SOUTHLAKE (TX)
The Roys Report [Chicago IL]
June 13, 2025
By Mark A. Kellner
A $1 million lawsuit just filed in Dallas County District Court alleges Gateway Church, a one-time evangelical megachurch, covered up the rape and sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl by its founder, Robert Morris.
The 63-year-old Morris is under criminal indictment in Oklahoma on five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child, and is set to stand trial there later this year. The Roys Report (TRR) this week reported that pastors Brady Boyd and Jimmy Evans knew that Morris’s victim Cindy Clemishire was 12 years old at the time the abuse began.
Neither Boyd nor Evans were named in the lawsuit. Clemishire’s attorney Alex Yaffe, told TRR, “We have sued those most directly responsible based on the evidence currently available. However, our investigation remains active, and we are continuing to assess all possible avenues for accountability—including the potential involvement of Jimmy Evans and Brady Boyd.”*
The action—brought by Cindy Clemishire and her father, Jerry Lee Clemishire—currently names Morris, his wife Deborah, Gateway Church, and more than a dozen current and former church elders and media directors as defendants.
In a statement to TRR, Cindy Clemishire said accountability from Gateway and its leadership is a key lawsuit goal.
“For almost 40 years, Robert Morris and the leadership at Gateway have tried to blame me and put this in a flippant light of a relationship instead of what it was—a brutal crime against a 12-year-old child,” Clemishire said in the statement. “My childhood and the woman I would have become died that day in 1982. The person who abused me and the people who blatantly covered it up deserve to be held accountable. My hope is that bringing awareness to my case will help other victims and survivors feel hope, because the person who did this to me — and the people who enabled him and covered it up for decades — are being held accountable.
The plaintiffs accuse Morris of sexually assaulting Cindy repeatedly from 1982 to 1987, beginning when she was just 12 years old. The suit alleges that Morris—an itinerant evangelist at the time— would tell Cindy she “can’t ever tell anyone what just happened or it will ruin everything,” and that his assaults included “rape by instrumentation.” The abuse, the suit states, occurred in both Texas and Oklahoma.
The Clemishires contend that after Cindy confided in a friend in 1987, Jerry Clemishire demanded Morris’s removal from ministry. Morris then claimed to step down for a “restoration” process. The lawsuit argues this was a lie and part of a larger cover-up involving church leaders who later helped Morris build Gateway Church into a megachurch with over 100,000 attendees at its peak.
The suit claims that Deborah Morris, Robert’s wife and a prominent women’s ministry leader at Gateway, knew about the abuse “at least since 1987” and called Cindy at age 17 to say she “forgave” her. The implication was the abuse was the teenager’s fault.
In 2005 and again in 2011, the filing says, Gateway Church elders and media executives received multiple emails detailing the abuse and identifying Cindy as a minor at the time. One email from Gateway elder Tom Lane acknowledged Cindy’s age at the time of the abuse.
Despite this, the lawsuit says, Morris continued preaching sermons condemning sexual immorality while concealing his past. In 2014, he gave a sermon in which he said, “I looked for girls that did not have a good relationship with their father. I learned how to spot that.” In a podcast as recently as 2023, Morris described children as being “12 and under.”
The suit further alleges that Gateway’s public statements in June 2024, including those by its elders and communications chief Lawrence Swicegood, falsely minimized Morris’s abuse as a “moral failure” involving a “young lady.” Morris himself described the abuse as “kissing and petting and not intercourse,” and suggested the 12-year-old seduced him.
On or around June 18, 2024, Gateway elders told the congregation, “We regret that we did not have the information that we now have,” a statement the plaintiffs say is knowingly false and defamatory. In July 2024, the church walked back its earlier comments, saying, “You were a child, not a young lady… This was sexual abuse of a child.”
The lawsuit accuses all named defendants of libel, slander, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and unjust enrichment. It cites sermons, books, TV shows, and other public platforms through which Morris allegedly profited from his story of redemption while continuing to defame his victim.
“Defendants obtained a benefit from Plaintiff by fraudulently utilizing the rape of Plaintiff for their own financial gain,” the suit states, adding that they should be ordered to “disgorge their ill-gotten gains.”
The Clemishires are seeking actual and exemplary damages exceeding $1 million, along with restitution and a jury trial. Their attorneys argue that the false narrative not only caused lasting harm but also allowed Morris and Gateway to build an empire on deception.
Morris resigned from Gateway a year ago and the church has since removed several elders and acknowledged a criminal investigation is underway.
Daniel Floyd, senior pastor of Lifepoint Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, will become Gateway’s leader in August, both congregations disclosed at the end of May.
*The statement by Attorney Yaffe was received after publication and then added to the article.