Texas megachurch founder and pastor Robert Morris, who lately resigned after confessing to sexually assaulted a baby within the Eighties, tried to pay his abuse survivor for her silence, based on a leaked telephone transcript.
The transcript from 22 September 2005, supplied to NBC by a former worker of Gateway church, exhibits Morris telling his sufferer, who lately revealed herself to be Cindy Clemishire, to “put a value on it”, when she requested to be compensated for the trauma inflicted on her.
“It’s not a small quantity,” Clemishire stated. “Cash doesn’t make you content and I can perceive that. So that’s not what that is about.”
The transcript allegedly exhibits Clemishire requesting “$2m”, at which level Morris hung up the telephone.
The transcript was discovered when the worker was transferring recordsdata from Morris’s pc to a brand new laptop computer. Gateway didn’t touch upon the validity of the transcript.
Morris based Gateway in 2000, now one of many largest megachurches in america and positioned in Southlake, Texas. He rose to fame as an evangelical chief, preaching purity and concerning the energy of prayer in his sermons and books and even sat on then president Donald Trump’s non secular advisory board.
Clemishire publicly alleged that Morris started assaulting her in 1982 in her residence when she was 12, and the abuse continued for a few years. Morris was a touring evangelist on the time and a household buddy to the Clemishires. He stated he confessed to Clemishire’s father years in the past and earned his forgiveness. However Clemishire stated whereas they forgave Morris, she and her household by no means wished him to return to ministry.
In a assertion, Gateway’s board of elders stated it knew of Morris’s self-described “ethical failure”, however solely partially since Morris solely confessed to “inappropriate sexual conduct with a younger woman”. However in June, Clemishire stated she was truly a baby when the abuse started – not a consenting grownup.
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The assertion learn: “Regretfully, previous to Friday, June 14, the elders didn’t have all of the details of the inappropriate relationship between Morris and the sufferer, together with her age on the time and the size of the abuse.
“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had mentioned many instances all through his ministry, was with ‘a younger woman’ and never abuse of a 12-year-old little one. Despite the fact that it occurred a few years earlier than Gateway was established, as leaders of the church, we remorse that we didn’t have the knowledge that we now have.”
The church accepted Morris’s resignation earlier this month when the reality got here out.
Gateway didn’t reply to a request for remark relating to the leaked telephone transcripts.
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