The New Orleans Saints clergy abuse scandal has once again taken a large place in headlines, this time right before the Super Bowl is hosted in their own city. This scandal has been one of the dark blemishes on the Saints over the past few seasons, and now it has come back to light as the Associated Press published further details regarding the full extent of how deep this issue truly went.
With Super Bowl LIX coming up soon, media had the chance to speak with Roger Goodell regarding a wide variety of topics across the NFL landscape, and this scandal came up as a question (can be found at 14:00 in this linked video). Here is what Goodell had to say in response:
“Well, a couple things, one is… Mrs. Benson and the Saints are very involved in this community, and they are great corporate citizens. So Mrs. Benson takes all these matters seriously, particularly for someone with the catholic church connections that she does.
“But I would say this, this is a matter of the FBI, I think local law enforcement, nationally and otherwise, are involved with this. Mrs. Benson first mentioned this back in 2018 in the context of… she’s made multiple comments about this… which you all have seen her transparency of the emails that are out there. So I leave it to them, but I am confident that they are playing nothing more than a supportive role to help be more transparent in circumstances like this.”
From these comments we can infer that an NFL investigation of this will not take place at this time, but will rather be handled by law enforcement agencies. We will see how things turn out in the coming days or weeks, but it is not a good look for the organization regardless.
