Two a long time ahead of pastor Robert Morris publicly confessed final 7 days to engaging in “sexual behavior” with a boy or girl and resigned from Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, his accuser had confronted him and sought payment, according to copies of email messages received by NBC Information.
“Twenty-three years after you commenced destroying my life, I am even now working with the discomfort and hurt you prompted,” Cindy Clemishire, 35 at the time, wrote to Morris on Sept. 20, 2005, according to partially redacted e-mail provided to NBC Information by her lawyer.
“I want some kind of restitution. Pray about it and simply call me.”
Morris responded two months later on.
“Debbie and I definitely do treatment for you and we sincerely want God’s ideal for you,” he wrote, referring to his spouse, Debbie Morris, according to the e-mail. Robert Morris wrote that he’d extensive ago confessed his sins to Clemishire’s father and believed that he’d “obtained your forgiveness as well as your family’s.”
Morris ended his reply with a legal warning.
“My lawyer advises that if I pay out you any money underneath a threat of exposure, you could be criminally prosecuted and Debbie and I do not want that,” he wrote. “If you want far more data, have your lawyer call mine.”
Morris’ e-mail was the remaining exchange in a series of messages that 12 months between Clemishire, Morris and a former Gateway elder, Clemishire said. The emails, spanning from April to Oct 2005, surface to expose Clemishire’s attempts to get Morris — who later rose to grow to be a leading evangelical figure who served on previous President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory panel — to compensate her for the trauma she suggests he inflicted on her as a boy or girl.
“Men that have about 100 counts of little one molestation go to jail,” Clemishire wrote to Morris in one particular of the messages. “Men who pastor church buildings that have about 100 counts of child molestation go to prison and pay out punitive damages. You have not experienced to do either.”
At the urging of a retired pastor, Clemishire went general public with her allegations from Morris very last 7 days in a post revealed by The Wartburg View, a web site centered on exposing abuse in church buildings. In the article and in a subsequent interview with NBC News, Clemishire accused Morris of molesting her for years beginning at her house in Oklahoma on Christmas night time in 1982, when she was 12.
Morris has not been charged with a criminal offense. He did not react to a ask for for comment.
Previous weekend, Morris and Gateway’s elders initially responded to Clemishire’s allegations by acknowledging in statements that Morris experienced a number of sexual encounters with a “young lady” when he was in his 20s and declaring he experienced been transparent about his sin and experienced repented. On Tuesday, adhering to times of backlash from church customers and elected officials, Gateway’s board of elders declared it had approved Morris’ resignation.
“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital romance, which he had discussed several instances during his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not abuse of a 12-12 months-previous child,” the church leaders said in their assertion.
Clemishire and her law firm, Boz Tchividjian, contend that Gateway elders should have lengthy back investigated Morris’ account of a consensual romantic relationship.
Gateway officers did not right away respond to a message requesting comment. The board of elders declared this 7 days it had hired a legislation business to investigate the make a difference.
The 2005 emails reveal that at the very least a person Gateway Church elder, Tom Lane, was mindful that Clemishire experienced been in touch with Morris and in search of payment. The e-mails do not show, on the other hand, regardless of whether Lane, who has considering that left the church, was aware that Clemishire was accusing Morris of youngster sexual abuse. The preliminary e-mail Clemishire sent is missing from the chain shared with NBC Information Clemishire’s attorney reported she could not locate it.
In a assertion to NBC Information on Friday, Lane claimed that, right up until Clemishire went community with her tale very last week, he “did not totally recognize the severity and details of the sexual abuse she professional, nor did I know she was 12 several years aged when the abuse commenced.”
Lane’s attorney, Richard Harmer, reported in an email that his customer was less than the effect that Clemishire was beneath 18, but aged plenty of to consent to a sexual relationship with Morris, who would have been in his early 20s. (The age of consent in Oklahoma, exactly where the abuse is alleged to have occurred, is 16.)
“I am deeply saddened by the pain Cindy Clemishire has endured and the modern revelations about Pastor Robert Morris,” Lane reported in his assertion. “My deepest sympathies go out to Cindy, and I pray her suffering is absolutely recognized and validated.”
In April 2005, Lane wrote to Clemishire on behalf of Morris, just after Clemishire at first achieved out in the email that NBC Information has not found. Lane requested to talk with her, and Clemishire replied that she required to handle the make a difference with Morris straight.
Lane then wrote that he and the other Gateway elders required Clemishire to “find support and healing.”
Lane informed Clemishire that Morris experienced been “completely open with the Elders of Gateway Church about his previous and specially about his indiscretion with you.” He reported Morris and his spouse experienced dealt with Clemishire with “caring issue but their responses apparently have not introduced the healing you seek out.”
“The ‘Blessed Life’ that Robert writes about in his e-book and you refer to in your e-mail, is not just one of perfection but a person of submission and obedience to God, something that he has manufactured diligent hard work to wander in, both of those in failure and achievements, for extra than 20 several years,” Lane wrote to Clemishire. “Robert and Debbie have completed what they can to assistance you heal. Our church believes in therapeutic, forgiveness, and restoration of all men and women. We would like to aid you obtain that therapeutic for your life.”
The e-mails shared by Clemishire’s attorney do not involve a response from her to Lane’s information.
In a statement, Tchividjian, Clemishire’s attorney, questioned why Lane and other Gateway elders did not investigate Morris’ promises.
“It looks as if it was preferable for them to simply accept his obscure narrative as a substitute of in search of the fact pertaining to a sexual offense perpetrated upon a minor,” Tchividjian claimed. “The leaders at Gateway had the obligation to come across out what took place and not to blindly acknowledge his words and phrases.”
Five months immediately after Lane’s concept, on Sept. 9, 2005, Clemishire wrote again directly to Morris.
“I am giving you a single last likelihood to get in touch with me,” she wrote. “You definitely have no idea how devastating it will be if you never. I really don’t want Tom or any one els to get hold of me. This is your difficulty not his.”
A 7 days afterwards, Morris wrote to say he was praying about how to reply, and he adopted up various times immediately after that to ask what Clemishire wanted.
Clemishire wrote again less than two hrs later: “I have experienced virtually my total daily life from the psychological damage you inflicted on me. If you want to know what I want, connect with me.”
Morris under no circumstances termed, Clemishire said, despite the fact that she reported she did speak briefly with his lawyer to go over location up a assembly with Morris but in no way adopted up.
In his remaining reply provided in the messages shared by Clemishire, Morris instructed her she was improper to imagine that he’d benefited from holding key what took place between them.
“You see the blessings God has poured out on my lifetime and conclude that it is due to the fact I have hidden my previous,” Morris wrote.
“God does not get the job done that way. He will not be mocked by deceit.”
