Michael Isikoff. The rookie had never worked at a big paper before, and he had certainly never seen or heard anyone like Isikoff. Isikoff was rumpled, in the vanishing mode of old-time newspapermen—an imperfect shave, a mess of tousled hair, a collection of ill-fitting sport jackets, a habit of gnawing on Bic pens when he wasn’t barking at someone on the telephone. But none of this was the real reason Isikoff stood out. What really amazed the newcomer was the subject matter of those high-decibel phone calls. This was what people reported on at The Washington Post ?
Finally, the new arrival couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer and asked Isikoff what he was working on.
I’m second-sourcing a blow job, Isikoff explained.
The story was the biggest of his career to date. In February 1987, a reporter named Charles Shepard of The Charlotte Observer broke the news that Jim Bakker, a celebrated televangelist who ran a religion and real estate empire known as the PTL Club, had deposited $265,000 into a trust fund for the benefit of a woman named Jessica Hahn. The purpose of this payment, it became clear, was to try to buy Hahn’s silence about an adulterous encounterthe former church secretary had had with Bakker in 1980. (Bakker’s broadcast partner in the PTL Club was his wife, the famously makeup-slathered Tammy Faye.) Shepard’s story set off one of the great journalistic chases of the era, as reporters began uncovering the corruption that permeated PTL and, as it turned out, several other ministries of the airwaves.
Isikoff—and the Post generally—had come to the story late, but he took after it with gusto. By late summer, Hahn had become a public figure herself, especially after she agreed to provide Playboy magazine with an interview and a photo shoot for a reported $1 million fee. Together with a similarly aggressive reporter named Art Harris, Isikoff decided to look into Hahn’s background, and they reported on September 30, 1987, that “questions have been raised about the credibility of the ex–church secretary whose revelations toppled a multimillion dollar TV pulpit.… Some of the questions … focus on Hahn’s alleged sexual experience.”
The key source for the story was a thirty-five-year-old electrician from Massapequa, Long Island, Rocco Riccobono, who told the Post reporters that he had had a “brief affair” with Hahn. Isikoff and Harris wrote, “Contacted by The Washington Post over several weeks, Riccobono said his fling with Hahn was in 1978. Hahn, then 18, had recently been hired as a church secretary and was visiting the apartment of a friend. After his pregnant wife fell asleep in a bedroom, Riccobono said, he plopped down in front of a fire where Hahn ‘seduced me on the couch.’ Riccobono said, ‘I didn’t resist. I couldn’t help it, my flesh is weak … I was with Jessica several times.’ ” (Asked to respond, Hahn said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with Rocco Riccobono.”)
The reporters ran with the story for weeks—Harris found Riccobono and handled more of the sexual material, and Isikoff did more on the financial details—and when they exhausted the Post ’s interest in the subject, they wrote two long freelance articles about PTL for another publication —Penthouse . The PTL story, they wrote, was “a saga of sex, sin and pseudosalvation”—and they emptied their notebooks of material that may have been too racy for their usual employer. In one of their tales about the Bakkers, there was even a foreshadowing of a bigger story in Isikoff’s future. An anonymous former aide identified as Daniel recalled how Jim Bakker told him “about parking with Tammy Faye at Bible college, how they’d first had sex in his car. ‘He was laughing,’ recalls Daniel. ‘He said Tammy had on a black velvet skirt, and he’d messed it up pretty badly by [ejaculating] all over it when they were petting.’ ”
Isikoff had helped to invent an entire new field
Finally, the new arrival couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer and asked Isikoff what he was working on.
I’m second-sourcing a blow job, Isikoff explained.
The story was the biggest of his career to date. In February 1987, a reporter named Charles Shepard of The Charlotte Observer broke the news that Jim Bakker, a celebrated televangelist who ran a religion and real estate empire known as the PTL Club, had deposited $265,000 into a trust fund for the benefit of a woman named Jessica Hahn. The purpose of this payment, it became clear, was to try to buy Hahn’s silence about an adulterous encounterthe former church secretary had had with Bakker in 1980. (Bakker’s broadcast partner in the PTL Club was his wife, the famously makeup-slathered Tammy Faye.) Shepard’s story set off one of the great journalistic chases of the era, as reporters began uncovering the corruption that permeated PTL and, as it turned out, several other ministries of the airwaves.
Isikoff—and the Post generally—had come to the story late, but he took after it with gusto. By late summer, Hahn had become a public figure herself, especially after she agreed to provide Playboy magazine with an interview and a photo shoot for a reported $1 million fee. Together with a similarly aggressive reporter named Art Harris, Isikoff decided to look into Hahn’s background, and they reported on September 30, 1987, that “questions have been raised about the credibility of the ex–church secretary whose revelations toppled a multimillion dollar TV pulpit.… Some of the questions … focus on Hahn’s alleged sexual experience.”
The key source for the story was a thirty-five-year-old electrician from Massapequa, Long Island, Rocco Riccobono, who told the Post reporters that he had had a “brief affair” with Hahn. Isikoff and Harris wrote, “Contacted by The Washington Post over several weeks, Riccobono said his fling with Hahn was in 1978. Hahn, then 18, had recently been hired as a church secretary and was visiting the apartment of a friend. After his pregnant wife fell asleep in a bedroom, Riccobono said, he plopped down in front of a fire where Hahn ‘seduced me on the couch.’ Riccobono said, ‘I didn’t resist. I couldn’t help it, my flesh is weak … I was with Jessica several times.’ ” (Asked to respond, Hahn said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with Rocco Riccobono.”)
The reporters ran with the story for weeks—Harris found Riccobono and handled more of the sexual material, and Isikoff did more on the financial details—and when they exhausted the Post ’s interest in the subject, they wrote two long freelance articles about PTL for another publication —Penthouse . The PTL story, they wrote, was “a saga of sex, sin and pseudosalvation”—and they emptied their notebooks of material that may have been too racy for their usual employer. In one of their tales about the Bakkers, there was even a foreshadowing of a bigger story in Isikoff’s future. An anonymous former aide identified as Daniel recalled how Jim Bakker told him “about parking with Tammy Faye at Bible college, how they’d first had sex in his car. ‘He was laughing,’ recalls Daniel. ‘He said Tammy had on a black velvet skirt, and he’d messed it up pretty badly by [ejaculating] all over it when they were petting.’ ”
Isikoff had helped to invent an entire new field
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