How N.F.L.’s Saints Helped Catholic Church Address a Sex-Abuse Scandal

The Archdiocese of New Orleans was facing a crisis. A sex-abuse scandal was bursting into public view, sending shock waves through the heavily Catholic city.

Leaders of one of New Orleans’s other major institutions, the N.F.L.’s New Orleans Saints, were concerned. Gayle Benson, the team’s owner, is a devout Catholic, major church benefactor and close friend of Archbishop Gregory Aymond.

So in July 2018, when Greg Bensel, the Saints’ head of communications, saw a local news story revealing that a former deacon who had been removed from the ministry after abuse accusations was serving in a public role at a local church, he sent an email to Ms. Benson.

“The issues that the Archbishop has to deal with that never involve him,” Mr. Bensel wrote.

In reply, Ms. Benson said the archbishop was “very upset.” Then, Mr. Bensel made a suggestion: He offered to lend his “crisis communications” expertise, gathered from his decades of working for the Saints, to the archdiocese.

Ms. Benson thanked him and said she would share his offer with Archbishop Aymond.

That exchange was the first of more than 300 emails, obtained by The New York Times, that show the Saints and the archdiocese working together to temper the fallout from a flood of sexual abuse accusations made against priests and church employees. The abuse accusations, which span decades, have led to dozens of civil lawsuits and out-of-court settlements, more than 600 claims of abuse in the archdiocese’s ongoing bankruptcy case and a handful of criminal convictions, and are part of an international reckoning for the church.

Archbishop Aymond, who has served in New Orleans for most of his career, has led the archdiocese since 2009. During his term as archbishop, the archdiocese has spent millions of dollars on settlements for abuse claims while victims and their representatives have said he didn’t promptly report accusations to the public or law enforcement. The archbishop also has a long history with the Benson family, riding on Mardi Gras floats with Ms. Benson and serving as a witness on the will of her husband, Tom.

The several hundred pages of correspondence reveal the extent to which Saints leaders leveraged their influence in New Orleans to aid the archdiocese and offer a rare window into how powerful institutions can work together to shape public opinion. They show Mr. Bensel, with the approval of Ms. Benson and using his Saints email address on the N.F.L.’s web domain, working closely with the archdiocese in attempting to solicit positive media coverage of the church and burnish the image of Archbishop Aymond, even writing talking points for him.

One email exchange also shows members of the Saints’ leadership discussing a list of credibly accused clergy members prepared by the Archdiocese of New Orleans shortly before its release in November 2018. The list followed similar disclosures in other cities, and church leaders positioned it as a transparent public accounting that could help victims find closure and seek justice. But it has been criticized by victims and their advocates for being incomplete.

A few hours before the list was released publicly, Mr. Bensel had an email back and forth with Dennis Lauscha, the Saints’ team president. Mr. Bensel told Mr. Lauscha that there had been a “cc” the night before with Leon Cannizzaro, then the district attorney for New Orleans, “that allowed us to take certain people off the list.” Mr. Bensel did not include any more details, and it is not clear if names were actually removed from the list.

“No one from the Saints organization or the New Orleans district attorney’s office had any role in compiling the list or had any say in adding or removing anyone from the list,” the Archdiocese of New Orleans said in a statement. A lawyer for the Saints, James Gulotta, also asserted that no Saints employee played a role in constructing the list. Mr. Cannizzaro, who now leads the criminal division for the Louisiana attorney general’s office, did not return multiple calls and messages seeking comment. He previously said he first saw the list the day the church made it public.

Mr. Gulotta said in a statement that Mr. Bensel had been told about a conversation between Mr. Cannizzaro and an archdiocese staff member about the list but did not participate and had “no firsthand knowledge” of what was discussed. It was Mr. Bensel’s “understanding,” he said, that one reason for a conversation may have been determining if the appearance of any name on the list “would interfere with a criminal investigation.” Mr. Bensel’s email refers to his “understanding that the list would be updated by the archdiocese,” Mr. Gulotta said.

Ms. Benson “is proud of her executive team and supports them,” Mr. Gulotta said.

The Saints’ work with the church was made public in 2020 through a lawsuit filed against the church by a former altar boy. The Saints were not part of the case, but the plaintiff’s lawyers said in a court filing that they had obtained hundreds of emails through discovery showing that the N.F.L. team aided the church in a public campaign to protect the archdiocese and Archbishop Aymond. The Saints fought in state court to keep the majority of these emails out of public view before the case was moved to federal court when the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in May 2020.

The Saints had described their involvement as “minimal” and said it came about because the church asked for advice on handling media attention around the release of the November 2018 list. Mr. Gulotta said nothing in the emails contradicted the team’s past statements. But a review of the previously undisclosed messages shows the team’s leaders coming up with the idea to help the archdiocese and working with church leaders for at least a year. The archdiocese said it did not pay Mr. Bensel for his public relations work.

It is common for N.F.L. teams to work with local officials and civic organizations on community issues unrelated to sports. But the extent of the Saints’ backing of the local Roman Catholic Church and the nature of the team’s work are atypical. The Archdiocese of New Orleans is also currently under investigation by state and federal authorities over claims that high-ranking members of the church ignored or covered up accusations of clergy abuse of minors, according to a search warrant of the archdiocese’s headquarters executed by the state police last year. The search warrant did not identify any church leaders by name. (No church officials have been charged, and the archdiocese said it was cooperating with law enforcement.)

The Saints are also central to the civic life of New Orleans. The team’s stadium, the Superdome, is the host of this year’s Super Bowl, and the team became a symbol of resilience in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Benson, who took over the Saints and the N.B.A.’s Pelicans in 2018 after the death of her husband, Tom, has contributed more than $80 million to the archdiocese and other Catholic causes since 2007 through the foundation she and her husband started. In Mr. Gulotta’s statement, he said Ms. Benson would “continue to support the Church and the great things it does,” adding, “Her support is unwavering.”

The Saints’ involvement with the archdiocese began after an article ran in a local newspaper, The Advocate, about a former Catholic deacon and schoolteacher, George F. Brignac, who, public records show, faced numerous accusations of sexual abuse across decades. It was that article in 2018 that prompted Mr. Bensel to email Ms. Benson and offer his help to the archdiocese. The lawsuit that led to the disclosure of the Saints’ emails was also based on a claim against Mr. Brignac from 40 years earlier. Mr. Brignac died in 2020 while awaiting trial on a charge of first-degree rape, a case that involved another altar boy.

Mr. Gulotta said a federal district judge, Jay Zainey, recommended to the archbishop that Mr. Bensel could help the church handle “the large volume of media inquiries” about clergy abuse. Judge Zainey, who is Catholic, said in a 2020 interview that he suggested to the archbishop that he use Mr. Bensel as an adviser. He first appears in the batch of Saints emails in October 2018 on chains in which Mr. Bensel updates the archbishop about his work.

Messages sent over the next year from Mr. Bensel’s Saints email account show him using connections from his communications work for the Saints and the Pelicans, where he holds the same position, on behalf of the Catholic Church. Mr. Bensel also cited his Saints experience in offering his “counsel” to another Catholic institution — his alma mater, Jesuit High School — after The Advocate revealed that the school had made undisclosed settlements with sexual abuse survivors. “You have the full support of myself, Dennis and Mrs. Benson,” he wrote to the school’s president. (Jesuit did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

In October 2018, Mr. Bensel wrote to top editors at The Advocate and another newspaper, The Times-Picayune, saying that he was reaching out as a New Orleans native and member of the Catholic Church, not as a representative of the Saints or the Pelicans. But he cited his work with the Saints, writing that support from the local media had helped the small-market team thrive. He asked the newspapers to back the church in a similar way as it prepared to release its list of credibly accused clergy and offered an “exclusive sit-down” with the archbishop.

“We have the right man — at the right time — right now and I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind him and work with him,” Mr. Bensel wrote, referring to Archbishop Aymond. He added, “Casting a critical eye on him is neither beneficial nor right.”

Mr. Bensel forwarded his letter to Ms. Benson and Mr. Lauscha. Ms. Benson replied: “Great letter Greg … spot on! Thank you very much.” A meeting was soon set up between the archbishop and Advocate editors. (Kevin Hall, president and publisher of the media company that owns The Advocate and The Times-Picayune, said engagement with community leaders “does not dilute our journalistic standards or keep us from pursuing the truth.”)

Multiple emails show Ms. Benson encouraging Mr. Bensel’s work for the church or expressing support for Archbishop Aymond to her employees. (“Very sad he is going through this,” Ms. Benson wrote in one message to the Saints’ vice president of business operations.)

In the weeks leading up to the release of the list in November 2018, Mr. Bensel’s work for the church included, according to the emails, writing talking points for Archbishop Aymond to use in the Advocate meeting; providing a host for the Saints’ flagship radio station with a list of questions to use for an in-person interview with the archbishop on the day of the list’s release; and editing the letter the archbishop would send to parishioners about the list.

Mr. Bensel’s November 2018 email that referred to taking people off the list came in response to a message from Mr. Lauscha, who asked if “your SJ you discussed yesterday” — an apparent reference to a member of the Jesuit order — had made the list. Mr. Bensel also told Mr. Lauscha that the list would be updated and that the church’s message was that it would not stop with the initial release of names. The archdiocese said Mr. Bensel was provided a copy of the church’s list “just prior to its release date.”

Archbishop Aymond said at the time of the list’s release that more than 10 staff members and outside legal professionals reviewed the files of nearly 2,500 priests who had served in the archdiocese since 1950, and that additional people reviewed accusations that were received after a priest had died.

Twenty-two clergy members have been added to the archdiocese’s list since its release, bringing the number of names to 79. An evidentiary memo prepared for law enforcement by lawyers representing victims of clergy sex abuse, first reported by The Guardian, contended that more than 300 clergy members and a handful of employees who worked in the Archdiocese of New Orleans had been credibly accused of sexual abuse, including clergy members who appear on lists from other dioceses but not in New Orleans and who have been named in proofs of claim filed in the bankruptcy.

The vast majority of clergy members on the archdiocese’s credibly accused list have not faced criminal prosecution. Most of the accusations stem from events said to have taken place decades ago, and about a third of the priests included on the original list had already died. But when the retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker was indicted in 2023 for sexually assaulting a teenage boy in the 1970s, Mr. Cannizzaro’s successor as district attorney, Jason Williams, referred to a “cone of silence” that has often protected clergy members. (Mr. Hecker, who died in prison in December shortly after pleading guilty, had confessed to archdiocese leaders in 1999 that he had abused multiple teenagers, The Guardian reported.)

Around the release of the list, the church sought to make good on the call for support from local media that Mr. Bensel had initiated. In a draft letter that Archbishop Aymond sent to Mr. Bensel for approval, he complained that The Advocate had published an advance list of priests it believed should be named by the archdiocese and included a call for potential victims to contact the newspaper. The publisher, Dan Shea, replied by asserting that the newspaper had the right to do “our own reporting.” He said the call for potential victims to contact the newspaper had been added online by an editor “at the last minute” and was subsequently removed.

The day of the list’s release, Mr. Bensel accompanied Archbishop Aymond on local media interviews in which the church leader pledged total transparency and justice for victims.

Mr. Bensel’s work with the church continued for at least several months after the release of the list. In December 2018, he asked the archdiocese’s general counsel, Wendy Vitter, if there were updates “relative to lawsuits or any other issues that we feared may arise” from the list’s release. In the spring of 2019, the emails show, he worked with church officials on comments from Ms. Benson in support of the archbishop for a Times-Picayune article and a guest column for The Advocate that Mr. Bensel said the archbishop requested she write.

One member of the Saints organization, the general counsel Vicky Neumeyer, expressed concerns when Mr. Bensel circulated a draft of the column internally. “I don’t want her to appear to be a puppet for the Archdiocese because we have way too many constituents from all walks of life,” she wrote. The piece, in which Ms. Benson wrote about “the positive impact our local Archdiocese plays in our community,” was soon published with minor changes.

Mr. Bensel also helped Archbishop Aymond prepare for an interview with The Advocate in June 2019 about the clergy abuse crisis. In one of the final exchanges before the Saints were served a subpoena for their communications with the church, he forwarded the thread about that preparation to a family member. “I don’t get paid enough,” Mr. Bensel wrote.