**Pastor Robert Morris Inquires About Cost of Accuser’s Silence, Phone Transcript Reveals**
In a shocking revelation, a phone transcript has surfaced showing Pastor Robert Morris, founder of Gateway Church, inquiring about the cost of keeping a sexual abuse accusation silent. The transcript, dated September 22, 2005, was provided to NBC News by a former Gateway staff member and details a conversation between Morris and Cindy Clemishire, who accused Morris of sexually abusing her as a child.
During the call, Morris asked Clemishire, “Put a price on it,” referring to her silence. Clemishire responded, “It is not a small number. Money doesn’t make you happy and I can understand that. So that is not what this is about.” Morris pressed her again, and Clemishire eventually named a figure: “Two Million Dollars.” The conversation ended shortly after.
Clemishire, now 54, publicly shared her story nearly two decades later, detailing the years of sexual abuse she says Morris inflicted on her starting when she was 12. Her account was first published on June 14 by The Wartburg Watch, a church watchdog site. In response, Morris confessed to “inappropriate sexual behavior” and resigned from Gateway Church, the megachurch he founded 24 years ago in Southlake, Texas.
NBC News had previously reported on a series of emails exchanged between Clemishire and Morris from April to October 2005. In these emails, Clemishire asked Morris to compensate her for the trauma she endured. “Twenty-three years after you began destroying my life, I am still dealing with the pain and damage you caused,” Clemishire, then 35, wrote on September 20, 2005. “I want some type of restitution. Pray about it and call me.”
Two days later, Morris and his wife, Debbie, called Clemishire, according to the transcript obtained by NBC News. Initially, Clemishire told NBC News that Morris hadn’t called her in 2005, but after reviewing the transcript, she recalled the conversation.
NBC News has not heard the audio on which the document is based and does not know who made the recording or produced the transcript. The document, titled “Transcription of recorded phone conversation with Cindy Clemishire,” was provided by a former member of Gateway’s IT department. The worker discovered the Microsoft Word document over a decade ago while transferring files from Morris’ computer to a new laptop. The IT worker shared the transcript on the condition of anonymity.
The document sat for years on a shared server at Gateway, primarily holding archival sermon notes and accessible to members of Gateway’s technology teams. Metadata from the document shows it was created on October 19, 2007, about two years after the call, during a time when Clemishire and Morris were negotiating a possible legal settlement that never materialized. The file was created by someone listed as “Administrator” from “Gateway Church” and has not been modified since its creation, according to its metadata.
The IT worker recalled skimming the document when he discovered it. At the time, he connected it to a story Morris frequently told from the pulpit about a long-ago “moral failure” involving a consensual extramarital affair. “At the time I heard the original story, I believed that it was refreshing to hear the truth,” the former employee said. “Now I feel foolish.”
Morris and his wife did not respond to messages requesting comment. Lawrence Swicegood, a Gateway spokesperson, said church leaders had not seen the transcript and did not comment on its authenticity. “We take all of this extremely seriously and abuse of any sort simply cannot be tolerated,” he said in an email. “Gateway Church has engaged outside counsel who is conducting an independent and comprehensive inquiry into this entire matter.”
In a statement, Clemishire said that in 2005, after years of struggling with “profound confusion” about what Morris had done to her, she was finally beginning to understand that it was a crime. “I was literally sick to my stomach and wanted to finally hold him accountable,” Clemishire said. “The call with Robert Morris had nothing to do with money; it was about my anger and my need to confront him so that he finally knew that I knew what he had done to me.”
The September 2005 call began with Morris notifying Clemishire that his wife was also on the line. “Okay,” Morris then said, “tell us what you need to tell us.” Clemishire referred to her emails from that year, telling Morris that she planned to go public with her story or seek criminal charges against him unless he paid for what he’d done. “Well, I don’t think money is going to help you,” Morris said. “Who said it was going to help me?” Clemishire interrupted. “It is certainly helping you.”
“No, it is not,” Morris replied. “What is helping me is that since this time I have tried to do the right thing and tried to serve the Lord.” Morris added that he and his wife love Clemishire and want what’s best for her.
Clemishire, now working as a real estate agent in Oklahoma, has said Morris was a family friend who had repeatedly molested her in Oklahoma and Texas between December 1982 and March 1987. During that period, Morris was in his 20s, married to Debbie, and working as a traveling evangelist and later as a pastor at Shady Grove Church near Dallas.
Morris recounted on the call how he’d left the ministry and sought counseling in 1987 after Clemishire’s father confronted him and church leaders. Clemishire told Morris he should have paid a steeper price. “Two years out of the ministry big deal,” she said. “I just have a real problem with the fact that you have gone untouched by this.”
Morris later responded, “Maybe I wasn’t asked to do enough but I did everything I was asked to do.” Clemishire described on the call watching interviews of people discussing child molestation and connecting those stories to her own experience with Morris, which she said helped her better understand what she’d been through. “I just can’t believe how I have justified and made excuses.”
She asked Morris to imagine if “this kind of thing” had happened to his daughter, who was a teenager at the time of the call and is now a pastor at a Gateway Church campus in Houston. “I think you would be horrified,” Clemishire said. “At least I hope you would.”
“Sure, I would,” Morris said. Clemishire asked Morris what he would want to happen if he learned that a pastor in his church had committed a crime against a child years earlier. “Would you not think they should pay?” Clemishire asked. “It may not help you to see that person go to prison. But don’t you believe that they should pay for the crime done?”
“Well,” Morris responded, “I don’t know whether it would be my responsibility for them to pay for the crime done or not.” Clemishire continued, “I really honestly feel like it is not fair. It is not fair for every single thing that I have gone through and still going through and for you to have no repercussions.”
“Well, I have had a lot of repercussions over the years,” Morris said, apparently meaning repercussions. Clemishire shot back, “Nothing compared to mine.” She also told him that if she pressed criminal charges or went public with the story, it “would destroy everything that you have.” “I just know I want to see you pay something,” she said.
Morris told Clemishire it would be wrong for him to pay her to keep her from going public. “I am not trying to blackmail you,” Clemishire said. “I am not trying to say you pay me or this is what I am going to do.” “Ok,” Morris said, “do you want to put an amount on it then?”
Clemishire resisted naming a dollar figure on the call. She repeatedly came back to her sense of injustice at watching Morris become a wealthy and powerful church leader while she struggled. “I just want to say,” Clemishire said toward the end of the call, “would people come to your church if they knew.”
Before finally naming a price — $2 million, which Clemishire recently said was never paid — Clemishire returned to something that she said had been bothering her for years. In sermons, Morris has frequently told a story of finally overcoming his sinful past as a young man after God spoke to him in room 12 of Jake’s Motel in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. But Clemishire believed she was the one who forced him to repent, by telling her father what had happened in 1987. “I honestly feel though that you wouldn’t have changed unless I would have told,” she said. “You only changed because you had to.”
“I am grateful that you told,” Morris said. “I am grateful because God used that to do a work in me that He needed to do. I am glad you did that.”
Source: NBC News, The Wartburg Watch, DailyMail.com
