Texas church fires four elders over Trump-linked founder's abuse of 12-year-old girl in 1980s | Texas

A Dallas-area Christian megachurch has fired four of its elders following an internal investigation into how the institution handled revelations of child sexual abuse by its founder, a former spiritual adviser to Donald Trump.

A Gateway Church official revealed during a service Saturday that the ousted leaders either knew Robert Morris had molested a girl for several years beginning in 1982, when she was 12, or “failed to investigate further.” “to hire” after they were informed, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Gateway did not name the removed leaders, but the Morning News found that four names had been removed from the church's elders page: Jeremy Carrasco, Kevin Grove, Gayland Lawshe and Thomas Miller. That left Kenneth W. Fambro II, Dane Minor and Tra Willbanks, who made the announcement Saturday about the other elders who had essentially served on Gateway's board.

Willbanks added that those who knew Morris' abuse survivor “was 12 years old at the time of the abuse” but failed to act are “fundamentally wrong and simply cannot and will not be tolerated.”

Willbanks' announcement marked another chapter in a scandal centered on an individual with ties to Trump's two previous presidential campaigns. And it happened days before Tuesday's election, in which Trump is also running.

Morris resigned in June after admitting that he engaged in “inappropriate sexual conduct” between 1982 and 1987 toward a girl who publicly identified herself as Cindy Clemishire while she was in her teens. He emphasized that sexual contact stopped shortly before intercourse, although he described that “kissing and caressing… (that) was wrong.”

Morris said he took a break from preaching in 1987 after confessing the abuse to his superiors at the time, but the details of the abuse were not immediately made public. He later founded Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, in 2000, which became one of the largest institutions of its kind in the United States with more than 100,000 parishioners.

The religious publication Christian Post first reported the allegations from Clemishire that prompted Morris' resignation. The Gateway Church condemned Morris' actions, but initially claimed that it did not know full details of the “inappropriate relationship between (him) and the victim, including her age at the time and the duration of the abuse.”

In a statement provided to the Guardian, church elders claimed they believed Morris had had an “extramarital relationship… with 'a young lady'” and had no prior evidence that he had sexually abused a child. But as Willbanks described Saturday, the results of an internal investigation by the Texas law firm Haynes and Boone into the cases of most of the church's elders appear to contradict that.

Willbanks said he could not discuss the matter further due to pending litigation and criminal investigations. He did not provide any details about who or what the authorities were investigating.

Morris was reportedly among a half-dozen people who refused to cooperate with Hayne and Boone's investigation. Willbanks also said Morris responded to Clemishire's public appearance of his abuse by directing church staff to issue a statement minimizing her account.

Morris, 63, previously took prominent seats alongside Trump when the star of “The Apprentice” won the presidency in 2016 and then lost it in 2020.

In the first of these campaigns, Morris served on Trump's evangelical advisory board. And in the second of those campaigns, he participated in a panel with the former president and faith leaders at Gateway.

Trump's team said Morris was not involved in the Republican candidate's third bid for the White House, which culminated on Tuesday against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

Morris was a traveling evangelist at the time he began abusing Clemishire and was friends with her family. Clemishire said Morris asked for and received her father's forgiveness. But her family didn't want him to ever return to work.

Another official who resigned from the Gateway Church after Clemishire spoke out was Morris' son James, who started a new church in September.

During a recorded phone conversation, Morris once offered to pay Clemishire to keep quiet about her abuse, NBC News previously reported, citing a transcript.

However, he reportedly hung up after Clemishire demanded $2 million.