Well – this is pretty disheartening.
Robert Morris, the megachurch pastor who served on Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board, pled guilty to five felony counts of child sexual abuse. He got six months.
Six months.
Morris was a 21-year-old traveling preacher when he started molesting 12-year-old Cindy Clemishire on Christmas night 1982 while staying at her family’s home in Oklahoma. She was wearing flowery pink pajamas and played with Barbie dolls. He called her to his bedroom, told her to lie on her back, and started what would become four and a half years of abuse.
“Never tell anyone about this,” he told her. “It will ruin everything.”
Fast forward to 2007. Clemishire is an adult, has spent thousands on therapy, and finally gets a lawyer to send Morris a letter demanding $50,000 in restitution. Morris’s attorney, J. Shelby Sharpe, responds by blaming the victim. “It was your client,” Sharpe wrote, referring to Clemishire at age 12, “who initiated inappropriate behavior by coming into my client’s bedroom and getting in bed with him.”
A 12-year-old. Initiated it. That’s what they went with.
Morris offered $25,000 – but only if she signed an NDA. Clemishire refused. She wasn’t going to be silenced about her own life.
The man representing Clemishire in those 2007 negotiations? Gentner Drummond. Currently the Attorney General of Oklahoma. The same man who just secured the guilty plea. The universe occasionally provides poetic justice, even if the actual justice is a joke.
Let’s talk about what Morris built while his victim was in therapy. Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas – one of the largest megachurches in America, with roughly 25,000 weekly attendees. A global broadcast empire. Bestselling books. And a direct line to Republican power.
In 2016, Trump’s campaign announced Morris as a member of his evangelical executive advisory board. In June 2020, Trump held a “Roundtable on Transition to Greatness” at Gateway Church with then-Attorney General William Barr. Trump thanked Morris from the podium: “They’re great people. Great people with a great reputation. I have to say that. Great reputation.”
Great reputation. The guy who raped a child for four years had a great reputation. Because nobody with power ever asked.
That’s not quite true. People knew.
Documents released in court filings show Gateway’s elders received Clemishire’s attorney’s letter in 2007 – the one stating clearly she was 12 when the abuse began. In 2011, Morris actually drafted an announcement to read to his congregation admitting he’d abused a girl “about 2 weeks before her 13th birthday.” Gateway’s lawyers advised against it – they suggested he “should not mention the family or Cindy specifically by name as this would violate their privacy.”
Violate their privacy. The victim’s privacy. By telling the truth about what he did to her. That’s some impressive moral gymnastics.
The church kept paying Morris. Kept promoting him. Kept sending him to advise presidents. An internal investigation after his 2024 resignation found that all but three of Gateway’s elders knew something about his “encounter” with Clemishire and “failed to inquire further.”
Some knew she was a child. They just didn’t inquire further.
Morris has the audacity to now be suing Gateway Church for millions in retirement benefits, claiming they forced him out. He says he “long since accepted responsibility in the eyes of God” and that Gateway Church “was a manifestation of that acceptance.”
His lawyers say he’s “at peace with his sentence” and “in an odd way, looks forward to fulfilling this penance, namely going to jail for his past sin and crime.”
Sin and crime. That’s the ordering. Sin first, then crime. Because in Morris’s world, the theological offense matters more than the four-year rape of a child.
Cindy Clemishire read her victim statement in court: “There is no such thing as consent from a 12-year-old child. We were never in an ‘inappropriate relationship.’ I was not a ‘young lady’ but a child. You committed a crime against me.”
For that crime, Morris will spend six months in an Oklahoma county jail, then go home to Texas on probation. He has to register as a sex offender and pay $270,000 in restitution. Less than $60,000 per year he committed the abuse.
The guy who showed school board candidate slates to his congregation, who told them “Satan has been trying to do things in our school systems,” who used his massive platform to shape Republican politics in Texas – he’s going to do six months.
This is who Trump’s evangelical advisory board included. This is who had “a great reputation.” This is what “moral failure” means when you’re rich and connected and wrap your crimes in Christianity.
Gateway Church is now bleeding donations and laying off staff. Multiple lawsuits are pending. Some justice is coming, slowly, through civil courts.
But Morris will be out by Easter.