TARRANT COUNTY — The North Texas megachurch embroiled in controversy over its founder’s alleged child sexual abuse is facing another lawsuit involving allegations of abuse by a member of a youth group.
The Gateway Church recently had a 2020 Child sexual abuse lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Tarrant County accuses a member of Gateway Church’s youth group of repeatedly sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl on church property. The suit claims the assaults began in 2016.
According to the lawsuit, the then 13-year-old regularly attended youth group meetings at King’s University in Southlake, where around 200 other members between the ages of 11 and 18 gathered. One of these members, according to the lawsuit, was Gabriel Snyder, who was 17 at the time.
In late 2016, according to the indictment, Snyder began manipulating the child at youth group meetings. He used “biblical beliefs and teachings from the pastor and clergy at Gateway” to convince the 13-year-old that it was God’s will for her to submit to him as a woman.
The lawsuit alleges that Snyder sexually abused the child multiple times in December 2016 by abducting her “in the darkness outside King’s University.”
The assaults on campus continued until February 2017. According to the lawsuit, surveillance cameras were installed on the building above the areas where the assaults allegedly occurred, by which time Snyder had turned 18.
No one ever came to help the child, the lawsuit states.
The child, now an adult, and his parents are suing Snyder and the Gateway Church for over a million dollars for personal injury, negligence and damages.
They claim that Gateway acted negligently as a youth services provider and failed to protect against child abuse. The suit also claims that a “special” or “confidential” relationship existed between the family and Gateway as “devout and active members” of the church. According to the suit, Gateway destroyed that relationship through distorted behavior and caused emotional and psychological harm.
The church’s behavior also constitutes fraud, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit alleges that the girl was not Snyder’s only victim within the youth group. He is currently serving a prison sentence at the Hightower Unit in Dayton, Texas, for sexual abuse of a child.
No criminal charges have been filed against Snyder in connection with this lawsuit.
A jury trial was requested.
CBS News Texas has reached out to Gateway Church and Snyder’s attorney and is awaiting a response.
King’s University was founded by the late Dr. Jack Hayford, who also served as an apostolic elder of the Gateway Church, according to the university’s website, and it was twinned with the Gateway Church.
Gateway Church lawsuit in 2020
The case, settled in April, involved allegations that several pastors covered up the alleged sexual abuse of a child by a congregation member in March 2018. The child’s mother filed suit in Tarrant County in 2020, also alleging that pastors encouraged congregation members to ostracize her.
The lawsuit also alleges that church leaders conspired by failing to inform law enforcement that they knew about the alleged abuse and had spoken to the accused church member, and it alleges that church leaders attempted to discredit the allegations.
For its part, the megachurch said it was not guilty of any cover-up or failure to report, saying the incident in the 2020 lawsuit did not occur on a Gateway campus or at a Gateway event, but between two teenagers during a sleepover at a family’s home.
The church said a third teenager was informed of the incident and later told his mother, a Gateway Church staff member, who reported him “to the appropriate authorities within 48 hours.”
“The victim’s mother was angry and claimed (Gateway Church) intentionally concealed the story for weeks and failed to report it to authorities,” the church said in an earlier statement to CBS News Texas.
“She decided to file suit against (Gateway Church)… After the girl’s mother retained six different attorneys, the insurance company decided to offer a settlement to avoid further litigation and costs. This was the ‘compromise of disputed claims’ that Gateway rightly defended in court,” the church added.
The scandal surrounding Robert Morris of the Gateway Church
The public controversy surrounding the megachurch began in June, when Cindy Clemishire publicly claimed that the church’s founder, Robert Morris, sexually abused her It began in 1982 when she was 12 years old. Morris was a traveling evangelist in her early 20s and was very close to her family.
These allegations were first published by The Wartburg Watch, a North Carolina-based church watchdog blog, and then picked up by The Christian Post. Clemishire told The Wartburg Watch that the alleged abuse continued until 1987.
Morris admitted in a 2014 sermon that he had been “sexually immoral” as a young man and confessed to “inappropriate sexual behavior” in a statement to the Christian Post.
“When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual conduct with a young lady at a home where I lived,” he said. “It was kissing and petting and not sexual intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior occurred several times over the next few years.”
Church elders said Morris had spoken to them about an extramarital affair, but not about the alleged abuse of a 12-year-old girl.
On 18 June Morris resigned from office as senior pastor of Gateway Church.
Clemishire said she had mixed thoughts and feelings about Morris’s resignation and believed she was not the only victim.
“While I am grateful that he is no longer pastor at Gateway, I am disappointed that the Board of Elders allowed him to resign,” Clemishire wrote in a statement. “He should have been terminated.”
She rebuked Church elders because they knew about her allegations of sexual abuse and acknowledged thembut they consciously “adopted the false narrative that Robert Morris wanted them to believe.”
On 23 June Protesters gathered in front of the church when a church elder spoke to the congregation for the first time after Clemishire’s statements.
“As an elder, I did not know the truth and frankly, my wife and I, like many of you, are shocked, devastated and in grief,” said Tra Willbanks, elder at Gateway Church. “I want to express my personal condolences to Cindy Clemishire. I cannot imagine carrying such a burden for so many years and I want to tell you, Cindy, I am so sorry.”
Four members of the Gateway Church’s Council of Elders, including Robert Morris’ sonhave been temporarily placed on leave while an outside legal team investigates the allegations against Morris, the church said June 28.
Founded in 2000, Southlake-based Gateway Church grew into one of the largest congregations in the country, drawing about 100,000 people each weekend to its nine locations. Morris broadcast his weekly program live online to over 190 countries, reaching an even larger audience.
