Texas megachurch pastor Robert Morris once asked his sexual assault accuser how much her silence would cost her, a shocking phone transcript revealed.
Morris, 62, founder and senior pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake – one of the largest megachurches in the country – has been accused of He sexually abused his former family friend Cindy Clemishire in the 1980s, when she was just 12 years old.
Clemishire, now 54, was eventually He went public with his allegations in a blog post on The Wartburg Watch, a website dedicated to exposing abuse in churches, last week.
But when he first threatened to expose Morris’ sexual assault in 2005, the pastor asked him to “put a price,” according to a transcript of a Sept. 22, 2005, phone call. obtained by NBC News.
Pastor Robert Morris, 62, allegedly once asked his sexual abuser to “put a price” on his silence, a newly released telephone transcript reveals.
Cindy Clemishire, now 54, announced last week that Morris had sexually abused her in the 1980s, starting when she was just 12.
Clemishire had approached the pastor just two days earlier and asked Morris to compensate her for the trauma she suffered.
“Twenty-three years after you began destroying my life, I am still dealing with the pain and damage you caused,” Clemishire, then 35, wrote in an email to Morris on Sept. 20, 2005.
“I want some kind of restitution,” he continued. “Pray about it and call me.”
The pastor would call her again two days later, and his wife, Debbie, would be on the line.
In the phone call with Clemishire, he recounted how he left the ministry and sought counseling in 1987, after his father confronted him and church leaders about the assault.
But Clemishire told Morris she should have paid a higher price for the pain she endured.
“Two years out of the ministry is not a big deal,” he said, according to the telephone transcript.
“I just have a real problem with the fact that this hasn’t affected you.”
Morris would later respond: “Maybe they didn’t ask me to do enough, but I did everything they asked me to do.”
Morris was already married to his wife, Debbie, when the abuse occurred.
Later in the conversation, Clemishire would describe watching interviews with victims of child abuse and connecting those stories to her own experience.
She said it helped her better understand what she had endured.
“I just can’t believe how I’ve justified and made excuses,” Clemishire said in the phone call.
She then asked Morris to imagine if “this kind of thing” had happened to her daughter, who was a teenager at the time.
“I think you’d be horrified. At least I hope you are,” he reportedly said.
When Morris admitted he would be horrified, Clemishire pressed him on what he would want to happen if he learned that a church pastor had committed a crime against a child years earlier.
“Don’t you think they should pay?” he asked.
It may help you to see that person go to prison. But don’t you think they should pay for the crime committed?
“I don’t know if it would be my responsibility to make them pay for the crime committed or not,” Morris responded.
Clemishire approached the pastor in 2005, asking him to compensate her for the trauma she suffered, but she insists she was not blackmailing him for money.
Still, Clemshire persisted, saying, “I really, honestly feel like it’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair that for everything I’ve been through and what I’m still going through, you don’t have (repercussions),” he said, according to the transcript.
He also told her that if she pressed criminal charges or made the story public, “it would destroy everything you have.”
“I just know I want to see you pay for something,” the victim reportedly said.
Morris then told Clemishire it would be wrong for him to pay her to stop her from going public, but the victim insisted she was “not trying to blackmail him.”
“I’m not trying to say, ‘You pay me or this is what I’m going to do.'”
“Okay,” Morris said. Do you want to put an amount on it then?
At first, Clemishire resisted giving a price figure, saying “that’s not what it’s about.”
But when the pastor continued to press her for a price, she replied $2 million.
Clemishire now says Morris never actually paid her the money and insists she never wanted payment.
She said she had spent years struggling with “deep confusion” about what Morris had done to her and, in 2005, was finally beginning to understand that it was a crime.
“I was literally sick to my stomach and wanted to finally hold him accountable,” she told NBC News.
‘The call with Morris had nothing to do with money: it was about my anger and my need to confront him so he would finally know that I knew what he had done to me.’
Morris left the ministry for two years after Clemishire’s father confronted him in 1987.
Clemishire has claimed Morris’ abuse began when he stayed at her family home in Tulsa over Christmas 1982, when he was already married to his wife, Debbie.
She describes a scene where Morris asked her to come to his room and talk to him, asking her to lie down on his bed.
Morris, a former spiritual adviser to Donald Trump, began touching her inappropriately, and Clemishire alleged he touched her stomach, then her breast and then under her pants.
‘I vividly remember everything I was wearing and how the pajamas felt. They were light pink, and it was a little top with baggy pants, and I had underwear and baggy pants and the little top and a robe that opened over the top,’ she said.
Clemishire added that after the alleged abuse occurred, Morris “told me I could never tell anyone, because it would ruin everything.”
She said he would continue to isolate and abuse her for the next four and a half years before she finally spoke out, first to a family friend and then to her parents.
Clemishire’s father demanded that Morris be removed from the ministry and she claimed that he had done so for two years to undergo a “restoration.” She returned to preaching in 1989.
Morris admitted to sexual abuse last week and resigned from Gateway Church
At Gateway Church, elders admitted they knew of Morris’ relationship with a “young lady” when he was in his 20s.
But they say they thought the pastor was simply confessing to having had an extramarital affair, something Morris would frequently discuss from the pulpit as a moral failure he overcame with God’s help.
“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’ extramarital affair, which he had spoken about many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young girl’ and not abuse of a 12-year-old girl,” the leaders said. of the church in a statement.
Lawrence Swicegood, a spokesman for the megachurch, also told NBC News that church leaders have not seen the transcript, which was allegedly kept on a server shared with archived sermon notes for years.
“We take all of this extremely seriously and any type of abuse simply cannot be tolerated,” Swicegood said in a statement.
‘Gateway Church has retained outside counsel who is conducting an independent and thorough investigation into this entire matter.’
DailyMail.com has also contacted Morris for comment.
He had resigned from the megachurch last week after admitting to abusing Clemishire.
Clemishire is now considering filing a lawsuit against Morris.
Clemishire, meanwhile, has hired Boz Tchividjian to represent her in a potential new lawsuit, according to WFAA. Tchividjian is the grandson of evangelist Billy Graham.
“It appears it was preferable for them to simply accept his vague narrative rather than seek the truth about a sexual crime committed against a minor,” Tchividjian said.
“Gateway leaders had a responsibility to uncover what happened and not blindly accept their words.”
Morris was never criminally charged and the statute of limitations on such a case has long since expired.