Klemischer went public with his accusations last month in a post on the church watchdog website The Wartburg Watch. Morris responded in a statement, saying he acknowledged “inappropriate sexual conduct” and had confessed and repented long ago. Gateway Church leaders initially said Morris “spoke openly and frankly about moral failings he made more than 35 years ago,” but later said they didn’t know Klemischer was a child at the time.
Within days, Morris resigned as senior pastor of the megachurch he founded in 2000, and Gateway Church elders hired an outside law firm to investigate the matter.
Gateway spokesman Lawrence Swisgood said church leaders had not seen the 2007 letter between Drummond and Sharp. Swisgood said “current elders did not have all the facts” until Clemischer went public with his story last month.
Gateway Sexual Abuse Scandal
Four Gateway Church officials have agreed to take administrative leave from the presbytery while an internal investigation is ongoing, the church announced last month. One of them is the Rev. James Morris, son of the Rev. Robert Morris. The other three served on the presbytery during the material period between 2005 and 2007 when Mr. Klemischer was seeking damages.
“Gateway Church is committed to protecting children and the most vulnerable first and foremost,” Swisgood said in an email. “Abuse is never acceptable.”
Ms Cremisher, now 54, believes the letter written by Ms Sharp in 2007 was part of an attempt by Mr Morris and his associates to make her feel guilty and ashamed.
“They don’t see children as people they need to protect,” Klemischer said.
Ms Cremisher said she suffered “deep confusion” for years about Morris’s actions and believed she was in the wrong for nearly 20 years. She said Morris sexually abused her more than 100 times over a four-and-a-half-year period. After they first met on Christmas Day in 1982, Ms Cremisher said, “he began kissing me, touching me and inserting his fingers into my body.” She said he tried to force sex on her, but she refused. Ms Cremisher admitted to “kissing and petting” her, and claimed the number of incidents was a fraction of what Ms Cremisher claims.
Klemischer said it took years of counselling and watching television interviews about grooming and sexual abuse in the mid-2000s for her to realise what had happened to her was criminal.
She began writing to Morris’ email address at Gateway Church in 2005, seeking compensation for the trauma she said he had inflicted on her. She hired Drummond in 2007 to make a formal request, according to documents provided to NBC News last month by her hired lawyer, Boz Tchividjian.
On January 30, 2007, Drummond wrote a letter to Sharp on behalf of Clemisher, using her then-legal name, Cindy Clemisher McCaleb. Drummond detailed the sexual abuse Clemisher suffered between 1982 and 1987 and how Morris “led her to believe that they were in a special relationship that must be kept secret.”
“Morris led Ms. McCaleb to believe that what he had done was her fault,” Drummond wrote, “and that she was the culprit.”
Drummond attached a draft of the lawsuit that Cremischer plans to bring if Morris does not respond within 15 days.
“Pastor Morris began sexually assaulting Mr. McCaleb, who was 12 years old at the time.”
Gentner Drummond, January 30, 2007
Sharp responded a week later, on February 6, 2007, with a letter alleging that Cremisher had initiated sexual contact with Morris.
“It was your client who initiated the inappropriate conduct by entering my client’s bedroom and getting into bed with him, and my client should not have allowed this to happen.”
J. Shelby Sharp, February 6, 2007
Sharp also alleges in the letter that Clemisher “engaged in inappropriate conduct with two other men who stayed over at her home” between 1982 and 1987, when he was between the ages of 12 and 17. Sharp also wrote that Clemisher “confessed his conduct” to Glenda Faulkner, who attended Shady Grove Church near Fort Worth, Texas, where Morris was pastor in the 1980s.
Faulkner, now Glenda Faulkner Woodliffe, a licensed counselor who later attended Gateway, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In an interview, Ms. Cremisher disputed Mr. Sharp’s portrayal, saying that as a child she was touched inappropriately by two men at home but that she did not initiate the behavior. On one occasion, Ms. Cremisher said, when she was 13, it was Mr. Morris who told her to go to a bedroom in her childhood home where another traveling preacher was staying. When she went inside, the man, whom she did not name, began kissing her but then pulled away and told her she was too young.
In another incident in 1986, Klemischer said, she was sleeping on a sofa bed next to her 3-year-old daughter when another man who was with her family climbed on top of her and she thought he was going to rape her, but suddenly he got off.
“I think God really intervened,” Klemischer said. “He made him feel like someone was passing by and he just rolled off of me.”
Klemisher said the incident prompted her to eventually confide in Faulkner Woodliffe, a family friend. Faulkner Woodliffe asked her if anyone else had touched her like that, Klemisher said. She then reluctantly explained what Morris had done to her, she said. Faulkner Woodliffe then urged her to tell her parents, Klemisher said.
That’s how her father found out that Morris had been sexually abusing her, Klemisher said, in March 1987. Her father was furious and contacted Shady Grove Church’s senior pastor, Oren Griffing, to demand that Morris step down from his ministry.
Cremisher remembers getting a call from Morris’ wife, Debbie, a few days later.
Debbie told her, “I forgive you.”
“I’ll never forget,” Klemischer said, “that they tried to make me believe that what happened was my fault, that I was a child. And they continued to try to make me believe that.”
Griffing, now in his 80s, later served as a pastor and elder under Morris at Gateway Church. He did not respond to messages.
Clemishire’s sister lived with the family in 1987 and corroborated Clemishire’s account of conversations that year between her sister, her parents, and the Faulkner-Woodliffe, Griffing, and Morris families.
