In 1987, Jimmy Swaggart went on Larry King Live and called a rival TV preacher caught in a sex scandal “a cancer in the body of Christ.” The next year, a private detective’s camera caught Swaggart himself. Swaggart was Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousin, and his ministry made an estimated $142 million in 1986. In 1986 he also exposed another preacher, Marvin Gorman, for having an affair. Gorman left the ministry. Gorman wanted revenge. He hired a detective, who photographed Swaggart at a motel outside New Orleans with a prostitute named Debra Murphree. She later said he paid her to pose nude. On February 21, 1988, he stood in front of about 7,000 people at his own church in Baton Rouge. He never said what he had done. In the video below, his face twists as he looks up and says, “I have sinned against you, my Lord.” He asks for every stain to be washed away “until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness.” His church ordered him out of the pulpit for a year. He refused and was defrocked. He later paid Gorman $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit. In 1991, police in California pulled him over for driving on the wrong side of the road. The woman in his Jaguar said she was a prostitute. This time there were no tears. He told his church, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.” He died in July 2025, at 90. Netflix’s documentary on the TV preacher scandals comes out November 20. So were the tears in 1988 real, or did he just know what 7,000 people and a TV camera needed to see?