It's no coincidence that many of the biggest and most problematic megachurches happen to be in Texas, with the welcoming atmosphere towards abusers, courtesy of the Texas GOP. Feds ought to be looking at the people screeching the loudest from the bully pulpit about "family values" and "sexual purity." Ken Paxton certainly has no problem looking the other way.
I hope Cindy gets closure and healing, because she did not deserve to have her life destroyed by this monster or his enablers.
Two decades before pastor Robert Morris publicly confessed last week to engaging in “sexual behavior” with a child and resigned from Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, his accuser had confronted him and sought compensation, according to copies 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 at the time, wrote to Morris on Sept. 20, 2005, according to partially redacted emails provided to NBC News by her attorney.
The emails, spanning from April to October 2005, appear to reveal Clemishire’s attempts to get Morris — who later rose to become a leading evangelical figure who served on former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory panel — to compensate her for the trauma she says he inflicted on her as a child.
At the urging of a retired pastor, Clemishire went public with her allegations against Morris last week in a post published by The Wartburg Watch, a website focused on exposing abuse in churches.
“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had discussed many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not abuse of a 12-year-old child,” the church leaders said in their statement.
“The ‘Blessed Life’ that Robert writes about in his book and you refer to in your email, is not one of perfection but one of submission and obedience to God, something that he has made diligent effort to walk in, both in failure and success, for more than twenty years,” Lane wrote to Clemishire.
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