A megachurch pastor, whom Donald Trump once lauded as a “spiritual adviser,” has admitted to “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady,” following new allegations that he’d sexually abused a 12 year-old.
Cindy Clemishire shared her account of sexual abuse by Robert Morris, who currently leads Gateway Church in Dallas, on Friday in the Wartburg Watch, a religious watchdog site.
In the 1980s, Morris would occasionally stay with Clemishire’s family when he was a traveling evangelist. In 1982, Morris invited Clemishire to his room, where he allegedly sexually molested her, warning her never to tell anyone. According to Clemishire, the abuse escalated and continued from 1982 to 1987.
Morris released a statement Saturday to the Christian Post responding to the claims.
“When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying. It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years,” said Morris.
“In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of. I submitted myself to the Elders of Shady Grove Church and the young lady’s father. They asked me to step out of ministry and receive counseling and freedom ministry, which I did. Since that time, I have walked in purity and accountability in this area.”
Morris neglected to mention in his statement that Clemishire was 12 at the time the abuse started. He also does not mention apologizing to her directly.
Gateway Church said that Morris underwent a two-year “restoration process” following a “moral failure,” in a statement to WFAA.
Morris was able to return to Shady Grove Church in 1987, after being forgiven by the victim’s father, he said. “I asked their forgiveness, and they graciously forgave me,” said Morris.
Clemishire said that although her family forgave him, her father never supported his return to ministry.
Morris did return, and in 2003, he founded the Gateway Church, one of the largest megachurches in the country. Gateway boasts a weekly attendance of 100,000 parishioners, according to the church’s website.
In 2016, Donald Trump named Morris to his spiritual advisory board, a convenient prop in his ultimately successful efforts to secure the white Evangelical Christian vote. In 2020, Trump visited Gateway Church, which had since expanded into several campuses across the Dallas area, amid the Black Lives Matter protests in response to George Floyd’s murder.
Clemishire told the Dallas Morning News that she was left unconvinced by Morris’s statement.
“I don’t think that it’s repentant when someone calls a 12-year-old a young lady and tries to just dismiss what happened as just some heavy petting,” she said. “I don’t believe that’s repentance. There’s no child on earth that any person should ever do that to. It’s just unacceptable. There’s zero excuse.”
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has found himself on the outside looking in at Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential vice presidential candidates. He’s taken to TV to raise his profile—which now means defending Trump’s election denial and minimizing the January 6 insurrection.
During a segment with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Cotton was shown a comment he had made in 2020 claiming that Trump pledged to accept the results of the election and commit to the peaceful transfer of power if he lost. When Tapper pointed out that Trump neither accepted the legitimate results of the election nor transferred power to President Biden peacefully without encouraging an insurrection, Cotton resorted to the same technicality-laden, mealymouthed nonanswer required by any GOP member hoping to stay in Trump’s good graces.
“Of course we will accept the results if the results are from fair and free elections,” Cotton said, his answer heavy with the baseless implication that the election might not be free or fair. Cotton, Trump, and the rest of the Republican Party relied on the same phrasing to cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots in the run-up to 2020 elections.
“Every candidate in any race has a right to go to court, to seek legal redress if they think there’s been any kind of fraud or cheating,” he continued. Faced with his own comments and pressed by Tapper on Trump’s continued insistence that the election had been rigged and his encouragement of the insurrection after exhausting his legal avenues, Cotton deflected, minimizing the Capitol riot and casting peaceful protests outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes as left-wing equivalents of January 6.
“What happened on January 6, 2021, is that there was a protest in Washington that got out of hand, and it became a riot, and as I’ve said from the very beginning, anyone who injured a law enforcement officer or committed acts of violence on January 6 at the Capitol should be prosecuted and face severe consequences, and again, that’s unlike Democrats, who won’t prosecute violent protesters, for instance, from Democratic street militias outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.”
TAPPER: *plays clip from Sept. 2020 of Tom Cotton saying Trump will abide by the peaceful transfer of power but will win anyway*
TAPPER: That didn't age very well
COTTON: Of course we'll accept the results. What happened on J6 was a protest in Washington that got out of hand pic.twitter.com/0SDoSgQnu9
Cotton, who has previously called for the National Guard to quash protests against police brutality, remains behind Senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and J.D. Vance and Governor Doug Burgum in the race to be Trump’s running mate, according to sources close to the Republican presidential nominee. It’s no wonder, then, that he’s making the rounds on television to engage in revisionist history about the threat to democracy his party poses.
Republican Senator Tim Scott started his week off by getting brutally fact-checked about just about everything. While Scott passed the Donald Trump loyalty litmus test with flying colors, he was only able to do so because he refused to fully answer a single question he was asked during Sunday’s episode of This Week With George Stephanopolus on ABC.
When asked about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to lift a ban on bump stocks, one which was put in place by Trump himself, Scott quickly agreed with the court’s decision, before pivoting to criticizing President Joe Biden about something entirely........