PAWHUSKA, Okla.— Robert Morris, the Texas megachurch pastor who built Gateway Church into one of the largest congregations in the country, pleaded guilty Thursday in Osage County District Court to charges that he sexually abused a girl in the 1980s.
Morris, 64, entered the plea before Judge Cindy Pickerill, admitting to five felony counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child. Under a negotiated plea agreement, he was given a ten-year sentence, but he will only serve six months in county jail. He must also be registered as a sex offender and pay $250,000 in restitution.
Morris was handcuffed and taken into custody after Thursday’s hearing.
Cindy Clemishire, the woman who accused Morris of molesting her at age 12, sat in the courtroom, surrounded by family, as Morris accepted responsibility — a moment she sought for decades.
The plea represents a remarkable fall for Morris, who founded Gateway in 2000 in Southlake, Texas, and grew it into a megachurch with tens of thousands of weekly attendees. His sermons were broadcast to audiences around the world, his books became bestsellers in evangelical circles, and he served as a faith adviser to President Donald Trump.
That career collapsed in June 2024 after Clemishire, 55, publicly accused him of sexually abusing her. Within days, Gateway announced that Morris was stepping down. In a statement at the time, Morris acknowledged what he described as “a moral failure” with a “young lady” decades earlier but didn’t respond to the specifics of the allegation.
Clemishire told NBC News the abuse began on Christmas night in 1982, when she was 12 and wearing flowery pink pajamas. Morris, a traveling evangelist in his early 20s who sometimes stayed with her family in Oklahoma, invited her to his room, where, she said, he instructed her to lie on her back. He then touched her breasts and felt under her panties, she said — the first of several similar encounters that would span the next few years. “Never tell anyone about this,” Clemishire recalled him saying. “It will ruin everything.”
She kept the secret until 1987, when she told her parents and leaders at her church. Morris went through what he later described as a “restoration process” in the late 1980s before he returned to ministry. Nobody called the police, Clemishire said.
Years later, in the mid-2000s — after Morris had risen to national prominence — Clemishire approached him and leaders of Gateway Church, seeking $50,000 in restitution to recover what she’d spent processing her childhood trauma in therapy, records show. In 2007, Morris’ lawyer at the time wrote a letter suggesting Clemishire bore responsibility for the “inappropriate behavior” between her and Morris when she was a child, according to a copy of the message reviewed by NBC News. Morris offered to pay $25,000, but the talks fell apart, Clemishire said, because she wasn’t willing to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
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