Cindy Clemishir, the woman who accused Morris of pestering her at 12 years old, was sitting in the courtroom, surrounded by a family, as Morris took responsibility – the moment that she was looking for decades.
The call is a wonderful fall for Morris, who founded Gateway in 2000 in Soutleka, Texas, and turned it into Meghierch with tens of thousands of weekly visitors. His sermons were broadcast to the audience around the world, his books became bestsellers in the gospel circles, and he served as an adviser to Vera President Donald Trump.
This career collapsed in June 2024 after the 55 -year -old Clemishir publicly accused him of sexual violence against her. A few days later, Gateway announced that Morris was Go downThe field in the statement at that time Morris admitted what he called the “moral failure” with the “young lady” for decades earlier, but did not respond to the specifics of the prosecution.
Clemishir said NBC News The abuse began on Christmas night In 1982, when she was 12 years old, and she was in flower pink pajamas. Morris, traveling the evangelist at the age of 20, who sometimes stayed with his family in Oklahoma, invited her to his room, where, according to her, he instructed her to lie on her back. Then he touched her chest and felt her under her panties, she said – the first of several such meetings to cover the next few years. “Never tell anyone about this,” Clemishir recalled him. “It will ruin it all.”
She kept a secret until 1987, when she told her parents and leaders in her church. Morris went through what he later called the “recovery process” in the late 1980s before he returned to the ministry. Clemishir said that no one called the police.
Years later, in the mid-2000s, after Morris rose to the national fame-Klemishir, he turned to him and the leaders of the Gateway Church, looking for $ 50,000 as restraint to restore what she spent on processing her children's injury in therapy show records. In 2007, Morris's lawyer at that time I wrote a letter Assuming that Clemishir is responsible for the “inappropriate behavior” between her and Morris when she was a child, according to a copy of the message considered by NBC News. Clemishir said that Morris offered to pay $ 25,000, but negotiations fell apart because she did not want to sign a non -disclosure agreement.
