Jessica: A New Life

AWoman I never met said I used to be a prostitute." Sitting poolside at Playboy Mansion West, Jessica Hahn shakes her head. "A woman who used to be my friend called me the Antichrist. Can you believe that? It sounds almost funny, but it hurts, too. It hurts to be an outcast," she says. "My life has been threatened more times than I can count. I've seen a letter written in blood that said, 'The wrath of my fury is on Jessica Hahn.' My mother thinks I have gone astray because I live at the Playboy Mansion, but it's beautiful here. There are birds, trees, flowers--beauty everywhere you look. And it's safe." Safe at last--walled in by the landscaped beauty and the security staff of Playboy Mansion West--she works on her autobiography and prays for strength. Today, relaxing in the Southern California sun after an arduous but exhilarating Playboy photo shoot, she is in a reflective mood. Until now, she has had little time to ponder the twists and turns her life has taken since the last time she appeared on these pages. Hugh Hefner's ladylove Kimberley Conrad ("We're like sisters," says Jessica) shouts a warning as Leilynd, Kim's golden Labrador, bounds into Jessica's lap. "You love your aunt Jess, don't you?" she coos to the dog. Leilynd licks Jessica's new, cosmetically slimmed nose. The dog has just returned from the vet with instructions to lose some weight. Jessica sympathizes, offering Leilynd a packet of Sweet 'n Low. "I love it here," she says, "and I know Hef would let me stay here forever. But soon, it's going to be time to move on. As soon as I get myself (text continued on page 158)Jessica(continued from page 121) together. I don't know what the future holds for me. I know I'll always be controversial, whether I wear a choir gown or nothing at all, because I can't be a phony like Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart or Jerry Falwell. I've spent a lot of time praying in the past year, wondering about God's plan for me, and finally decided just to trust in Him. I have a plaque in my room here at the Playboy Mansion that reads Jessica, Trust me. I have everything under Control, Signed, Jesus. Whatever the future is, I know it will be part of His plan."

God's plan--or the machinations of modern-day evangelism--hurled Jessica Hahn into the spotlight last year. The former secretary at Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Massapequa, Long Island, became the unwitting Delilah who brought down a multimillion-dollar empire called the PTL-- and became a fugitive from the wrath of Jim Bakker's angry followers.

More than a decade ago, at Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, the teenaged Jessica fell under the influence of the charismatic Reverend Gene Profeta, a freewheeling tent preacher whose moneyed lifestyle and private plane were funded by the one-dollar-for-God-and-one-dollar-for-me style of collection-plate finance. Although raised in a strict Catholic household, Jessica fell for the fiery, lecherous leader of the flock.

Profeta, Jessica says, showered her with attention and convinced her that heavy petting with the pastor was part of her role as church secretary/baby sitter/consort and would leave her still "technically" a virgin. Now under investigation by a New York grand jury for his creative financial strategies, Profeta mesmerized young Jessica with a combination of fire, brimstone, money and sex.

Jessica knew there was "something wrong with this picture" but told herself that what might be sin with another man was acceptable with her spiritual guide. A naive 18, she figured that if that was what God wanted, so be it.

"I thought, God understands," she says. "Even though this had to be kept secret, I thought that God understood that I would do all I could for my pastor." To a confused Jessica, that meant that the subject of Gene Profeta was off limits. In July 1981, seven months after the Jim Bakker/John Wesley Fletcher incident in Florida, Profeta persuaded Jessica to have sexual intercourse with him for the first time. "He said, 'I'm going to prove to you that I'm not like Jim and John. Not all men are like that.' He was going to show me how a woman should be treated."

Upon reflection, Jessica now thinks, "My relationship with Gene Profeta and his Full Gospel Tabernacle Church was even more important to me than anything that happened with Jim Bakker."

After returning from Florida, she sought comfort and advice from her pastor/friend. Profeta, says Jessica, was the only one who knew the details of the trip to Florida, and he was outraged and consumed with feelings of guilt and remorse.

"He convinced me that, unlike Jim and John, he would take care of me and that our love would be wonderful and pure. But I want to make it clear that I wanted the relationship as much as he did. I could have walked away but chose not to. He loved me. He made me feel safe."

Soon after, Jessica began a full-fledged romance with Profeta. However, she began to notice that he was becoming increasingly obsessed with the conduct of his fellow clergymen. "He would say to me, 'I'll help you forget the pain Jim and John caused; I'll make things right.' It all sounded like something I'd heard before, and I knew something was wrong."

While Jessica would have liked to end the affair on any number of occasions, she found the combination of security, power and gifts, along with Profeta's increasingly tight hold over her personal life, much stronger. "I loved the man, but as I have grown up, I realize the power and the gifts and all of that were also very intoxicating."

Eventually, as the revelations about Bakker grew imminent, Profeta took over and began to orchestrate her every move. He contacted the PTL, hired Paul Roper, the law student who Jessica thought was an attorney, who negotiated the "settlement," and told Jessica what to say and to whom.

"Even when I was telling my story to Playboy the first time, Gene refused to let me talk about him. I was protecting the guy, because I loved him."

To everyone's surprise, at the same time that the Playboy piece was being published, the New York attorney general began looking into the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church and the Reverend Gene Profeta. Of course, having been at his side for more than eight years, Jessica was the primary source of information in the case. This made Profeta extremely nervous.

"Gene figured that now that I had some money and independence, I was liable to say something about him that was damaging. That's when all of these liars came crawling out of the woodwork with Jessica Hahn revelations.

"Listen, I was no angel, especially when I was with Gene, and I certainly wasn't a hooker at 17 or any age! All of the people who came forward with 'information' on me were associated with the church in some way, and they all knew about Gene and me. I find it interesting that not one of them mentioned our affair--which would have buried me at the time--because it didn't look good for the pastor."

"I covered up Gene Profeta's role in my story," she admits now. "I did it to protect a man I loved. He was in control of my story. He demanded that I be silent, and I was until the grand-jury investigation, when I decided to cooperate.

"Unlike Gene, Jim Bakker had perverted ideas about sex. These men behind the pulpit--they think sex is dirty," she says. "They spend so much time telling people it's dirty that when they finally give in to it themselves, it is dirty."

Bakker's sexual perversion of December 6, 1980--Jessica has called it rape--has been widely recounted (see The Jessica Hahn Story, Playboy, November and December 1987). He forced himself on a bewildered girl, then left her to be ravished by Fletcher. Bakker's financial rape of the PTL, which made Profeta's alleged mismanagement of his own church look penny ante, led to the crumbling of his empire.

"Bakker used other people to service him--emotionally, financially and sexually," Jessica says. "He thought he was bigger than God, and it finally caught up with him."

Through PTL operatives, Bakker promised Jessica $265,000 in "hush money." Of this, she actually received only $20,000, plus several small payments from a PTL trust fund. Her "legal advisor" took $95,000. The rest remained within the PTL "family." Still, she kept Bakker's dirty secret to herself for seven years before the story broke last fall. Jessica expected fundamentalists to be shocked by the revelations about Bakker but was stunned when she realized that they would neither forgive nor forget her. Even her own congregation turned against her.

"They blamed me for the fall of the PTL," she says. "They still do. That's what makes me angry and bitter. Instead of saying 'OK, all the dirty stuff is over now; let's get back to worshiping,' they chose to blame me." Watching the sun on Hugh Hefner's pool, she reflects, "Instead of saying 'Jim Bakker set himself up,' they chose to hate me. They called me a liar and a prostitute. Men came out of the woodwork to say they'd had affairs with me, when, in fact, I'd been at church, at Gene Profeta's side, almost 24 hours a day. I took lie-detector tests and passed them. Still, no one wanted to believe me. I was on my own, except for the reporters and photographers who camped out on my lawn."

Lying in bed on her 28th birthday, she contemplated suicide. She says she spoke with God and asked for a miracle.

"The next day, Playboy called. That was my miracle."

Hungry, broke, friendless, she agreed to Hefner's offer to tell her story in full. In the following months, the walls came crumbling down on Jim Bakker and the PTL, while Jessica went from frightened and broke to confident and nearly wealthy (before taxes).

"I guess you could call me Jessica Hahn, media creature. I don't mind. I'm growing into the role," she says. "At times, I've felt like doing an Elvis and shooting the TV I've even seen it reported that I had 'an affair' with Jim Bakker! But I've learned to take the bad with the good. The first time I posed for Playboy, I was scared to death of what people would say I thought, God, am I going to catch hell for this! And, of course, I did. But I survived and got stronger. This time, I concentrated on pleasing me. And let me tell you, the pictures you see here are more of a fantasy for me than for any man who is going to pick up the magazine."

This month, Playboy features Jessica's new attitude, as well as her new nose, teeth and breasts. She is not at all abashed about admitting she has had cosmetic surgery.

"What you see here is what I fantasized the first time I posed for Playboy. This is the soft, sexy, new Jessica."

During the shooting of these pictures, she found herself getting more excited every time Contributing Photographer Richard Fegley clicked a shutter. She insisted that Fegley work overtime to capture every soft, sexy impulse that arose from the new, improved Jessica.

"As Richard took these pictures, I thought, Jessica, you don't have to be ashamed ever again. You don't have to answer to any preacher, or any preacher's wife, or anybody. We put on music--some of it was even Gospel--and all of a sudden, I felt free. I didn't have to cover my breasts anymore. And it wasn't dirty, it was pretty," she exults. "Here's the one thing I'd like to tell all the people back at Full Gospel Tabernacle Church: God loves the sinners and the centerfolds, too, not just the saints and the righteous."

Since Jessica moved into the Playboy Mansion, she has moved in a circle of celebrities. Still, she says, Hefner is the number-one celeb in her life.

"He opened his home to me. He calls me 'the unsinkable Jessica,' but I might have sunk if not for him."

This year, in an incident that still mystifies her, Jessica was cast as home wrecker in a palimony suit between Hefner and his ex-lover Carrie Leigh. When Leigh sued Hefner, she said Jessica had been "instrumental" in the breakup. The juicy implication of this charge--which Leigh later recanted--made headlines.

Hefner's new consort, leggy Canadian Kimberley Conrad, is less of a problem for her friends. She and Jessica share clothes and make-up, read the newspapers together, romp with Kimberley's dogs and sometimes bicker like sisters.

"It's like having a whole new family, living here, and yet we all have our privacy," says Jessica. "Kim has her time with Hef and I have my time with me.

In her private times, Jessica reflects on her year in the eye of controversy and keeps one eye on the televangelists. She is amused by Jim and Tammy Bakker's latest bid to rebuild their shattered empire.

Jimmy Swaggart, she says, is a phony. "He's power mad. Now he wants to preach again. He thinks he's above the law, even God's law. Men like Jimmy Swaggart have hurt religion for millions of people who just wanted to get closer to God. It's going to take a miracle for those people to feel like they can go to church again without being taken. Remember, I do believe in miracles. They happen every day."

In April 1988, Jessica received a request from PTL's legal department for the $160,000 remaining in the trust fund. At that point, Jessica was unaware that the fund was intact. Jerry Falwell had assured her that it no longer existed. When she learned that the PTL was trying to take over the fund, Jessica said, "I'd be glad to help, if only the PTL would tell me how it would be used. I didn't want them buying Jacuzzis with it. I'd gladly have given the money to PTL if it would be used to save the ministry. Then I read in the paper that the PTL could never accept help from Jessica Hahn, a sinner who lives in Hugh Hefner's house. Well, they did ask for my help. I have their request in writing."

Jessica says she looks for God on her own, without benefit of television clergy.

"I'm not worshiping through any man or any ministry, but my relationship with God hasn't changed. I talk to Him all the time."

She would like to have a church to attend but knows she would be unwelcome at Full Gospel Tabernacle back home in Massapequa. Driving up and down the California coast, pained by its occasional resemblance to song Island, she has searched for a house of worship. She has walked into a few, between services, ever ready to turn and run lest she be recognized, pointed at and cast out again, but has yet to find a church to call her own.

Among the "sinners and centerfolds" at Playboy Mansion West, she walks, prays for guidance and gathers her strength in preparation for the next chapter in the life of the most famous church lady of the tele-vangelical age.

"I would like to make up for the hurt so many people have felt--those whose faith got shaken by these scandals--to touch their lives. I would like to reach out to all the people who have hurt like I have hurt, and searched like I have searched, and are close to giving up hope. I would like to tell them that there's always a way out. Just when you think your story is over, there's a miracle around the corner. Don't give up hope. Just look up--that's where your source is, where to find your strength."

The next chapter may be the most unlikely of all. "I can hear people saying, 'Jessica, are you talking about preaching?' All I know is, I have a message. If God wants that message to be heard, He'll take care of everything. He always does."

"'I know I'll always be controversial, whether I wear a choir gown or nothing at all.' "

"I don't agree with all the preachers who say sex is dirty. It may be the best thing God created. It's like a taste of heaven. There's something for the preachers to think about!"