Robert Tilton

==Ministry and fundraising scandal==
In 1991, [[ABC News]] conducted an investigation of Tilton (as well as two other Dallas-area televangelists, Grant and [[Larry Lea]]). The investigation, assisted by [[Trinity Foundation (Dallas)|Trinity Foundation]] president [[Ole Anthony]] and broadcast on [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]]'s ''[[Primetime Live]]'' on November 21, 1991, alleged 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.<ref name="pt" />

===Allegations of exploitation of vulnerable people===
Anthony, a Christian minister whose organization works with the homeless and the poor on the east side of Dallas, first took an interest in Tilton's ministry in the late 1980s after encountering needy people who told him they had lost all of their money making donations to high-profile televangelists, especially 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 Trinity after he had been turned away from Tilton's church when he found himself on hard times following a divorce. He had been a longtime 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 [[United States Air Force|Air Force]] intelligence officer 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 later did much of the legwork in uncovering the paper trail for the ABC News investigation.<ref name="trinity">[http://www.trinityfi.org/press/newyorker.html "The Antichrist of East Dallas"], Burkhard Bilger, ''[[The New Yorker]]'', first published on December 6, 2004; retrieved June 11, 2006.</ref>

===Undercover investigation===
In a November 21, 1991, promotional appearance on ''[[Live with Kelly and Ryan|Live with Regis and Kathie Lee]]'', Diane Sawyer said that she had incidentally watched several televangelist programs, including ''Success-N-Life'', and was both "fascinated" and "disturbed" by them. Stressing the public's sensitivity to reporters questioning religion, Sawyer said that she spoke with other journalists, and then eventually to ABC producers, who then decided to conduct their own investigation into Grant, Lea, and Tilton.<ref name="LiveRegisKathieLee">''[[Live with Kelly and Ryan|Live with Regis and Kathie Lee]]'', aired November 21, 1991, as compiled on ''The Prophet of Prosperity: Robert Tilton and the Gospel of Greed'', DVD produced by The Trinity Foundation, publication date not specified.</ref> ABC producers learned about possible resources available from Anthony and Trinity, and contacted them for information. 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 as a Dallas-based minister with a small church looking into the ways TV ministries could grow so quickly, and the ABC producers would pose as Anthony's "media consultants."<ref name="LiveRegisKathieLee" />

===Meeting with Response Media===
The team, armed with hidden cameras and microphones, arrived for a meeting at Response Media, the [[Tulsa, Oklahoma|Tulsa]]-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 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 compelled the recipient to mail something back in return, and most recipients would include some money along with it. Moore declined to disclose how much Response Media was paid for its services or how much money the mailings were generating for the Tilton ministry.<ref name="pt" />

However, as part of his sales pitch to Anthony, Moore disclosed that the response letters generated by the fundraising mailings Response Media sends out for its clients were never delivered to the client; instead, they were 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 Anthony about dealing with the gimmick objects sent to the potential donors in the mails. One of the ABC producers asked 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."<ref name="pt" />

=== 1991 ''Primetime Live'' documentary ("The Apple of God's Eye") ===
Trinity members, acting on this information, started digging through [[dumpsters]] outside Tilton's many banks in the Tulsa area as well as dumpsters outside the office of Tilton's lawyer, J.&nbsp;C. Joyce (also based in Tulsa). Over the next thirty days, Trinity's "garbologists", as Anthony dubbed them,<ref name="trinity" /> 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 Tilton segment within the ''Primetime Live'' broadcast, titled "The Apple of God's Eye".<ref name="pt" /> In a follow-up broadcast on November 28, 1991, Sawyer said that Trinity and ''Primetime Live'' assistants found prayer requests in bank dumpsters on fourteen separate occasions in a thirty day period.<ref name="pt_follow_up">Follow-up segment to "The Apple of God's Eye", ''Primetime Live'', first broadcast November 28, 1991.</ref>

===Denial===
Tilton vehemently denied the allegations and took to the airwaves on November 22, on a special episode of ''Success-N-Life'' entitled "Primetime Lies", to air his side of the story. He asserted that the prayer requests found in garbage bags shown on ''Primetime Live'' were stolen from the ministry and planted in the dumpster for a [[sensationalism|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 [his] bloodstream, and... [he] had two small [[stroke]]s in [his] brain."<ref name="pt_follow_up" /> 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 multimillion-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.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.salon.com/2000/11/21/tilton/|title=Oh God, you devil|first=Stephen|last=Bender|date=November 22, 2000|website=Salon}}</ref>

===Further revelations===
After Trinity 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, 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 information which demonstrated what happened to money and prayer requests which the average viewer of Tilton's television program sent him.<ref name="the_prophet_of_prosperity">''The Prophet of Prosperity: Robert Tilton and the Gospel of Greed'', DVD produced by The Trinity Foundation, publication date not specified.</ref> When both Tilton and his lawyer J.&nbsp;C. Joyce reacted to the news by claiming 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."<ref name="the_prophet_of_prosperity" />

''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 the ministry cared little for desperate followers who called for prayer, saying Tilton had a computer installed in July 1989 to make sure the operators talked to no caller for longer than seven minutes. The former employee also revealed very specific instructions were given to them in terms of how to talk with callers and 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 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 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 prayer requests which 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 the garage until Tilton had them thrown away. In the same interview, Tilton's former secretary came forward and claimed Tilton lifted excerpts from "get rich quick" books and used them in his sermons, and she never saw him perform normal pastoral duties such as visiting with the sick and praying with members.<ref name="pt_follow_up" />

===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 (law)|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.<ref name="the_prophet_of_prosperity" />

As each revelation became increasingly more damaging, viewership and donations declined dramatically. The last episode of ''Success-N-Life'' aired nationally on October 30, 1993. By that time, viewership had fallen 85 percent and monthly donations went from $8 million to $2 million.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.trinityfi.org/press/tilton3.html|title=The Resurrection of Robert Tilton|access-date=April 15, 2017|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110728130645/http://www.trinityfi.org/press/tilton3.html|archive-date=July 28, 2011}}</ref>

===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 Rutherford Brett]], in his July 16, 1993, dismissal of the case, stated that information in Trinity'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 Anthony had recanted the erroneous entries in a subsequent [[affidavit]].<ref name="Wilonsky">{{Cite web|url=https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/the-robert-tilton-files-7117475|title=The Robert Tilton Files|last=Wilonsky|first=Robert|date=August 8, 2006|website=Dallas Observer|access-date=May 1, 2019}}</ref> Tilton appealed the decision in 1993; although the findings of the original court were upheld in 1995, federal Judge [[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 Anthony from her work as a religion reporter at ABC affiliate [[WFAA-TV]] in Dallas), that, "Mr. Anthony could not be trusted and was obsessed with his crusade against [Tilton]."<ref name="Wilonsky"/> Tilton once more appealed the decision, this time to the [[Supreme Court of the United States|U.S. Supreme Court]] in 1996, but the court refused to hear the case.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://apnews.com/c3918a1411552cb21401776084f5158a|title=Supreme court rejects suit by television evangelist Robert Tilton|last=Carelli|first=Richard|website=AP NEWS|access-date=May 1, 2019}}</ref>

=== Tilton sued for fraud ===
Several donors to Tilton's television ministry sued Tilton in 1992–1993, charging various forms of fraud. One plaintiff, 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 or even intended to be built.<ref name="cbs" /> The judgment was later reversed on appeal.

As part of the [[defense (law)|defense]] strategy to the fraud cases, Tilton sued Anthony, Guetzlaff and four plaintiff's lawyers who had filed the fraud cases against him in federal court in Tulsa. The tactic is known to critics as a "SLAPP" ([[strategic lawsuit against public participation]]) suit. Tilton claimed that the individuals conspired to violate his [[First Amendment]] rights under a federal statute designed to protect black citizens from the [[Ku Klux Klan]]. ([[Enforcement Act of 1871 (third act)|42 U.S.C. Sec. 1985.]]) Defense attorneys Martin Merritt of Dallas and [[ACLU]] lawyer Michael Linz, also of Dallas, with others, won dismissal for the six defendants in federal district court. On appeal, in ''Tilton v. Richardson'', 6 F.3d 683 (10th Cir.1993), the [[10th Circuit Court of Appeals]] affirmed the dismissal on the grounds that 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1985 did not protect a nonminority individual against a purely private conspiracy, if one existed. The fraud cases continued until the [[Texas Supreme Court]] eventually ruled that the plaintiffs could not prove damages because they could not show that, if Tilton had actually prayed over the prayer requests, the prayers would have been answered.{{citation needed|date=September 2015}}

The decline of ''Success-N-Life'' also led to the end of Tilton's 25-year marriage to his wife Marte, who had been 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.<ref name="the_prophet_of_prosperity" /> Marte intervened in Tilton's second divorce from Leigh Valentine, who had asked the court to include the church and all its assets as community property in the proceedings. Under Texas law, property accumulated during a marriage is considered community property and thus subject to division between the parties in a divorce. The jury eventually ruled against the request.<ref name="divorce">{{cite web|url=http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1997/march3/7t363b.html|title=Tilton's Church to Retain Assets|date=March 3, 1997 |access-date=April 15, 2017}}</ref>
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