Category: Saints

The New Orleans Saints have gone to court to block public view of hundreds of emails sent on the NFL.com domain allegedly showing team executives involving themselves in damage control for the Archdiocese of New Orleans in what has become a growing sexual abuse scandal, according to an exclusive report by the Associated Press.

Attorneys for the more than two dozen men suing the church say that in the process of discovery, documents were found indicating that members of the Saints organization assisted the Archdiocese in a  “pattern and practice of concealing its crimes.”

“Obviously, the Saints should not be in the business of assisting the Archdiocese, and the Saints’ public relations team is not in the business of managing the public relations of criminals engaged in pedophilia,” the attorneys wrote in a court filing, per the AP. “The Saints realize that if the documents at issue are made public, this professional sports organization also will be smearing itself.”

Team owner Gayle Benson, who inherited the Saints when her husband, Tom Benson, died on March 15, 2018, is a devout Catholic who has given millions of dollars to local Catholic institutions. Archbishop Gregory Aymond has been a regular guest of the team at football games and charitable events of the church.

The attorneys for the men suing the church say that multiple Saints employees used their team email accounts to give church officials advice on the proper “messaging,” and how to lessen the impact of a list of the archdiocese’s release of a list of clergy members “credibly accused” of sexual abuse.

“The information at issue bears a relationship to these crimes because it is a continuation of the Archdiocese’s pattern and practice of concealing its crimes so that the public does not discover its criminal behavior,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “And the Saints joined in.”

The Associated Press, which has covered sexual abuse by the clergy in a series of recent stories, also has filed a motion with the court supporting the release of the documents as a matter of public interest.

“This case does not involve intensely private individuals who are dragged into the spotlight,” the AP argued, “but well-known mega-institutions that collect millions of dollars from local residents to support their activities.”

It is expected that a court-appointed special master will hear arguments in the upcoming weeks regarding the validity of the public interest claims.

Attorneys for the team admitted that there had been communication between the team and the Archdiocese regarding the list of credibly accused members of the clergy, but that the nature of the communication was based on disclosure and was “the opposite of concealment.”

The email issue is related to multiple claims against George F. Brignac, a longtime schoolteacher and deacon who was removed from his position in 1988 after an accusation of abuse led to several others.

As the AP reported:

Church officials permitted Brignac, 85, to act as a lay minister until local news accounts of his service in 2018 prompted his ouster and an apology from the archdiocese. The AP last year reported that Brignac, despite his supposed defrocking, also maintained access to schoolchildren and held leadership roles as recently as 2018 in the Knights of Columbus.

Following a new wave of publicity — in which Brignac told a reporter he had touched boys but never for “immoral purposes” — Brignac was indicted last month on a rape charge that could land him behind bars for the rest of his life. The prosecution came more than a year after a former altar boy told police that Brignac repeatedly raped him beginning in the late 1970s. Police said the abuse began when the boy was 7 and continued until he was 11.

Neither the Saints nor the NFL had any comment when asked by the AP.