Pastor Robert Morris asked sexual harassment accuser how much her silence cost – shocking phone transcript revealed

As a shocking phone transcript shows, Texas megachurch pastor Robert Morris once asked the woman who accused him of sexual assault what the price of her silence would be.

Morris, 62, founder and pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake – one of the largest megachurches in the country – was accused from He sexually abused former family friend Cindy Clemishire in the 1980s when she was just 12 years old.

Clemishire, now 54, eventually left She made her allegations public last week in a blog post on The Wartburg Watch, a website dedicated to exposing abuse in churches.

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

Clemishire had approached the pastor just two days earlier and asked Morris for compensation for the trauma he had suffered.

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

“I want some kind of reparation,” she continued. “Pray for it and call me.”

Two days later the pastor called her back and his wife Debbie was on the line.

In the phone call with Clemishire, he recounted how he resigned from his position as pastor in 1987 and sought counseling after her father confronted him and church leaders about the assault.

But Clemishire told Morris he should have paid a higher price for the pain she had endured.

“Two years out of the ministry – a big deal,” she said, according to the telephone transcript.

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

Morris later replied, “Perhaps 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 endured.

“I just can’t believe how I justified and excused it,” Clemishire said in the phone call.

She then asked Morris to imagine if “something like that” had happened to his daughter, who was a teenager at the time.

“I think you would be horrified. At least I hope so,” she is said to have said.

When Morris admitted he was horrified, Clemishire asked him what he thought would happen if he learned that a pastor at his church had committed a crime against a child years ago.

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

“Perhaps it would help you if this person went to prison. But don’t you think he should pay for the crime he committed?”

“I don’t know whether it would be my responsibility to make them pay for the crime they committed or not,” Morris replied.

Still, Clemshire remained adamant, saying, “I really think it’s not fair.”

“With everything I’ve been through and am still going through, it’s not fair that you don’t have to fear (repercussions),” she said, according to the transcript.

She also told him that if she filed criminal charges or made the story public, it would “destroy everything you have.”

“All I know is that I want to see you pay something,” the victim is said to have said.

Morris then told Clemishire that it would be wrong of him to pay her money not to go public, but the victim insisted that she was “not trying to blackmail you.”

“I’m not trying to say, ‘Either you pay me or I’ll do this.'”

“Okay,” Morris replied. “Would you like to specify an amount then?”

Clemishire initially refused to name a price, saying: “That’s not what this is about.”

However, when the pastor continued to press for a price, she replied: $2 million.

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

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

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

“The phone call with Morris wasn’t about money – it was about my anger and my need to confront him so that he would finally know that I knew what he had done to me.”

Clemishire claims Morris’s abuse began when he stayed at her family’s Tulsa home during Christmas 1982, when he was already married to his wife, Debbie.

She describes a scene in which Morris asked her to come into 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. Clemishire claimed he first touched her stomach, then her chest, and finally under her pants.

“I remember exactly what I was wearing and how the pajamas felt. They were light pink and consisted of a top with bloomers. I wore underwear and bloomers and the top and a robe that buttoned up over it,” she said.

Clemishire added that after the alleged abuse, Morris “told me I couldn’t tell anyone because it would ruin everything.”

She said he continued to isolate and abuse her for the next four and a half years before she finally spoke about it, first to a family friend and then to her parents.

Clemishire’s father demanded that Morris be removed from the ministry, and she claimed that he did so for two years to undergo “reinstatement.” He returned to preaching in 1989.

At Gateway Church, elders admitted they knew about Morris’ relationship with a “young lady” when he was in his twenties.

However, they claimed they believed the pastor had merely admitted to an extramarital affair – something Morris frequently spoke about from the pulpit as a moral failure that he had overcome with God’s help.

“The elders previously believed that Morris’ extramarital relationship, which he had often discussed during his tenure, was 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 had not seen the transcript – which was reportedly kept for years on a shared server containing archived sermon notes.

“We take this extremely seriously and simply cannot tolerate abuse of any kind,” Swicegood said in a statement.

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

DailyMail.com also asked Morris for comment.

He left the megachurch last week after admitting to abusing Clemishire.

According to WFAA, Clemishire has now hired Boz Tchividjian to represent her in a new possible lawsuit. Tchividjian is the grandson of evangelist Billy Graham.

“It seems they would rather just accept his vague account than seek the truth about a sexual offense against a minor,” Tchividjian said.

“The leaders at Gateway had a responsibility to find out what had happened and not to blindly accept his words.”

Morris was never charged and the statute of limitations for such cases has long since expired.