Pastor Robert Morris, a Texas megachurch pastor who served as former President Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser, confessed to a “moral failure” four decades ago after a woman accused him of repeatedly molesting her as a child.
The woman, Cindy Clemishire, told NBC News that Morris, now senior pastor at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, was staying with her family on Christmas Eve 1982. She was 12; he was 21 years old. Clemishire, now 54, said he invited her to her bedroom, where he instructed her to lie on her back. He then touched her breasts and groped under her underwear, Clemishire said — the first of several similar encounters that would last over the next four and a half years, she said.
“Never tell anyone about this,” Clemishire remembers him saying. “This will ruin everything.”
Clemishire’s accusations were made public on Friday The Wartburg clock, a website focused on exposing stories of abuse in churches. Responding to questions about Clemishire’s account, Morris acknowledged Saturday in a statement to the The Christian Postan evangelical news website, what he called “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young woman” when he was in his 20s.
“It was kissing and fondling, not sexual intercourse, but it was wrong,” Morris said in the statement. The same written statement was sent to Gateway Church employees on Friday, just hours after Clemishire’s story was published in The Wartburg Watch, according to a copy of the message reviewed by NBC News.
Without naming Clemishire, Morris said the sexual encounters took place on “several occasions” over the next few years until “the situation was brought to light” in March 1987 – appearing to confirm the timeline described by Clemishire. Morris said she confessed to church elders at the time and asked for forgiveness.
“Since then, I have walked with purity and responsibility in this area,” Morris said, according to the statement. “Sin was rightly dealt with by confession and repentance.”
Morris has not been charged with any crime. He and Gateway Church officials did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. In the message to employees on Friday, Gateway officials said Morris had “adequately disclosed” the matter to the church’s elders.
“Since the resolution of this 35-year-old matter, there have been no other moral failures,” the message said.
Morris’s reach and influence extend far beyond his role as leader of one of the country’s largest megachurches. He served under Trump spiritual advisory board during his first presidential campaign and while Trump was president. In a statement released Monday to NBC News, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung distanced Trump from Morris and said the former president had no knowledge of the allegations.
“He has no role in the 2024 campaign,” Cheung said. “President Trump’s broad appeal among religious communities across the country is a testament to his unwavering commitment to defending faith and protecting religious freedoms.”
Clemishire said she was disgusted by Morris’ description of her as a “young lady.” She also noted that in his 2005 book, “From Dream to Destiny,” Morris wrote that he stepped away from the ministry for two years in the late 1980s because God revealed that he had become too proud, omitting any mention of misconduct. sexual activity that church leaders committed. now they say that motivated the temporary departure.
“I don’t know if anyone deserves to be restored to a position when they committed criminal acts against a child,” Clemishire said Monday. “I believe that people can be restored when caught doing something if there is true repentance, but when you lie about it, I don’t believe that is true repentance.”
Clemishire attorney Boz Tchividjian is a former prosecutor who spent three decades investigating sexual misconduct and child abuse. Tchividjian, grandson of famous evangelist Billy Graham, said the use of phrases like “moral failure” and “young man” is intended to “clean up something that is criminal.”
“I was responsible for putting people in prison who are still there to this day for doing the same things that Robert Morris did to my client,” Tchividjian said. “They’re in prison and he preaches to thousands of people, week after week.”
When the Clemishire family met Morris, he was a traveling evangelist who spoke in churches and high school assemblies under guardianship of James Robisona televangelist and leader of the Moral Majority movement of the 1980s. In 1987, Morris was a pastor at Shady Grove Church, located between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Clemishire said that, at the urging of a friend, she finally told her father that March, at age 17, about how Morris had abused her over the years. She said her father, furious, called the lead pastor at Shady Grove and threatened to file a police report unless Morris left the ministry.
What followed, according to the message from Gateway elders, was a “two-year process of restoration,” including professional counseling. In his statement, Morris said the girl’s father blessed his return to the ministry at the end of the two years, which Clemishire denies.
“My father said, ‘I gave you to God; you’re lucky I didn’t kill you,’” Clemishire said. “So that wasn’t a blessing.”
A decade later, in 2000, Morris founded Gateway Church in Southlake, which has become one of the largest megachurches in the country, with an estimated weekly attendance of 100,000 people across multiple campuses.
Clemishire, who works as a real estate agent in Oklahoma, said she has tried repeatedly over the years to tell church leaders what she says Morris did to her as a child — at Gateway and other congregations. Her story was released last week only after a retired pastor suggested she speak to The Wartburg Watch. It has been painful, Clemishire said, to watch Morris rise in prominence and influence.
“He would not have been allowed to work at his church daycare if he had revealed the truth,” she said. “Why should he be in the pulpit?”
Today, Morris is known in Texas and nationally for his efforts to promote conservative Christian morality through Republican government and politics. Like many evangelical leaders, Morris remained loyal to Trump after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election helped fuel the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Eight months later, in September 2021, Morris joined a conference call of pro-Trump evangelical leaders and prayed that the nation “never have another election stolen from the American people” – echoing Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.
In 2017, Morris appealed to parishioners to support a bill – hosted by Texas Governor Greg Abbotta Republican, as a way to “protect the safety of women and children” – this would have prohibited trans people from using public bathrooms that correspond to their gender.
He also preached about the dangers posed to children in public schools, where Morris said Satan has attacked students through the curriculum and libraries. Before Election Day in each of the last four years, Morris promoted local conservative school board candidates who ran on promises to defeat the spread of critical race theory and LGBTQ inclusion policies in schools.
“If you haven’t looked at the material that’s in the textbooks that are in our school libraries, I want you to take a look,” Morris said from the pulpit in May 2022. “It’s as pornographic as anything you’ve ever read. ”
Like most evangelical pastors, Morris teaches a strict adherence to sexual purity outside of marriage. In a 2014 sermon, he spoke of his own struggle with sexual immorality as a teenager. To satisfy his sinful lust, Morris said, he “learned to lie and manipulate” and target “insecure girls.”
“Girls were made to be held by men,” Morris told his congregation before referring to a biblical passage about rape. “If that need is not met in a healthy way by the parent, they will meet it in an unhealthy way.”
Speaking to the women in the congregation, Morris then said that when a man seeks a sexual relationship outside of marriage, such as when he is flirting in the office, it is because “he is satisfying an appetite that you have created in him.”
“I’m not saying it’s right,” Morris said, “but I’m trying to make you understand how important it is not to work up an appetite in someone.”
Clemishire said she felt sick when she saw the video of the sermon this week. To her, it seemed like Morris was blaming girls and women for the sins of men.
“When he presented himself vulnerable on stage and shared all of his shortcomings, of course people are going to be drawn to that,” Clemishire said. “I don’t think they would have been attracted to the fact that he molested a 12-year-old.”
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