Texas megachurch founder and pastor Robert Morris, who recently resigned after confessing to sexually assaulted a child in the 1980s, attempted to pay his abuse survivor for her silence, according to a leaked phone transcript.
The transcript from 22 September 2005, provided to NBC by a former employee of Gateway church, shows Morris telling his victim, who recently revealed herself to be Cindy Clemishire, to “put a price on it”, when she asked to be compensated for the trauma inflicted on her.
“It is not a small number,” Clemishire said. “Money doesn’t make you happy and I can understand that. So that is not what this is about.”
The transcript allegedly shows Clemishire requesting “$2m”, at which point Morris hung up the phone.
The transcript was found when the employee was transferring files from Morris’s computer to a new laptop. Gateway did not comment on the validity of the transcript.
Morris founded Gateway in 2000, now one of the largest megachurches in the United States and located in Southlake, Texas. He rose to fame as an evangelical leader, preaching purity and about the power of prayer in his sermons and books and even sat on then president Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory board.
Clemishire publicly alleged that Morris began assaulting her in 1982 in her home when she was 12, and the abuse continued for many years. Morris was a traveling evangelist at the time and a family friend to the Clemishires. He said he confessed to Clemishire’s father years ago and earned his forgiveness. But Clemishire said while they forgave Morris, she and her family never wanted him to return to ministry.
In a statement, Gateway’s board of elders said it knew of Morris’s self-described “moral failure”, but only in part since Morris only confessed to “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady”. But in June, Clemishire said she was actually a child when the abuse began – not a consenting adult.
The statement read: “Regretfully, prior to Friday, June 14, the elders did not have all the facts of the inappropriate relationship between Morris and the victim, including her age at the time and the length of the abuse.
“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had discussed many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not abuse of a 12-year-old child. Even though it occurred many years before Gateway was established, as leaders of the church, we regret that we did not have the information that we now have.”
The church accepted Morris’s resignation earlier this month when the truth came out.
Gateway did not respond to a request for comment regarding the leaked phone transcripts.
