In a bid to avoid producing documents and sit for depositions in child-sex abuse survivor Cindy Clemishire’s defamation lawsuit, Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, and its independent elders are seeking to overturn a recent court ruling rejecting their motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that secular courts lack jurisdiction in matters of religion.
The appeal was filed on Nov. 14 in the Dallas-based Fifth Court of Appeals.
This defense was invoked by the church and elders John D. “Tra” Willbanks, Kenneth W. Fambro II, and Dane Minor, via the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine. It is a legal principle that prevents civil courts from adjudicating disputes that require them to rule on matters of religious doctrine, faith, or internal governance. The principle is also based on the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, which aim to protect religious institutions from state intervention in strictly religious affairs.
“To start, the propriety of any order compelling the Independent Elders and Gateway to submit to discovery in the face of the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine raises important legal issues concerning the First Amendment,” attorneys for Gateway Church and the independent elders argued in a joint emergency motion to stay a limited discovery process in the defamation lawsuit pending a mandamus review.
A writ of mandamus is an order “issued by a court to compel performance of a particular act by a lower court or a governmental officer or body, usually to correct a prior action or failure to act.”
Lawyers for Gateway Church and their independent elders insist that Clemishire’s lawsuit should have been dismissed under the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine.
“These issues are not susceptible to meaningful review through the normal appellate processes … once [a] religious organization has been forced to disclose information in contravention of its First Amendment rights, any resulting harm cannot be undone,” the attorneys argued. “Therefore, in order to obtain meaningful review of these issues, it is necessary for the Independent Elders and Gateway to seek the extraordinary remedy of writ of mandamus.”
Gateway Church and its independent elders have asked the court to stay the discovery process until a review of their mandamus appeal has been completed by the Dallas Court of Appeals.
“Mandamus relief, …. will ultimately be inadequate if, in the interim, the Independent Elders and Gateway are required to submit to the Clemishires’ intrusive discovery, hand over materials related to internal church deliberations, and thereby lose the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment,” they argued. “Accordingly, stay is warranted to ensure the Independent Elders and Gateway an adequate and meaningful opportunity to seek appellate review by mandamus of that ruling.”
In a two-page order earlier this month, Dallas County District Court Judge Emily Tobolowsky denied Gateway’s motion to dismiss Clemishire’s defamation lawsuit against the church, their embattled founder, Robert Morris, and other defendants.
“After reviewing the Pleas, Plaintiffs’ responses, applicable law, and arguments of counsel, and reviewing evidence, the Court finds that the Pleas should be DENIED,” Tobolowsky wrote.
In a separate 16-page order on Nov. 11, Tobolowsky also granted Clemishire’s motion for continuance and limited discovery to oppose the defendants’ motions to dismiss her lawsuit under the Texas Citizens Participation Act in open court. The TCPA is a 2011 law that protects citizens from lawsuits intended to stifle their First Amendment rights.
All the defendants were ordered to provide written responses and produce documents in response to Clemishire’s proposed discovery requests that focus mainly on internal and external communication church officials engaged in regarding the handling of her child-sex abuse claims against Morris.
Gateway Church founder Robert Morris was given a six-month prison term and a 10-year suspended sentence during a hearing in Osage County Court, Oklahoma, on Oct. 2, after he pleaded guilty to sexually abusing Clemishire, 55, over 4.5 years in the 1980s, beginning when she was 12. At the time, Morris, who founded Gateway Church in 2000, was serving as a traveling evangelist.
In her defamation lawsuit, Clemishire and her father, Jerry Lee Clemishire, are seeking more than $1 million in damages, alleging that Morris and Gateway Church leaders publicly mischaracterized the abuse she suffered as a consensual “relationship” with a “young lady” instead of the sexual assault of a child after the abuse was made public in 2024.
In an affidavit dated Nov. 6, Clemishire said the statements made by both Morris and former Gateway Church elders led to her being harassed by Gateway Church followers and members of the public.
“On June 14, 2024, Robert Morris made a public statement to The Christian Post wherein he falsely minimized his rape of me, referring to it only as ‘inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady,'” Clemishire wrote.
“Shortly thereafter in June of 2024, the Elders of Gateway Church issued their own statement to Gateway staff wherein they asserted that ‘Pastor Robert has been open and forthright about a moral failure he had over 35 years ago when he was in his twenties’ and republished Robert Morris’s statement that he made to The Christian Post,” she continued.
“These statements were false and misleading because they minimized Robert Morris’s rape of me, a 12-year-old child, as something that was only ‘inappropriate’ rather than criminal and implied the sex acts were consensual by classifying me as a ‘young lady.'”
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