Gateway Church, a Texas-based megachurch with more than 100,000 active attendees, is continuing to face claims that its leadership either engaged in or tolerated child sex abuse.
According to CBS News, Gateway recently settled another complaint alleging that its founder, Robert Morris, molested a 12-year-old girl in the 1980s. The most recent claim accuses a youth group member of repeatedly assaulting another teenager.
The defendant, Gabriel Snyder, was 17 years old when the abuse purportedly occurred.
Snyder, adds The Dallas Morning News, was indicted in an unrelated case in 2017 and charged with two counts of indecency with a child and one count of sexual assault. He is currently serving a four-year sentence, but is scheduled for release later this autumn.
George Boll, an attorney for the plaintiff, emphasized that Snyder’s current criminal sentence has no connection with his client’s case.
The lawsuit claims that Snyder assaulted the victim, then 13 years old, “in the darkness outside of The King’s University,” a Gateway Church campus. The abuse allegedly occurred between December 2016 and December 2017.
“There were surveillance cameras on the building above the area where [Plaintiff] was sexually assaulted but nobody from Defendant Gateway ever came to [Plaintiff’s] aid,” the family’s attorneys wrote.
Boll told The Dallas Morning News that his client considers litigation part of her personal “healing process.”
“Normally, when there’s a minor involved, you just have the initials,” Boll said, explaining why his client chose to file the lawsuit in her own name rather than using her initials or a pseudonym. “She wanted it out there, because she doesn’t—she’s not ashamed of what happened to her.”
CBS News notes that Gateway has been embroiled in controversy since June, when a woman accused its founding pastor of molesting her in 1982. Morris, then a traveling Evangelist, was in his early 20s and had become “familiar” with the victim’s family.
Morris acknowledge in a 2014 sermon that he had been “sexually immoral” when younger, and released a statement to The Christian Post admitting to “inappropriate sexual behavior.”
“When I was in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying,” Morris said in a statement. “It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong. This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years.”
Gateway’s elders have since said that Morris had told them that he had an extramarital affair, but did not mention that the “affair” had been with a 12-year-old girl. Morris resigned from his position several days after the allegations went public.
Sources
Gateway Church hit with new lawsuit alleging child sex abuse of youth group member
Lawsuit alleges 13-year-old was sexually assaulted at Gateway Church youth group meetings
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