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The wheel of justice often turns slowly, but after 40 years, one woman is finally getting the justice she deserves. Robert Morris, former spiritual advisor to Donald Trump and Gateway megachurch founder, resigned last year after being accused of sexual abuse in the ‘80s.
Morris admitted to engaging in “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady,” but his wording is disingenuous at best, and insidious at worst. After months of litigation, even his former parish is more than ready to send this pastor out to pasture.
It’s hard to imagine a world in which shrieking harpy Paula White-Cain isn’t the worst possible pick to lead a White House Faith Office, yet here we are. Trump’s 2016 “spiritual advisor,” Robert Morris — a man whose Southlake, Texas church reaches more than 25k people every Sunday — has emerged to take the scumbag cake, and it only took 43 years for it to happen.
Morris was 21 when he, in what he describes as a “moral failing,” became involved in “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady.” Morris was staying with the family of then 12-year-old Cindy Clemishire when he started abusing her. Describing their encounters as “kissing and petting and not intercourse,” Morris spent four years molesting Clemishire in her parents’ home.
When the abuse was discovered, he confessed to the church elders and “the young lady’s father” and was “repentant of” the abuse. Morris was asked to step out of the ministry and receive counseling, which he did until he was accepted back 2 years later with the blessing of the victim’s father. “I asked for their forgiveness, and they graciously forgave me,” he told the Christian Post.
Notice that not once did he speak to the person he actually harmed? Clearly Ms. Clemishire did not feel the same as her father and the church. She told the Wartburg Watch that she was “no young lady” when Morris began the abuse.
According to Clemishire, Morris told her to “never tell anyone about this” because it would “ruin everything,” and that he told his wife that he was “counseling her” during the abuse. “I was 12 years old. I was a little girl. A very innocent little girl. He was brought into our home.” She says that they trusted him and his young wife and son. He integrated himself into her father’s community “and then began grooming all of us to do this,” something that took her “decades to wrap my brain around as an adult.”
“He says there was no sexual intercourse, but he did touch every part of my body and inserted his fingers into me, which I understand now is considered a form of rape by instrumentation. I was an innocent 12-year-old little girl who knew nothing about sexual behavior.”
Morris’s phrasing led Gateway Church elders to believe that it was a consenting woman he had relations with, not a child. They believed it was with “‘a young lady’ and not abuse of a 12-year-old child,” according to a statement released by the board. Clemishire first contacted lawyers in a bid to force Morris to pay for counseling, but when he tried to force a nondisclosure agreement, negotiations fell apart. The allegations went public last year.
Morris was indicted on five felony counts of “lewd or indecent acts toward a child” and is expected to turn himself in before his Monday arraignment, the Oklahoma Attorney General Genter Drummond told the Dallas Morning News. And there we have it folks, yet another case of a child’s innocence being stolen by the hands of an clergyman, and not the trans/drag boogeymen the right is so keen to blame.