Gateway Church has denied all allegations in a lawsuit filed by a former youth group member who accused the megachurch of turning a blind eye to her sexual assault at the hands another member when she was 13 years old.
According to the suit filed in August, the woman was groomed and sexually assaulted by the high school senior in 2016. The church did nothing to prevent the series of assaults over the span of three months despite multiple surveillance cameras in the area in which the abuse occurred, according to the suit.
The complaint also says there may be other girls who were assaulted by the same person.
The Southlake megachurch on Friday filed a general denial of all claims but did not lay out its argument in court documents.
KERA News has reached out to Southlake for comment and will update this story with any response. KERA News is also withholding the identities of both the accuser and the alleged assailant, because they were minors at the time of the incident.
The lawsuit came the same day the church announced it would cancel its annual conference amid the resignation of disgraced founding pastor Robert Morris.
Morris stepped down in June after child sexual abuse allegations surfaced. His accuser, Cindy Clemshire, said the abuse started in the 1980s when she was 12 years old and continued for nearly five years.
Church elders have since launched an internal investigation, but Morris has not been charged or arrested.
Gateway was named in another lawsuit in 2020, where at least five church staff members were accused of covering up allegations of sexual assault of a minor. The suit was settled in May but resurfaced after Morris’s resignation.
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