Names and faces
■ New York’s top law enforcement officer told televangelist Jim Bakker to stop making misleading claims about a product’s effectiveness as a treatment for coronavirus, saying there is no specific medication available to prevent or cure the disease. State Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to Bakker this week, noting that a guest on his Feb. 12 show touted a dietary supplement called Silver Solution, which is sold on the show’s website. The guest said the product hadn’t been tested on the current coronavirus but had been found to eliminate similar viruses within 12 hours. Silver Solution costs $300 for a dozen 16-ounce bottles. In the letter, James wrote that “Your show’s segment may mislead consumers as to the effectiveness of the Silver Solution product in protecting against the current outbreak.” The letter also asked Bakker to affix a disclaimer to all Silver Solution products indicating that any statements about the product’s effectiveness have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The Jim Bakker Show didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment. In the 1980s, Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, who died in 2007, spread the gospel through their PTL television ministry to 13.5 million homes, generating more than $120 million in annual revenue. The ministry ended in 1987 when Bakker resigned amid disclosures he had sex with a former church secretary, Jessica Hahn, and that he used $265,000 in ministry money to buy her silence. Bakker reemerged as a televangelist in 2003 with a new show airing on DirecTV and other providers.
■ Oprah Winfrey reversed her book club selection of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s forthcoming My Dark Vanessa after the novel was briefly the subject of online controversy, a spokeswoman confirmed Thursday. “Ultimately, we did not end up moving forward with it as a book club selection,” a representative for Winfrey said. Winfrey’s dropping of the novel followed her highly controversial choice of Jeanine Cummins’ My American Dirt, the best-seller about Mexicans fleeing to the U.S. border that has been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes. The novel has intensified an ongoing debate over the lack of Hispanic representation in the publishing industry. Winfrey said in a February interview that she did not want to “wade” again into controversies that took away attention from the books themselves. Russell’s novel, My Dark Vanessa, the story of a teenager’s relationship with her high school English teacher, was one of the most anticipated books of 2020. However, author Wendy Ortiz has alleged that it was lifted from her memoir Excavation. Reviewers who looked at both books saw no evidence of plagiarism, and Russell has since said the novel was based in part on her own life.