Twenty years before Pastor Robert Morris publicly admitted last week to engaging in “sexual conduct” with a child and resigned from Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, his accuser confronted him and asked for compensation, copies show of emails obtained by NBC News.
“Twenty-three years after you began destroying my life, I am still dealing with the pain and damage you caused,” Cindy Clemishire, 35 years old at the time, wrote to Morris on September 20, 2005, according to partially redacted email emails to NBC News through her attorney.
“I want some form of restitution. Pray about it and call me.”
Morris responded two weeks later.
“Debbie and I truly care about 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 had long ago confessed his sins to Clemishire’s father and believed that he had “obtained both your forgiveness and that of your family.”
Morris ended his response with a legal warning.
“My attorney advises that if I pay you money under threat of exposure, you could face criminal charges and Debbie and I don’t want that,” he wrote. “If you need more information, please have your lawyer contact mine.”
Morris’ email was the latest exchange in a series of messages that year between Clemishire, Morris and a former Gateway elder, Clemishire said. The emails, spanning the period from April to October 2005, appear to reveal Clemishire’s attempts to convince Morris — who later became a leading evangelical figure who served on former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory panel — to to compensate for the trauma he said he had inflicted. her as a child.
“Men with over 100 child molestation charges are going to jail,” Clemishire wrote in one of the messages to Morris. “Men who staff churches where there are more than 100 cases of child abuse go to jail and pay restitution. You didn’t have to do that either.”
At the urging of a retired pastor, Clemishire made her allegations against Morris public last week in a message published by The Wartburg Watch, a website aimed at exposing abuse in churches. In the post and in a subsequent interview with NBC News, Clemishire accused Morris of abusing her for years, beginning in her Oklahoma home on Christmas night in 1982, when she was 12.
Morris has not been charged with a crime. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Over the weekend, Morris and Gateway elders initially responded to Clemishire’s allegations by acknowledging in statements that Morris had several sexual encounters with a “young lady” when he was in his 20s and saying he had been transparent about his sin and had converted. On Tuesday, after days of resistance from church members and elected officials, the Gateway board of elders announced it had accepted Morris’ resignation.
“The elders’ previous understanding was that Morris’s extramarital affair, which he had discussed many times during his ministry, involved ‘a young lady’ and not the abuse of a 12-year-old child,” church leaders said in their declaration.
Clemishire and her attorney, Boz Tchividjian, argue that Gateway elders should have investigated Morris’ account of a consensual relationship long ago.
Gateway officials did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The council of elders announced this week that it had hired a law firm to investigate the matter.
The 2005 emails show that at least one Gateway Church elder, Tom Lane, knew Clemishire had contacted Morris and demanded damages. However, the emails do not indicate whether Lane, who has since left the church, knew that Clemishire accused Morris of child sexual abuse. The first email Clemishire sent is missing from the chain shared with NBC News; Clemishire’s lawyer said she couldn’t find it.
In a statement to NBC News on Friday, Lane said that until Clemishire made her story public last week, he “did not fully understand the severity and specifics of the sexual abuse she experienced, nor did I know she was 12 years old when the abuse started.”
Lane’s spokesman, Richard Harmer, said in an email that Lane was under the impression Clemishire was under 18 but old enough to consent to a sexual relationship with Morris, who would have been in his early 20s. (The age of consent in Oklahoma, where the abuse allegedly occurred, is 16.)
“I am deeply saddened by the pain Cindy Clemishire has endured and the recent revelations about Pastor Robert Morris,” Lane said in his statement. “My deepest condolences go out to Cindy, and I pray that her suffering is fully recognized and validated.”
In April 2005, Lane wrote a letter to Clemishire on Morris’s behalf, after Clemishire initially made contact in the email that NBC News has not seen. Lane asked to speak with her, and Clemishire responded that she wanted to discuss the matter directly with Morris.
Lane then wrote that he and the other Gateway elders wanted Clemishire to “find help and healing.”
Lane told Clemishire that Morris “had been completely open with the elders of Gateway Church about his past and specifically about his indiscretion with you.” He said Morris and his wife had treated Clemishire with “caring concern, but their responses apparently did not bring the healing you seek.”
“The ‘Blessed Life’ that Robert writes about in his book and that you refer to in your email is not one of perfection, but one of submission and obedience to God, something he has worked diligently to achieve to walk, both in failure and failure. success for over twenty years,” Lane wrote to Clemishire. “Robert and Debbie did what they could to help you heal. Our church believes in healing, forgiveness and restoration of all individuals. We would like to help you find that healing for your life.”
The emails shared by Clemishire’s attorney do not include a response from her to Lane’s message.
In a statement, Tchividjian, Clemishire’s attorney, questioned why Lane and other Gateway elders had not investigated Morris’ claims.
“It appears that it would be preferable for them to simply accept his vague story rather than seek the truth about a sexual crime committed against a minor,” Tchividjian said. “Gateway’s leaders had a responsibility to find out what happened and not blindly accept his words.”
Five months after Lane’s message, on September 9, 2005, Clemishire again wrote directly to Morris.
“I’m giving you one last chance to call me,” she wrote. “You really have no idea how devastating it will be if you don’t. I don’t want Tom or anyone else to contact me. This is your problem, not his.”
A week later, Morris wrote that he was praying about how he would respond, and a few days later he asked what Clemishire wanted.
Clemishire wrote back less than two hours later: ‘I have suffered almost my entire life from the emotional damage you have caused me. If you want to know what I want, call me.”
Morris never called, Clemishire said, although she said she spoke briefly with his attorney to discuss setting up a meeting with Morris, but never followed up.
In his final response, included in the messages Clemishire shared, Morris told her she was wrong to believe he had benefited from keeping what happened between them a secret.
“You see the blessings God has poured out on my life and conclude that it is because I have hidden my past,” Morris wrote.
“That’s not how God works. He will not be mocked with deceit.”
CORRECTION (June 21, 2024, 8:29 PM ET): An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Richard Harmer. He’s Tom Lane’s spokesman, not his lawyer.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
