A Dallas-area Christian megachurch has removed four of its elders after an internal investigation into how the institution handled revelations of child sexual abuse by its founder, a former spiritual adviser to Donald Trump.
An official at Gateway church announced during a service on Saturday that the ousted leaders either knew that Robert Morris molested a girl for several years beginning in 1982, when she was 12, or “failed to inquire further” after being informed of it, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Gateway did not identify the removed leaders, but the Morning News found four names had been taken off the church’s elders page: Jeremy Carrasco, Kevin Grove, Gayland Lawshe and Thomas Miller. Remaining were Kenneth W Fambro II, Dane Minor and Tra Willbanks, who made Saturday’s announcement about the other elders, who had belonged to what was essentially Gateway’s directing board.
Willbanks added that those who knew Morris’s molestation survivor “was 12 at the time of the abuse” but failed to act “are fundamentally wrong and simply cannot – and will not – be tolerated”.
The announcement from Willbanks provided another chapter to a scandal centering on a figure with ties to Trump’s two prior presidential runs. And it came days before the election on Tuesday, in which Trump is also running.
Morris resigned in June over his admission that he engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a girl – who has publicly identified herself as Cindy Clemishire – between 1982 and 1987, starting when she was a preteen. He made it a point to say that the sexual contact stopped short of intercourse, though he described “kissing and petting … [that] was wrong”.
Morris has said he took time off from preaching in 1987 after confessing the abuse to his superiors back then, but the details of the molestation did not immediately become public. He later founded the Gateway church in 2000 in Southlake, Texas, and it grew into one of the largest institutions of its kind in the US, with more than 100,000 congregants.
The Christian Post religious publication first reported the allegations from Clemishire which precipitated Morris’s resignation. The Gateway church condemned Morris’s actions while initially maintaining that it did not have all the details of the “inappropriate relationship between [him] and the victim, including her age at the time and the length of the abuse”.
In a statement provided to the Guardian, the church elders claimed to have believed that Morris had engaged in an “extramarital relationship … with ‘a young lady’” and had no prior indication he had sexually molested a child. But, as described on Saturday by Willbanks, the findings of an internal investigation conducted by Texas’s Haynes and Boone law firm have seemingly contradicted that in the case of most of the church’s elders.
Willbanks said he could not discuss the matter further because of litigation and a criminal investigation that were pending. He did not elaborate on precisely who or what authorities were investigating.
Morris was reportedly among a half-dozen people to refuse to cooperate with Hayne and Boone’s investigation. Willbanks also said Morris reacted to Clemishire’s going public about his abuse by instructing church staff to issue a statement minimizing her account.
The 63-year-old Morris had previously occupied visible spots alongside Trump as The Apprentice star won the presidency in 2016 and then lost it in 2020.
Morris was on Trump’s evangelical advisory board for the first of those campaigns. And, for the second of those campaigns, he took part in a roundtable discussion with the former president and faith leaders at Gateway.
Trump’s team has said Morris has not been a part of the Republican nominee’s third run for the White House, culminating on Tuesday against the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Morris was a traveling evangelist at the time he began abusing Clemishire and was friends with her family. Clemishire said Morris asked for – and received – forgiveness from her father. But her family did not want him to ever return to ministry.
Another official to resign from Gateway church after Clemishire spoke out was Morris’s son, James, who in September launched a new church.
At one point, during a recorded telephone call, Morris offered to pay Clemishire to remain silent about her abuse, NBC News previously reported, citing a transcript.
Yet he reportedly hung up after Clemishire asked for $2m.
