17, when he drove into a motel parking lot here. He admitted to paying a prostitute to perform a pornographic act, sources said, and to a lifelong fascination with pornography. By his own account, he lost that round, confessing on nationwide television last Sunday to unspecified 'sins' and stepping down from his $150 million global TV ministry. Over the last 'two or three years,' the motel owner says, he watched one of the country's most powerful Pentecostal holy men - a man who once called himself an 'old-fashioned, Holy-Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, gospel-preaching preacher' - rent rooms here in the shadow of an ominous billboard with words warning, 'Your Eternity Is at Stake.'Ĭruising about in his Lincoln Town Car, Jimmy Swaggart was wrestling Satan and his obsession down on the bayou. Mike,' the owner of four cut-rate motels along the strip. When checking in, he always 'used the girls' names to register,' never his own, according to 'Mr. At times, he wore hats, or sunglasses, or headbands, combing his blond hair down in front, 'as if he were hiding,' says a woman who has been registered for some time at Tony's Motel as Peggy Carrier. 24 - Victory over flesh does not come easily.Īccording to those who inhabit the demimonde along Airline Highway, a seedy strip of no-tell motels, their neon lights flashing adult movies, water beds and rooms by the hour, he pursued a secret life.
