[Marvin Gorman] confronted Swaggart. They climbed into Gorman's car; and, according to the Gorman confidant, the Pentecostal inquisitor broke down and confessed that he'd had a problem "for some time." For two hours he wept, begging Gorman to show mercy in the same way other wayward preachers had begged to Swaggart over the years before Swaggart, as one evangelist put it, "ground them to dust."

Spearheading what Gorman portrayed as a brotherly lynch mob, Swaggart helped prepare a church statement accusing Gorman of "numerous adulterous and illicit affairs"-a statement read to Gorman's former flock July 20, 1986. Three weeks later, Gorman was permanently dismissed from his denomination after Swaggart wrote Louisiana District Superintendent Cecil Janway. It was Janway who this week urged leniency for Swaggart in his hour of crisis.

In October 1986, to curtail what one former PTL official calls Swaggart's "smart remarks," Bakker kicked Swaggart off his PTL network. Also removed from PTL programming was Tennessee evangelist John Ankerberg, who last year joined Swaggart in instigating the church investigation of the sex scandal that brought down Bakker's empire. Swaggart called Bakker a "cancer" on God's kingdom, sneering at "pretty little boys with their hair done and their nails done, who call themselves preachers."