dallas area until Tilton went to Hawaii—his self-described version of Jesus' forty days in the wilderness[5]—and spent time fishing, drinking, and watching an increasingly popular new form of television programming: the late-night infomercial.
Tilton was particularly influenced by Dave Del Dotto, a real estate promoter who produced hour-long infomercials showing his glamorous life in Hawaii (which he constantly stressed anyone could achieve just by following the principles set up in his many "get rich quick" books), as well as "interviews" with students who were brought out to his Hawaiian villa for said interviews, specifically for their on-camera testimonials about the success in life they were now enjoying thanks to his teachings[5]. Upon his return from Hawaii in 1981, Tilton—with the help of a US$1.3M loan from Dallas banker Herman Beebe[1]—revamped Daystar into an hour-long "religious infomercial" with the title Success-N-Life[5].
[edit] Success-N-Life
In Success-N-Life, Tilton regularly taught that all of life's trials, especially poverty, were a result of sin. Tilton's ministry consisted mainly of impressing upon his viewers the importance of making "vows"—financial commitments to Tilton's ministry. His preferred vow, stressed frequently on his broadcasts, was $1,000.[6] Occasionally, Tilton would claim to have received a "word" for someone to give a vow of $5,000 or even $10,000. When a person made a vow to Tilton, he preached that God would recognize the vow and reward the donor with vast material riches.[7] The show also ran "testimonials" of viewers who gave to Tilton's ministry and reportedly received miracles in return, a practice that would be used as the basis for a later lawsuit from donors charging Tilton's ministry with fraud[8]. A Dallas Morning News story published in 1992 observed that Tilton spent more than 84% of his show's airtime for fundraising and promotions, a total higher than the 22% for an average commercial television show[9]; other sources put the total fundraising time during episodes of Success-N-Life closer to 68%.[7] By contrast, the televised ministry of Billy Graham spent an average of 5% of total airtime on fundraising and promotions[10]. Some of Tilton's fundraising letters were written by Gene Ewing, who heads a multi-million dollar marketing empire writing donation letters for other evangelicals like W.V. Grant and Don Stewart.[11]
As a result of Tilton's television success, the membership of the Word of Faith Family Church (renamed "Word of Faith Family Church and World Outreach Center") grew to become an 8,000 member megachurch[4].
Tilton is the author of several self-help books about financial success, including The Power to Create Wealth, God's Laws of Success, How to Pay Your Bills Supernaturally, and How to be Rich and Have Everything You Ever Wanted. Most of Tilton's books were published in the 1980s and distributed via promotion on Success-N-Life and through the many mailings Tilton's ministry sent his followers. The books were republished in the late 1990s and were used as centerpieces of his later infomercial series and are now promoted on his new daily live internet broadcast.[12]
[edit] Scandal
Even before the ABC News investigation into his ministry, Tilton had experienced controversy. In a deposition video for a lawsuit that was taped August 18, 1992, Tilton admitted to having robbed a fruit stand as a teen and abusing marijuana, LSD, and various barbiturates as a young man prior to his conversion to Christianity in 1969[13]. Tilton also admitted several times on Success-N-Life that he used to "drink lots of alcohol and use lots of drugs" before his conversion.
[edit] Exploitation of vulnerable people
In 1991, Diane Sawyer and ABC News conducted an investigation of Tilton (as well as two other Dallas-area televangelists, W.V. Grant and Larry Lea). The investigation, assisted by Trinity Foundation president Ole Anthony and broadcast on ABC's Primetime Live on November 21, 1991, found that Tilton's ministry threw away prayer requests without reading them, keeping only the accompanying money or valuables sent to the ministry by viewers, garnering his ministry an estimated US$80 million a year. Ole Anthony, a Dallas-based minister whose Trinity Foundation church works with the homeless and the poor on the east side of Dallas, took an interest in Tilton's ministry after some of the people coming to the Trinity Foundation for help told him they had lost all of their money making donations to some of the higher profile televangelists, especially fellow Dallas-area minister Robert Tilton. Curious about the pervasiveness of the problem, the Trinity Foundation got on the mailing lists of several televangelists, including Tilton, and started keeping records of the many types of solicitations they received almost daily from various ministries.
Former Coca-Cola executive Harry Guetzlaff came to the Trinity Foundation for help and told Anthony that Guetzlaff had been turned away from Tilton's church when he found himself on hard times following a divorce. He had been a longtime high-dollar donor, and gave up his last $5,000 as a "vow of faith" just weeks earlier. Guetzlaff's experience combined with the sheer magnitude of mailings from Tilton's ministry spurred Anthony, a former intelligence officer in the United States Air Force and licensed private investigator, to start a full investigation of Tilton's ministry. Guetzlaff joined Anthony in the task of gathering details on Tilton's operation, and would later do much of the legwork in finding and following the paper trail for the ABC news investigation.[14]
[edit] Undercover investigation
ABC producers, who had started working on their own investigation into a number of televangelists in early 1991, contacted the Trinity Foundation for information on Tilton. After comparing their accumulated notes, data, and details, the two groups decided to pool their efforts and began planning the undercover portion of the story. Anthony agreed to portray himself—a Dallas-based minister with a small church looking into the ways televangelist ministries were able to grow so quickly—and ABC producers would pose as Anthony's "media consultants." The team, armed with hidden cameras and microphones, arrived for a meeting at Response Media, the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based marketing firm handling Tilton's mass mailings, to discuss a proposal sent by Anthony to Response Media about fundraising for a religious-based TV talk show. The director of Response Media, Jim Moore, described for Anthony and the hidden cameras (concealed in the undercover Primetime Live producers' glasses and handbags) many of the techniques used by Tilton to raise funds for his ministry. Moore also said that Tilton was doing "far better than anyone knows" and described the main strategy Tilton employed for such a high return rate on his mailings—that is, send the recipient a "gimmick" that would compel the recipient to mail something back in return, and most recipients who would be inclined to respond would include some money along with it—but declined to disclose how much Response Media was being paid for its services nor how much money the mailings were generating for the Tilton ministry.
However, Moore did disclose, as part of his sales pitch to Anthony, that the response letters generated by the fundraising mailings Response Media sends out for its clients would never actually be delivered to the client; instead, they would be sent unopened to the client's financial institution or other institutions of choice. "You never have to touch it," Moore added in response to a clarification question from Ole Anthony about dealing with the gimmick objects sent to the potential donors in the mailers. One of the ABC producers asked for clarification as to whether this was a standard practice—"So the mail goes straight to the bank?"—and Moore asserted that it was: "The mail goes to the bank, and they put the money in your account. We just get the paper with the person's name and how much they gave."[1]
[edit] The Apple of God's Eye
Trinity Foundation members, acting on this information, started digging through dumpsters outside Tilton's many banks in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area as well as Dumpsters outside the office of Tilton's lawyer J.C. Joyce (who was also based in Tulsa). Over the next 30 days Trinity's "garbologists," as Anthony dubbed them[14], found tens of thousands of discarded prayer requests, bank statements, computer printouts containing the coding for how Tilton's "personalized" letters were generated, and more, all of which were shown in detail on the Primetime Live documentary, now titled "The Apple of God's Eye"[1]. In a follow-up broadcast on November 28, 1991, Primetime Live host Diane Sawyer said that the Trinity Foundation and Primetime Live assistants found prayer requests in bank dumpsters on 14 separate occasions in a 30-day period[15].
[edit] Denial
Tilton vehemently denied the allegations and took to the airwaves on November 22, 1991 on a special episode of Success-N-Life entitled "Primetime Lies" to air his side of the story. Tilton asserted that the prayer requests found in garbage bags shown on the Primetime Live investigation were stolen from the ministry and placed in the dumpster for a sensational camera shot, and that he prayed over every prayer request received, to the point that he "laid on top of those prayer requests so much that 'the chemicals' actually got into my bloodstream, and...I had two small strokes in my brain."[15] Tilton remained defiant on claims regarding his use of donations to his ministry to fund various purchases, asking "Ain't I allowed to have nothing?" with regards to his ownership of multiple multi-million dollar estates. Tilton also claimed that he needed plastic surgery to repair capillary damage to his lower eyelids from ink that seeped into his skin from the prayer requests.[16]
[edit] Further revelations
After Trinity Foundation members spent weeks poring over the details of the documents they and ABC had uncovered, sorting and scrutinizing each prayer request, bank statement, and computer printout dealing with the codes Tilton's banks and legal staff used when categorizing the returned items, Ole Anthony called a press conference in December 1991 to present what he described as Tilton's "Wheel of Fortune," using a large display covered in actual prayer requests, copies of receipts for document disposition, and other damaging information that demonstrated what happened to money and prayer requests that the average viewer of Tilton's television program sent him.[17] When both Tilton and his lawyer J.C. Joyce reacted to the news by claiming that the items Anthony was displaying had somehow been stolen by "an insider," Anthony responded in a subsequent interview that "Joyce was our mole—a lot of this stuff came from the dumpster outside his office."[17]
Primetime Live's original investigation and subsequent updates included interviews with several former Tilton employees and acquaintances. In the original investigation, one of Tilton's former prayer hotline operators claimed that the ministry cared little for desperate followers who called for prayer, saying that Tilton had a computer installed in July 1989 to make sure the phone operators were off the line by seven minutes. The former employee also revealed that very specific instructions were given to them in terms of how to talk with callers and that they were told to always ask for a $100 "vow" at a minimum. Also in the original report, a former friend of Tilton's from college (who remained anonymous and was shown in silhouette) claimed that both he and Tilton would attend tent revival meetings as a "sport" and would claim to be anointed and healed at the meetings. He added that the two had often discussed the notion that after graduation they would set up their own roving revival ministry "and drive around the country and get rich." In a July 1992 update to the investigation, Primetime Live interviewed Tilton's former maid, who claimed that prayer requests that were sent to Tilton's house by the ministry were routinely ignored until he told her to move them out of the house and into the garage; according to the maid, "they stacked up and stacked up" in Tilton's garage until he had them thrown away. In the same interview, Tilton's former secretary came forward and claimed that Tilton lifted excerpts from "get rich quick" books and used them in his sermons, and that she never saw him perform normal pastoral duties such as visiting with the sick and praying with members[15].
[edit] Government involvement
Despite Tilton's repeated denials of misconduct, the state of Texas and the Federal government became involved in subsequent investigations, finding more causes for concern about Tilton's financial status with each new revelation. After nearly 10,000 pounds of prayer requests and letters to the Tilton ministry were found in a disposal bin at a Tulsa area recycling firm in February 1992 along with itemized receipts of their delivery from Tilton's main mail handling service in Tulsa rather than from the church offices in Farmers Branch, Tilton admitted in a deposition given to the Texas Attorney General's office that he often prayed over computerized lists of prayer requests instead of the actual prayer requests themselves, and that prayer requests were in fact routinely thrown away after categorization[17].
As each revelation became increasingly more damaging, viewership and donations declined dramatically. When Tilton announced the cancellation of Success-N-Life in 1993, viewership had fallen 85 percent and monthly donations went from $8 million to $2 million. The last episode aired nationally on October 30, 1993.[18]
[edit] Failed libel action
In 1992, Tilton sued ABC for libel because of its investigation and report, but the case was dismissed in 1993. Federal Judge Thomas Brett, in his July 16, 1993 dismissal of the case, stated that information in the Trinity Foundation's logs on prayer requests reportedly found in dumpsters on September 11, 1991 "could not have been found then because the postmark date was after September 11, 1991," but also noted that Ole Anthony had recanted the erroneous entries in a subsequent affidavit.[19] Tilton appealed the decision in 1993; although the findings of the original court were upheld in 1995, Federal Judge B. Michael Burrage's opinion criticized ABC and the Primetime Live producers for their editing of the story, and noted that ABC had been warned by their own Religion Editor Peggy Wehmeyer (who knew Ole Anthony from her work as a religion reporter at WFAA-TV in Dallas, Texas) that "Mr. Anthony could not be trusted and was obsessed with his crusade against [Tilton]."[19]. Tilton once more appealed the decision, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996, but the court refused to hear the case.[20]
[edit] Tilton sued for fraud
Several donors to Tilton's television ministry sued Tilton himself in 1992 and 1993, charging various forms of fraud. One of the suing parties, a woman named Vivian Elliott, won $1.5 million in 1994 when it was discovered that a family crisis center for which she had made a donation (and recorded an endorsement testimonial) was never built nor was ever intended to be built[8]. The judgment was later reversed on appeal[21].
The decline of Success-N-Life also led to the end of Tilton's 25-year marriage to wife Marte, who had served as the administrative head of the Word of Faith Family Church and World Outreach Center, in 1993. Dallas lawyer Gary Richardson, who represented many of the parties suing Tilton for fraud, attempted to intervene in the Tiltons' divorce, citing the potential for the divorce settlement to be used to hide financial assets that were currently part of the many fraud cases; Richardson's petition to have the divorce action put on hold until after the fraud cases were settled was denied[17].
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