Decrease than a twelve months after resigning over allegations dating support to the Eighties, the ragged megachurch pastor faces a felony case in Oklahoma.
Robert Morris
Christianity On the present time March 12, 2025
Alex Brandon / AP
The ragged pastor of one among the largest church buildings in Texas now faces felony payments over allegations of child sexual abuse that took station in the Eighties.
On Wednesday, a mountainous jury in Oklahoma indicted Gateway Church founder Robert Morris on five counts of lewd or monstrous acts with a toddler.
He resigned from Gateway closing twelve months after an Oklahoma lady publicly recounted how Morris molested her starting up when she became as soon as 12.
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“After virtually 43 years, the law has at closing caught up with Robert Morris for the horrific crimes he dedicated in opposition to me as a toddler,” Cindy Clemishire said in a statement to the click on Wednesday.
Closing June, Clemishire advised the abuse watchdog blog Wartburg Gaze that Morris as soon as more and as soon as more stayed with her family while visiting Tulsa as a younger evangelist and that he came into her room and touched her below her garments. She said the incidents took station dozens of instances over four years and incorporated attempting to cling intercourse with her as a teen. Morris became as soon as in his early 20s and married.
As of Wednesday evening, neither Morris nor his attorney had made a public statement responding to the indictment. Morris previously referred to what took station as “flawed sexual conduct with a younger girl” and said that “it became as soon as confessed and repented of.”
Morris follows an exact string of church leaders who cling been the topics of allegations dropped at light during the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements all the plot in which during the final decade. Such claims cling resulted in many prominent pastors being eliminated from ministry—nonetheless few inch onto deal with appropriate repercussions.
The imply age for victims who had been abused as minors to exclaim their abuse is in their 40s or 50s, so on the whole the change to earn law enforcement has passed. In Clemishire’s case, the statute of obstacles isn’t very acceptable, based totally totally on the enlighten attorney overall, on tale of Morris, who became as soon as a touring preacher at the time, by no methodology lived in Oklahoma.
The chair of the elder board at Gateway said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News that the church is “grateful for the work of the justice system in keeping abusers accountable for his or her actions” and that the elders “proceed to pray for Cindy Clemishire and her family, for the contributors and workers of Gateway Church and for all those impacted by this ugly misfortune.”
A four-month-prolonged neutral investigation commissioned by the multisite megachurch didn’t picture extra victims nonetheless did lead to the termination of church elders who both knew that the “sexual conduct” from Morris’s previous alive to a minor or who didn’t discontinuance ample to demand it, based totally totally on a church announcement in November 2024.
Morris based Gateway in 2000, and the church grew in measurement and have an effect on over the a long time, with the upward thrust of popular charismatic musicians take care of its ragged treasure chief Kari Jobe and Morris’s involvement as a non secular consultant to President Donald Trump all the plot in which through his outdated term.
Morris’s departure—as one among several Dallas-house pastors to prominently step down in scandal closing summer—has left his church shaken. The Dallas Morning News reported attendance dropped 40 p.c at its critical Southlake campus in a matter of months, and the church continues to endure a moment of reckoning.
The five payments in opposition to Morris, 63, lift a total sentence of up to 100 years in detention heart.
The Oklahoma attorney overall said in a statement, “There will even be no tolerance in case you sexually prey on children. This case is your whole more contaminated on tale of the alleged perpetrator became as soon as a pastor who exploited his discipline. The sufferer on this case has waited a ways too decades for justice to be performed.”
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