In a 2007 letter, attorneys for Gateway founder and former pastor Robert Morris argued that Cindy Klemisher, a 54-year-old woman who claimed she was sexually abused by Morris beginning at age 12 in the 1980s, was partly responsible because she had climbed into Morris’ bed and engaged in inappropriate acts with two other adult men. On February 6, 2007, J. Shelby Sharp, who also served as personal attorney for Paige Patterson, former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in a letter to Klemisher’s then-attorney, Gentner Drummond, that she bore responsibility for the abuse she suffered as she sought to sue Morris for $50,000. NBC News report.
“It was your client who initiated the inappropriate conduct by entering my client’s bedroom and getting into bed with her, and my client should not have allowed this to happen,” Sharp wrote.
Drummond, who is now Oklahoma’s attorney general, confirmed the conversation with NBC News but declined to comment further, while Sharp, who retired as Morris’ representative, told the outlet he had no recollection of the settlement and denied knowing Klemisher was a child when the abuse began.
Recalling the letter, Sharp said, “I have no recollection of seeing it.”
“The letter that you saw speaks for itself,” Sharp said. “I’m not going to go into any more detail here because the letter speaks for itself.”
In the 2007 letter, Sharp reportedly said that when Cremisher was between the ages of 12 and 17, she “engaged in inappropriate conduct with two other men who stayed over at her home between 1982 and 1987.”
The letter also said that Mr. Clemisher “confessed his conduct” to Glenda Faulkner, who attended Shady Grove Church near Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1980s, when Mr. Morris was pastor.
Cremischer told NBC News that she was touched inappropriately by two men at her home as a child but denied initiating any contact. On one occasion, when she was 13, she claimed Morris asked her to go to a bedroom in her childhood home where another traveling preacher was staying.
She noted that the man, who she did not identify, tried to kiss her after she came into the room but stopped him, telling her she was too young.
In another incident in 1986, another man who was staying with Cremischer’s family climbed onto her bed while she was sleeping on a sofa bed next to his 3-year-old daughter.
She thought the man was going to rape her, but he suddenly stopped her.
“I really think God intervened,” Klemischer told NBC News. “God made him feel like someone was passing by and he just rolled off of me.”
After the 1986 incident, Cremisher said she decided to confide in the Rev. Faulkner Woodlife, who encouraged her to tell her parents what was happening with Morris. After telling her parents, her father encouraged Oren Griffing, then senior pastor at Shady Grove Church, to remove Morris from his position, and he resigned in 1987 before returning in 1989.
Morris resigned from Gateway Church last month after Cremischer alleged that Morris had abused him beginning in the 1980s, when he was 12 years old.
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