Pastor Robert Morris heard asking sexual assault accuser how much it cost for her silence shocking phone transcript reveals

Texas megachurch Pastor Robert Morris once asked his sexual abuse accuser how much it would cost for her silence, a shocking phone transcript reveals.

Morris, 62, the founder and senior pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake – one of the largest megachurches in the country – has been accused by sexually assaulting her former family friend, Cindy Clemishire, in the 1980s, when she was just 12 years old.

Clemishire, now 54, finally went went public with her allegations in a blog post on The Wartburg Watch, a website dedicated to exposing abuse in churches.

But when she first threatened to go public with Morris’ sexual assault in 2005, the pastor asked her to “put a price tag on it,” according to a transcript of a Sept. 22, 2005, phone call. obtained by NBC News.

Clemishire had contacted the pastor two days earlier and asked Morris to compensate her for the trauma she had suffered.

“Twenty-three years after you began destroying my life, I am still dealing with the pain and damage you caused,” Clemishire, then 35, wrote in an email to Morris on September 20, 2005.

“I want some form of compensation,” she continued. “Pray about it and call me.”

The pastor would call her back two days later, while his wife Debbie was on the phone.

In the phone call with Clemishire, he told how he left the ministry in 1987 and sought help after her father confronted him and church leaders about the attack.

But Clemishire told Morris that he had had to pay a higher price for the pain she had endured.

“Two years without service — big deal,” she said, according to the phone transcript.

I just have a real problem [with] the fact that you have remained unaffected by this.”

Morris would later respond, “Maybe not enough was asked of me, but I did everything that was asked of me.”

Later in the conversation, Clemishire described watching interviews with victims of child abuse and connecting those stories to her own experiences.

She said it helped her better understand what she had been through.

“I just can’t believe how I justified myself and made excuses,” Clemishire said in the phone call.

She then asked Morris to imagine what would happen if something like this happened to his daughter, who was a teenager at the time.

“I think you’d be shocked. At least I hope so,” she reportedly said.

When Morris admitted he would be shocked, Clemishire pressed him on what he would want to happen if he learned that a minister in the church had committed a crime against a child years earlier.

“Don’t you think they should pay?” she asked.

“It might help you to see that person go to prison. But don’t you believe that they should pay for the crime they committed?”

‘Don’t know [whether] “It’s my responsibility to make sure they pay for the crime that was committed or not,” Morris responded.

Still, Clemshire persisted, saying, “I really feel it’s not fair.

It’s not fair that for everything I’ve been through and continue to go through, you don’t [repercussions]” she said, according to the transcript.

She also told him that if she were to file criminal charges or make the story public, it would “destroy everything you have.”

“I just know I want you to pay something,” the victim reportedly said.

Morris then told Clemishire that it would be wrong to pay her to prevent her from making her actions public. However, the victim insisted she was “not trying to blackmail you.”

“I’m not trying to say, ‘Pay me or I’m going to do this.’

“Okay,” Morris replied. ‘Would you like to put an amount on it?’

Initially, Clemishire refused to give a price figure, saying: ‘That’s not what this is about.’

But when the pastor continued to insist on a price, she replied: $2 million.

Clemishire now claims Morris never actually paid her the money and insists she never wanted a payout.

She said she had struggled for years with “deep confusion” about what Morris had done to her, and in 2005 she finally began to understand it was a crime.

“I was literally sick to my stomach and wanted to finally hold him accountable,” she told NBC News.

‘The conversation with Morris had nothing to do with money. It was about my anger and my need to confront him so he could finally know what he had done to me.”

Clemishire has alleged that Morris’ abuse began when he stayed at her family home in Tulsa over Christmas 1982, when he was already married to his wife Debbie.

She describes a scene in which Morris asked her to come to his room and talk to him, and asked her to lie on his bed.

Morris, Donald Trump’s former spiritual adviser, began touching her inappropriately. According to Clemishire, he first touched her stomach, then her breasts and then under her pants.

“I still vividly remember everything I was wearing and how the pajamas felt. They were light pink and it was a little top with a bloomer, and I had underwear on and a bloomer and the little top and a robe that clipped over the top,” she said.

Clemishire added that after the alleged abuse occurred, Morris “told me never to tell anyone because it would ruin everything.”

She said he would continue to isolate and abuse her for the next four and a half years before she finally spoke out. First to a family friend and then to her parents.

Clemishire’s father demanded that Morris be removed from office, and she claimed that he did so for two years to undergo ‘restoration’. He returned to preaching in 1989.

Elders at the Gateway Church have admitted they were aware of Morris’ relationship with a “young lady” when he was in his 20s.

But they claim they thought the preacher was merely admitting to having an extramarital affair — something Morris often discussed from the pulpit as a moral failure he overcame with God’s help.

“The elders’ previous understanding was that Morris’ extramarital affair, which he discussed many times during his ministry, involved a relationship with ‘a young lady’ and not the abuse of a 12-year-old child,” church leaders said in a statement.

Lawrence Swicegood, a spokesman for the megachurch, also told NBC News that church leaders have not seen the transcript. It was reportedly kept for years on a shared server with archival notes of the sermon.

“We take all of this extremely seriously and abuse in any form simply cannot be tolerated,” Swicegood said in a statement.

“Gateway Church has retained outside counsel to conduct an independent and comprehensive investigation into this entire matter.”

DailyMail.com has also contacted Morris for comment.

Last week he resigned from the megachurch after admitting he abused Clemishire.

Meanwhile, Clemishire has hired Boz Tchividjian to represent her in a new potential lawsuit, according to WFAA. Tchividjian is the grandson of evangelist Billy Graham.

“It appears that it would be preferable for them to simply accept his vague story rather than seek the truth about a sexual crime committed against a minor,” Tchividjian said.

“Leaders at Gateway had a responsibility to find out what happened and should not take his words at face value.”

Morris has never been criminally charged and the statute of limitations for such a case has long since expired.