Donald Trump's former spiritual adviser asked his sexual abuse accuser to name her price to ensure her silence, according to a newly revealed transcript.
The transcript covers a Sept. 22, 2005, phone call between Robert Morris, the founder of Gateway Church, and Cindy Clemishire, a woman who came forward with accusations the pastor abused her in the 1980s, starting when she was 12, reported NBC News.
“Put a price on it,” Morris said, according to the document provided by a former Gateway staff member.
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“It is not a small number,” the woman, Cindy Clemishire, responded, according to the transcript. “Money doesn’t make you happy and I can understand that. So that is not what this is about.”
She suggested $2 million when Morris pressed her again to name a figure, but he ended the conversation a moment later.
Clemenshire went public nearly two decades later to accuse Morris of sexually abusing her, and the pastor confessed to “inappropriate sexual behavior" shortly after her account was published June 14 by the church watchdog site The Wartburg Watch and he resigned last week from the megachurch he founded in Southlake, Texas.
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She had reached out to Morris by email on Sept. 20, 2005, according to previous reports, and told the pastor she wanted "some type of restitution" for "the pain and damage [he] caused," and she previously told NBC News the pastor had not responded to her invitation to call but said she recalled the conversation after reviewing the transcript.
A former member of Gateway's IT department found the Microsoft Word document titled “Transcription of recorded phone conversation with Cindy Clemishire" more than a decade ago while transferring files from Morris’ computer to a new laptop.
That worker recalled skimming the document when he discovered it but assumed it was related to a story the pastor frequently told during sermons about a long-ago “moral failure” involving a consensual extramarital affair.
“At the time I heard the original story, I believed that it was refreshing to hear the truth,” the former employee. “Now I feel foolish.”
