An attorney whose lawsuit discovered the existence of emails showing how top executives at the NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans tried to help New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese soften critical news coverage about the church’s management of a clergy-abuse scandal has challenged the sports teams’ assertions that the communications were protected by a court order.
Nonetheless, an attorney for the Saints on Tuesday issued a statement doubling down on his position that the material’s disclosure to the press was “a violation of [a] court order protecting them”.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer John Denenea said on Tuesday that neither he nor any of his staff provided the emails in question to any media outlets at all, including the Guardian, WWL Louisiana or various other ones that published investigations a day earlier into the communications for the first time.
But Denenea responded to contentions from the Saints – prominently boosted on Monday by at least one popular sports website – that the materials reported on by the outlets were leaked in defiance of a court order sealing them from public access.
Denenea recounted how he obtained the New Orleans archdiocese’s correspondence with the Saints and Pelicans – including team owner Gayle Benson and spokesperson Greg Bensel – through a subpoena that he issued on behalf of a clergy-abuse survivor pursuing a civil lawsuit against the church in a local courthouse.
The subpoena was the first public indication of the emails. Denenea argued that the emails should become public, but the Saints countered that they should be protected.
The state court judge handling the case had not formally resolved that dispute when New Orleans’ archdiocese filed for federal bankruptcy protection in May 2020 in an attempt to dispense with numerous pending lawsuits stemming from the church’s decades-old, worldwide clerical child molestation scandal.
The bankruptcy not only delayed litigation against the archdiocese indefinitely – it also forced Denenea’s client’s case to be transferred to the federal courthouse in New Orleans.
At the new venue, Judge Susie Morgan granted permission to attorneys for the archdiocese to file seven evidentiary exhibits into the case record under seal, Denenea said and court documents showed. The order signed by Morgan on 4 May 2020 directs the courthouse clerk to “take all steps necessary … to ensure that the sealed components … are entered into the record in the above-captioned matter under seal”.
Eleven days later, as Denenea said and court documents show, Morgan signed an order permitting archdiocesan attorneys to file 14 additional exhibits into the case record. The order says nothing about those exhibits being sealed or maintained under any protections.
It merely directed the court clerk to “take all steps necessary to ensure that the attached … exhibits … are filed in the record of the above-captioned matter”.
The email communications involving the Saints and the archdiocese were among those 14 supplementary exhibits, Denenea said he confirmed.
Denenea said that evident error – and the fact that the Saints “were relying on the church’s lawyers to protect the [team’s] documents” – prompted him to formally notify the ball club’s lawyers in July “that these emails were not under seal or protected”.
“I put them on notice that, if they wanted to protect these documents, they needed to bring it up with the judge in a motion to seal or a motion for a protective order for those documents,” Denenea said.
A letter that Denenea sent to Saints lawyer James Gulotta cited a local rule at New Orleans’ US district courthouse which reads: “In recognition of the right of the public to access material filed with the court, no document or other tangible item, or portion thereof, may be filed under seal without the filing of a separate motion and order to seal, unless authorized by a federal statute, federal rule, or prior court order in the same case expressly authorizing the party to file certain documents (or portions thereof) under seal.”
Denenea’s letter also said a member of the court clerk’s office had confirmed that the email-related documents were “not sealed by any court order”.
Denenea said the Saints’ lawyers took no action despite his notice. “They didn’t do it then,” he said. “They haven’t done it since.”
On Tuesday, Gulotta provided the Guardian with a reply he sent to Denenea in July which contended that a protective order in state court applied to the emails and remained in effect. He also cited a 2020 ruling from the federal fifth circuit court in New Orleans reading: “In this circuit, when a case is removed from state court to federal court, the federal court takes the case and it finds and treats the state court rulings as its own.”
Gulotta’s letter to Denenea said: “There is no occasion for me, as counsel for the Saints, to file a motion in federal court to preserve the effect of the protective order restricting their disclosure.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Gulotta characterized Denenea’s arguments that the emails were unshielded as “erroneous”. His statement also said: “Any disclosure to the public or to the press of the protected documents is and would be a violation of the court order protecting them.”
Denenea on Tuesday countered: “It appears to me that the Saints and their attorneys foolishly relied on the archdiocese and its lawyers in protecting their precious documents.”
The Saints and archdiocese emails publicized on Monday mainly establish that Bensel – the team’s vice-president of communications – directly lobbied New Orleans media outlets to focus on exalting Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s courage in releasing a list of local, credibly accused clergy abusers in November 2018, which was meant as an act of conciliation and transparency amid the ongoing fallout of the church’s clerical molestation scandal.
He also solicited and frequently received feedback on – and moral support for – the messaging campaign from Benson, who is Aymond’s close personal friend, as well as the Saints and Pelicans president, Dennis Lauscha. Bensel did the same with other powerful civic figures who neither worked for the Saints nor the archdiocese.
The Saints have insisted the emails amount to nothing more than well-intended “public relations assistance” with media attention over the clergy-abuse scandal, which in April 2024 left the archdiocese faced with a child sex-trafficking investigation being conducted jointly by state and federal law enforcement.
A statement from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests’ Louisiana chapter on Tuesday said those emails “signal that the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church is more widespread and insidious than anyone could possibly imagine”.
But at a news conference on Monday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell hailed the Saints as being “very involved in this community, and they are great corporate citizens”.
