
Pastor Robert Morris, a 21-year-old father and spouse, traveled the nation in 1982 sharing Jesus with young people.
Cindy Clemishire was a twelve-year-old girl who still enjoyed playing with Barbie dolls and wore flowery pink pajamas.
During Christmas of that year, Morris, who would later become a prominent figure in the American evangelical movement and found Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, started what he would later refer to as “inappropriate sexual behavior” with Clemishire while he was visiting her parents in Oklahoma. Morris, according to Clemishire, instructed her to see him in his room before going to bed, and she was the kind of girl who followed guidance from responsible adults.
However, a lawyer for Morris retaliated by holding Clemishire responsible for her misfortune after Clemishire hired an attorney and threatened to sue him 25 years later, alleging that he had regularly molested her as a youngster, according to 2007 email acquired by NBC News.
Attorney J. Shelby Sharpe wrote, “Your client entered my client’s bedroom and made love to him, which is inappropriate behavior that your client should not have permitted to occur.” Sharpe was referring to Clemishire at the age of twelve.
The correspondence dated February 6, 2007, was one of several letters that Sharpe and attorney Gentner Drummond, who was then representing Clemishire, exchanged that year. In an interview conducted last week, Clemishire stated that she had been requesting $50,000 in reparations from Morris in order to pay for the expense of therapy. Instead, Morris offered $25,000 through his attorney, but Clemishire claimed that because she refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement, the negotiations broke down.
The current attorney general of Oklahoma, Drummond, echoed Clemishire’s account of the 2007 talks but refrained from adding more details.
When contacted by phone on Monday, Sharpe claimed he no longer represented Morris and that he had no memory of the $25,000 settlement offer or the NDA demand. He denied being aware at the time that Morris had started having intercourse with Clemishire when she was a small child. But it was made quite evident in the first letter Drummond wrote to him that Clemishire was “twelve years old” at the time the abuse started.
After a reporter read him the document, Sharpe remarked, “I don’t ever remember seeing that.” Sharpe refused to provide an email address and stated he did not have time to read the letters when a reporter asked to provide a copy of them.
“The letters you’ve seen speak for themselves, I can assure you of that,” stated Sharpe, who has also represented Paige Patterson personally. Patterson is a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention who is accused of mishandling or covering up sexual assaults that occurred in the late 1980s. “Those letters speak for themselves, so I won’t elaborate further.”
Messages were not returned by Morris.
Last month, Clemishire made her claims public in a post that was published on The Wartburg Watch, a website that monitors churches. Morris replied that he had long before confessed and felt regret for his “inappropriate sexual behavior” and issued a statement. In the beginning, Gateway Church officials claimed that Morris had been “transparent and honest about a moral failing that occurred more than 35 years ago,” but they later admitted that they were unaware that Clemishire was still a minor.
Morris quit his position as lead pastor of the megachurch he founded in 2000 in a couple of days, and the elders of Gateway recruited an outside law firm to look into the situation.
A spokesman for Gateway Lawrence Swicegood stated that church officials were unaware of the letters that Drummond and Sharpe exchanged in 2007. Prior to Clemishire’s revelations last month, according to Swicegood, “Not all the information was known to the current Elders.”
The church announced last month that four Gateway officials have agreed to take leaves of absence from the board of elders while the internal probe is ongoing. The first is Robert Morris’s son, pastor James Morris. Throughout the crucial years between 2005 and 2007, when Clemishire was suing for damages, the other three were members of the board of elders.
In an email, Swicegood stated, “Gateway Church is dedicated to safeguarding individuals, with a primary focus on children and the most susceptible groups.” “We just cannot tolerate abuse.”
The 54-year-old Clemishire saw Sharpe’s 2007 letter as one more example of Morris and his allies trying to instill guilt and shame in her for what he did to her.
According to Clemishire, “A youngster is not seen as someone to be protected by them.”
According to Clemishire, she suffered from “profound confusion” for years over Morris’ actions and thought she was at fault for almost 20 years. In four and a half years, Morris, according to her, abused her more than 100 times. Clemishire claimed that “It simply developed into a lot of touching, kissing, and sticking of fingers into my body” following their initial encounter on Christmas Eve in 1982. She claimed that despite Morris’s push, she declined to have sex. Morris has admitted to “kissing and petting,” but he has maintained that there were far fewer instances than Clemishire claims.
Clemishire claimed that she came to the realization that what had occurred to her was illegal in the middle of the 2000s, following years of therapy and watching a television interview regarding grooming and sex assault.
In 2005, she started sending emails to Morris at his Gateway Church email address, requesting that he make up for the pain she claimed he caused her. According to records released to NBC News by her lawyer Boz Tchividjian this month, she engaged Drummond in 2007 to make a formal demand.
Drummond used Clemishire’s then-legal name, Cindy Clemishire McCaleb, in a letter to Sharpe dated January 30, 2007. Morris “gave her the impression that their particular bond needed to be kept a secret,” according to Clemishire, who claims to have undergone sexual assault from 1982 to 1987. Drummond went into depth about this.
Drummond stated, “Morris persuaded Ms. McCaleb that she was the perpetrator and that she was accountable for what he did to her.”
A draft of the lawsuit Drummond said Clemishire intended to bring in the event that Morris did not reply within 15 days was attached.
A week later, on February 6, 2007, Sharpe wrote back, accusing Clemishire of being the one who first made sexual contact with Morris.
In the letter, Sharpe further asserted that Clemishire, who was between the ages of 12 and 17, “behaved improperly toward two additional men who resided in her house from 1982 to 1987.” Additionally, Sharpe reported that Clemishire had “confessed her conduct” to Glenda Faulkner, a former member of Shady Grove Church in the 1980s—when Morris was the pastor there—and that Clemishire had done so to her.
Licensed counselor Glenda Faulkner-Woodliff, who subsequently attended Gateway, did not reply to mails seeking comment from Faulkner.
Clemishire refuted Sharpe’s portrayals in an interview. She claimed that while she was a child, two additional males touched her improperly at her house, although she did not start those interactions. In one case, Clemishire claimed, Morris gave her the order to enter a bedroom at her childhood home where a fellow traveling missionary was residing when she was thirteen years old. She claimed that after entering, the man—whom she wished to remain anonymous—started kissing her but soon withdrew and informed her that she was too young.
Another incident happened in 1986, according to Clemishire, when a different guest of her family climbed on top of her as she slept on a sofa bed close to his 3-year-old daughter. She said the man abruptly left her, even though she thought he was about to rape her.
Clemishire declared, “I genuinely believe God intervened.” God gave him the impression that someone was passing by, and then he simply rolled off of me.
According to Clemishire, it was because of that particular occurrence that she ultimately decided to confide in her family friend Faulkner-Woodliff. Clemishire remarked when Faulkner-Woodliff questioned if anyone else had ever touched her in that manner. Then, she said, Clemishire gave a grudging explanation of what Morris had done to her. After that, Faulkner-Woodliff pushed on her to tell her parents, according to Clemishire.
According to Clemishire, this is how her father found out that Morris had been assaulting her sexually in March 1987. She claimed that her father became furious and called Shady Grove Church senior pastor Olen Griffing to insist that Morris leave his position as minister.
A few days later, Clemishire recalls receiving a call from Debbie, Morris’s wife.
“I forgive you,” Debbie said to her.
“I will always remember that,” Clemishire remarked. They wanted me to think that I was the one who caused everything—that is, that I was the child. And they haven’t given up on attempting to convince me of that.
Later, Griffing—who is already in his 80s—worked under Morris at Gateway Church as an elder and pastor. Messages were not returned by him.
The discussions that Clemishire described that year between her sister, her parents, Griffing, Faulkner-Woodliff, and the Morris family were confirmed by her older sister, who was residing with her family in 1987.
Since then, Morris has narrated the incident in a sanitized and occasionally twisted manner on numerous occasions. From the pulpit, he has frequently discussed his struggles with sexual immorality and his decision to leave the ministry in 1987. However, in public statements, he claims that his sinful pride was the cause, leaving out the details of his years of child sex.
Speaking on June 10, 2017, Morris talked of going through a “restoration process” approximately seven years into his marriage, or in 1987, during a sermon at Gateway Church titled “The Principle of Honesty.” Morris said that Griffing, the former senior pastor of Shady Grove, and his wife Debbie were the two people to whom God had instructed him to confess “everything that I’ve ever done.”
“I must inform you about your true spouse,” he claimed he informed Debbie.
Morris stated in the 2017 sermon that the confession spanned several hours, but he did not list any particular sins from the pulpit.
Morris opened with, “I will always remember what she said,” evoking laughs from the Gateway crowd. “Robert, I knew you were bad before I married you,” she murmured. I had no idea you were that awful.
When Morris recounted the tale once more on August 28, 2022, in a sermon titled “Passing the Purity Test,” he encouraged the congregation to imitate his candor regarding his previous transgressions.
He told the Old Testament tale of Amnon, the son of King David, who is supposed to have sexually assaulted Tamar while she was a teenager in that lecture. The Bible claims that Amnon’s love for Tamar changed to a fierce loathing after he sexually assaulted her, according to Morris.
Morris used the scripture to warn “young ladies” in his church about the consequences of letting men have sex with them before being married.
Morris stated, “Here’s why love can turn into hate: when love becomes lust and that lust is satiated.” “Young ladies, you have his respect, which is one of the reasons he loves you.” It’s possible that the very thing the world advises you to give him in order to maintain him will also be the reason you lose him.
Since “you can’t love someone you don’t respect,” he explained.
Clemishire stated that she has always felt that if Morris had not kept the truth about what he had done to her a secret, none of it would have been possible. She has seen Morris amass fortune, power, and notoriety over the years.
Morris’s attorney, Sharpe, responded to Drummond on February 16, 2007, expressing a want to avoid taking her claims to court. He suggested using “Christian arbitration consistent with 1 Corinthians 6:1-8” to resolve the dispute, alluding to a verse in the Bible that evangelicals frequently use to argue that suing fellow Christians is wrong.
According to Sharpe, his sole intention while making the recommendation was to “Try to come to a satisfactory conclusion for everyone at that moment.”
Clemishire, however, feels that the real intention was to keep her quiet and shield Morris from the kinds of consequences that have befallen him since she made her public last month. She did not consent to the arbitration.
According to Clemishire, “There didn’t seem to be any genuine regret or contrition for what had occurred.”
“That was not how it would have been answered,” she added if it hadn’t.