Cindy Clemishire, the woman who accused Morris of having assaulted her at the age of 12, seated in the courtroom, surrounded by family, while Morris accepted responsibility – a moment that she sought for decades.
The plea represents a remarkable fall for Morris, who founded Gateway in 2000 in Southlake, Texas, and transformed it into mega-church with tens of thousands of weekly participants. His sermons were broadcast to the public around the world, his books have become bestsellers in evangelical circles, and he was a religious advisor to President Donald Trump.
This career collapsed in June 2024 after Clemishire, 55, publicly accused her of having sexually abused her. In a few days, Gateway announced that Morris resign. In a statement at the time, Morris recognized what he described as “a moral failure” with a “young woman” of decades earlier, but did not respond to details of allegation.
Clemishire told NBC News that the abuses started on Christmas Eve in 1982 when she was 12 years old and wearing flowery pink pajamas. Morris, a traveling evangelist at the beginning of the twenty who sometimes stayed with his family in Oklahoma, invited her to her room, where, she said, asked him to lie on her back. He then touched her breasts and felt under her panties, she said-the first of several similar meetings that would extend over the next few years. “Never speak to anyone,” recalls Clemashire. “It will ruin everything.”
She kept the secret until 1987, when she told her parents and her leaders from her church. Morris crossed what he described later as a “restoration process” in the late 1980s before returning to the ministry. No one called the police, said Clemishire.
Years later, in the mid -2000s – after Morris reached national importance – Clemishire approached him and Gateway Church leaders, looking for $ 50,000 in restitution to recover what she had spent to treat her childhood trauma in therapy, according to files. In 2007, Morris’s lawyer at the time wrote a letter suggesting that Clemashire was responsible for “inappropriate behavior” between her and Morris when she was a child, according to a copy of the message examined by NBC News. Morris proposed to pay $ 25,000, but the talks collapsed, said Clemashire, as she was not willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
