Robert Morris

Introduction

Robert Preston Morris is the American televangelist who founded Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, in 2000 and built it into one of the largest megachurches in the United States before his empire collapsed under the weight of a four-decade-old secret: the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. In June 2024, Morris resigned as senior pastor after Cindy Clemishire publicly accused him of sexually abusing her beginning in 1982, when she was 12 and he was a 21-year-old traveling evangelist. An Oklahoma grand jury indicted him in March 2025 on five felony counts, and on October 2, 2025, he pleaded guilty to all five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child. He served six months in the Osage County Jail and was released in early April 2026 to begin nearly a decade of probation as a registered sex offender.

Background Information

Morris was born July 29, 1961, in Marshall, Texas; in the late 1970s he was a youth evangelist at the Hi-Way 80 Rescue Mission — while, by his own admission, also selling drugs in the church parking lot — before joining the James Robison Evangelistic Association as a traveling evangelist in December 1981. He and his wife, Debbie, whom he married in 1980, have three children. (He shares his name with a well-known American economist; the two are unrelated.)

In 2000, the Morrises founded Gateway Church in Southlake, a Dallas–Fort Worth suburb. By 2024 the nondenominational church claimed a weekly attendance of about 25,800 across multiple campuses and ranked among the largest congregations in the country. Morris also served as chancellor of The King’s University in Southlake and hosted a radio program that reached more than 6,800 cities. He mixed church with right-wing politics, serving on the 25-person evangelical executive advisory board for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and hosting Trump at Gateway’s Dallas campus in June 2020.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

On June 14, 2024, the watchdog blog The Wartburg Watch published accusations from Cindy Clemishire, who said Morris began abusing her on Christmas night in 1982, when he was staying with her family in Hominy, Oklahoma, while working as a traveling evangelist. She was 12; he was 21 and married with a child. She recalled him telling her, “Never tell anyone about this because it will ruin everything.” The abuse, she said, continued for roughly four and a half years in Texas and Oklahoma and ended in March 1987, when she was 16 and told her parents.

The history ran deeper than a single confession. In 2005, Clemishire emailed Morris seeking restitution; he responded that he had already obtained her family’s forgiveness, and his lawyers later suggested she bore responsibility for being “flirtatious,” offering $25,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement. She refused. In a 2014 sermon, Morris admitted that as a teenager he “learned to lie and manipulate” and “looked for the girls who would be the most susceptible.”

When the allegations surfaced in June 2024, Morris confessed to a “moral failure,” telling The Christian Post it was “kissing and petting, not intercourse, but it was wrong.” Gateway’s elders acknowledged knowing of the misconduct but framed it as an “extramarital relationship” with “a young lady,” not the abuse of a child. Facing mounting criticism, Morris resigned on June 18, 2024; his son James resigned from all church positions that July.

On March 12, 2025, an Oklahoma multi-county grand jury indicted Morris on five felony counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child. He faced up to 20 years per count and surrendered on March 17, 2025, posting a $50,000 bond.

Public Reaction and Consequences

On October 2, 2025, Morris pleaded guilty to all five counts before Osage County District Special Judge Cindy Pickerill in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, as part of a plea agreement. He received a 10-year suspended sentence with the first six months to be served in the Osage County Jail, was ordered to register as a sex offender, to pay restitution to his victim — reported by MinistryWatch at $250,000 — and to serve the balance under supervision by Texas authorities. Deputies led him from the courtroom in handcuffs, still wearing his suit. Clemishire, now 55, said in a statement that “justice has finally been served, and the man who manipulated, groomed and abused me as a 12-year-old innocent girl is finally going to be behind bars.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, whose office prosecuted the case, was unsparing: “There can be no tolerance for those who sexually prey on children. This case is all the more despicable because the perpetrator was a pastor who exploited his position of trust and authority.” Morris’s attorney Bill Mateja said his client wanted to accept responsibility “in the eyes of the law” after believing he long since had “in the eyes of God.” The fallout reached beyond one man: Gateway Church suffered a widely reported exodus of worshippers, and the Oklahoma House unanimously passed the “Cindy Clemishire Act,” which would void NDAs in child sexual abuse cases.

Current Status

Morris was released from the Osage County Jail in early April 2026 after serving his six-month term. He plans to live in a lakefront home in Palo Pinto County, Texas, during his 9.5 years of probation and must register as a sex offender. “What I did to Cindy decades ago was wrong,” his statement after the release conceded, expressing sorrow for the “damage” he had caused and an intent to “live quietly and with integrity.” Clemishire called the release “another chapter in a long journey.”

Impact on Their Career/Life

The fall ended a ministry that had spanned more than four decades. Morris went from preaching to tens of thousands, advising a president, and chancellorship of a university to a registered sex offender on felony probation, his books and broadcasts reduced to artifacts of a disgraced empire. Gateway Church lost worshippers in droves and was stripped of the influence his political and religious alliances had built. Clemishire’s refusal of a $25,000 settlement and her decision to put her name on the record did what money could not: it put a megachurch founder in a jail cell. As she put it: “After almost 43 years, the law has finally caught up with Robert Morris.”