Evangelical child sex predator "Pastor" Robert Morris threatened his sex abuse victim of legal consequences
Two decades before he publicly confessed last week to engaging in “sexual behavior” with a child and resigned from Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, his accuser had confronted him in an e-mail.
“Twenty-three years after you began destroying my life, I am still dealing with the pain and damage you caused,” Cindy Clemishire, 35 at the time, wrote to Morris on Sept. 20, 2005. “I want some type of restitution. Pray about it and call me.” Morris responded two weeks later.
Morris's sex victim Cindy Clemishire (left) with her sister
“Debbie and I really do care for you and we sincerely want God’s best for you,” he wrote, referring to his wife, Debbie Morris, according to the emails. Robert Morris wrote that he’d long ago confessed his sins to Clemishire’s father and believed that he’d “obtained your forgiveness as well as your family’s.”
Morris ended his reply with a legal warning: “My attorney advises that if I pay you any money under a threat of exposure, you could be criminally prosecuted and Debbie and I do not want that,” he wrote. “If you need more information, have your attorney contact mine.”
Morris’s email was the final exchange in a series of messages that year between Clemishire, Morris and a former Gateway elder, Clemishire said. The emails, spanning from April to October 2005, appear to reveal Clemishire’s attempts to get Morris — who later rose to become a leading evangelical figure who served on former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory panel — to compensate her for the trauma she says he inflicted on her as a child.
“Men that have over 100 counts of child molestation go to prison,” Clemishire wrote to Morris in one of the messages. “Men who pastor churches that have over 100 counts of child molestation go to prison and pay punitive damages. You have not had to do either.”
At the urging of a retired pastor, Clemishire went public with her allegations against Morris last week in a post published by The Wartburg Watch, a website focused on exposing abuse in churches. Clemishire accused Morris of molesting her for years beginning at her home in Oklahoma on Christmas night in 1982, when she was 12. Morris hasn’t been charged with a crime.
Last weekend, Morris and Gateway’s elders initially responded to Clemishire’s allegations by acknowledging in statements that Morris had several sexual encounters with a “young lady” and saying he had been transparent about his sin and had repented. On Tuesday, following days of backlash from church members and elected officials, Gateway’s board of elders announced it had accepted Morris’ resignation.
“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,” the church leaders said in their statement. Clemishire and her lawyer, Boz Tchividjian, contend that Gateway elders should have long ago investigated Morris’ account of a consensual relationship.
“It seems as if it was preferable for them [Church edlers] to simply accept his vague narrative instead of seeking the truth regarding a sexual offense perpetrated upon a minor,” attorney Tchividjian said. “The leaders at Gateway had the responsibility to find out what happened and not to blindly accept his words.”
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