Tammy Faye divorced Jim Bakker in 1992 while he was serving his federal sentence, and married building contractor Roe Messner, who had built much of Heritage USA, in 1993. Messner was himself later convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 1995 and served about two years in prison, an echo of the financial troubles that had ended the marriage he replaced.
Tammy Faye rebuilt a public career on her own terms after PTL, appearing in concerts, a short lived secular television talk show, and eventually a series of interviews and appearances that introduced her, for the first time, to an audience well outside evangelical broadcasting. Her consistent public message of acceptance, delivered without qualification to interviewers who asked her directly about gay viewers, won her an improbable following as a gay icon in her later years, a reputation many of PTL's original viewers did not share and one she never disavowed.
Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, she spoke about the disease publicly for more than a decade, including in a 2004 documentary, Tammy Faye: Death Defying, made after the cancer had spread to her lungs. She continued public appearances and interviews until weeks before her death, telling audiences in her final months that doctors had stopped treating the disease. She died in Loch Lloyd, Missouri, on July 20, 2007, at age 65.