The Guardian and WWL Louisiana have obtained emails showing how top officials at the NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans spent a year collaborating with New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese as the organizations sought to soften media coverage about the church’s management of a decades-old clergy-abuse scandal in their city.
An investigation of the emails shows how the communications call into question statements made over the last five years by the Louisiana billionaire Gayle Benson’s two professional sports franchises that sought to minimize their role in trying to help the church deal with the scandal’s fallout once they got involved in the summer of 2018. Nonetheless, in a lengthy statement from a team attorney on Saturday, the Saints insisted they had accurately portrayed their involvement.
Below is a summary of key points made in the lengthy report that WWL Louisiana and the Guardian published after an extensive review of the emails in question, contained in hundreds of pages of documents that vividly show how fierce the friendship is between Benson – a devout Catholic as well as prolific church donor - and New Orleans’ archbishop, Gregory Aymond.
Saints and Pelicans spokesperson Greg Bensel described a conversation with then New Orleans district attorney Leon Cannizzaro that ‘allowed us to take certain people off the list’ of credibly accused clergy abusers published by the church in the fall of 2018.
In the most striking example of the coordinated messaging campaign he was helming, Bensel – the teams’ vice-president of communications – employed abbreviations commonly used for “conference call” and “with” to report that there had been a “cc w” New Orleans’ district attorney at the time, Leon Cannizzaro, on the evening before the church released a credibly accused clergy-abuser list in November 2018.
“Had a cc w Leon Cannizzaro that allowed us to take certain people off the list,” Bensel wrote to Saints and Pelicans president Dennis Lauscha, though Bensel has consistently denied in public that his organizations had any input with respect to who went on that disclosure. “The list will get updated, and that is our message that we will not stop here today.”
Cannizzaro has consistently denied such a conversation took place. When asked by WWL Louisiana in 2020 if he had any input on the contents of the church’s credibly accused list, Cannizzaro said: “No.” Also that same year, a Cannizzaro spokesperson wrote in an email to an Associated Press reporter that Cannizzaro “was not consulted about the composition of the archdiocese’s ‘credibly accused’ list nor did he or anyone from [his] office have input into its assembly”.
And more recently, Cannizzaro said: “I did not at any time ask the archdiocese or tell the Saints to tell the archdiocese … ‘remove this name from the list’.”
The Guardian asked Cannizzaro about a 29 October 2018 typed message informing him of a call from the archdiocese general counsel at the time, Wendy Vitter. Vitter, now a federal judge, was “following up on conversation you had with Archbishop Aymond”, according to the message left for Cannizzaro just four days before the list’s release.
Cannizzaro has since said: “If I was in a conversation with him, I would’ve been looking for any records he would have had relative to complaints made against priests so we could reach out to those victims to see if there was a prosecutable case.”
He added: “I do not ever remember having a conversation with the Saints about any case going on with our office” at that specific time.
The Saints lawyer’s statement on Saturday also said that no one from the team spoke with Cannizzaro. Instead, Bensel’s email to Lauscha referred “to a conversation that he was told had occurred between a member of the staff of the archdiocese and … Cannizzaro, concerning the list” and how it would be updated.
A statement from the archdiocese on Saturday echoed the Saints and Cannizzaro in saying “no one from the [team] or the New Orleans district attorney’s office had any role in compiling the [credibly accused] list or had any say in adding or removing anyone from the list”.
Cannizzaro’s office later filed charges against one clergyman on the list: George Brignac, though the deacon died awaiting trial in 2020. Cannizzaro later became the chief of the criminal cases division at the Louisiana state attorney general’s office.
The Saints’ and Pelicans’ top spokesperson, Greg Bensel, involved the organizations in the archdiocese’s clergy-abuse scandal with the blessing of the teams’ owner – and without being asked to do so by the church.
In July 2018, Bensel asked Benson if she would offer his services as a crisis communicator to Aymond, citing the experience Bensel had accumulated working in the NFL since the 1990s. Benson – who has been a friend of the archbishop for years – thanked Bensel and said she would pass on the offer to Aymond.
In September 2018, Bensel wrote in an email to the president of a Catholic school from which he graduated that he had been with Aymond on Benson’s boat in July 2018 when a damning news story appeared about Brignac, who was accused of molesting dozens of children – and had been removed from ministry for 20 years – still being allowed to read scripture at masses. That was months before Bensel and other team officials helped the church with the release of a list of credibly accused clergy in November 2018.
Benson said in 2020 that Bensel helped the church in the weeks leading up to the release of the list.
The Saints attorney’s statement said Bensel only got involved at the behest of New Orleans-based federal judge Jay Zainey, who, according to the emails and time stamps from them, would have had to make that entreaty offline before the article on the abusive deacon was published or very shortly thereafter. Zainey has publicly acknowledged making such a suggestion at some point.
“Other local civic leaders” also asked Bensel to get involved, the Saints’ statement said, without elaborating.
Bensel then solicited feedback and support from influential allies.
Bensel remained in constant touch with Aymond’s archdiocese as it prepared – and then published – the list of dozens of priests and deacons who faced credible allegations of child molestation while serving the church in New Orleans. That included prepping Aymond for media interviews, and the archbishop would use talking points suggested by Bensel.
Though he claimed he was operating in his personal capacity, Bensel used his Saints email address – with a signature containing the NFL and NBA’s logos – throughout the communications. Bensel directly lobbied local media outlets to highlight Aymond’s courage in releasing the list, which was meant as an act of conciliation and transparency after a series of local and national scandals revived the unresolved issue of clergy abuse.
On occasion, the outlets Bensel contacted would subsequently produce pieces whose tone he complimented. It is, however, unclear exactly when those pieces had been planned.
He also solicited – and frequently received – feedback and moral support on the messaging campaign from Benson, Lauscha, Zainey and Vitter, the wife of the former Republican US senator David Vitter.
Benson and Lauscha used their Saints email addresses as well.
Zainey – who has served on the governing board of the New Orleans archdiocese-run college that educates prospective priests – at one point told Bensel he was confident that Aymond’s “sincerity” would “open” the “minds and hearts” of the public. He referred to Aymond in one instance as “our shepherd”.
The judge later recused himself from any rulings directly involving the archdiocese. But he went on to rule in a case involving a Catholic religious order that a 2021 Louisiana law enabling clergy-abuse survivors and others to seek damages over decades-old child molestation was unconstitutional. Zainey’s ruling was in effect negated when Louisiana’s state supreme court later upheld the law.
Zainey declined comment for this report.
The emails show how the Saints and the church’s close coordination on media messaging only stopped after a July 2019 subpoena.
Bensel, Benson and Lauscha continued to coordinate with the archdiocese about how to respond to news stories about the clergy-abuse crisis – or other more general matters involving their respective organizations – for almost eight months beyond the release of the clerical molester list.
In one instance, Aymond successfully asked the Saints for Benson to submit an opinion letter to a local newspaper praising the New Orleans church’s work combating sex trafficking and advocating for children’s safety online. That was about five years before Louisiana state police would allege having probable cause to suspect the archdiocese in prior decades had sexually trafficked minors.
The Saints on Saturday said that letter was not “misleading” and did not excuse “the misconduct of members of the clergy”.
In another instance, Bensel wrote about preparing Aymond for an interview with the same newspaper about the effect of the clergy-abuse scandal on church finances.
One of the clergy-abuse lawsuits that drove the archdiocese to seek bankruptcy protection in 2020 resulted in a subpoena for copies of all communications among Saints and church officials. The plaintiffs’ attorneys who obtained the subpoena said the order was necessary because the case’s discovery process turned up emails and other evidence establishing that Bensel was advising the archdiocese on how to navigate its clergy-abuse scandal.
The Saints and the church complied with the subpoena but fought in court to keep the news media from accessing copies of the communications. They also issued statements strongly saying that they had only communicated with Aymond’s archdiocese to handle “pending media attention” in the lead-up to the release of the clergy-abuser list. On Saturday, the team’s statement summarized its involvement as “public relations assistance provided to the archdiocese of New Orleans … in anticipation of press interest in the publication of a list of clergy who were credibly accused of abuse”.
The church wrote up several questions it wanted the archbishop to be asked on his one live, on-air interview on the day the list was released. Bensel forwarded the questions to the interview host, who asked at least half of them in similar form and let the archbishop give the remaining answers unprompted.
On the day the clergy-abuser list was published, Aymond granted his only live interview that day to former local area sheriff and afternoon radio show host Newell Normand. Normand’s employer, WWL Radio, has long held the exclusive rights to the Saints local broadcasts. And Bensel brokered the conversation through emails involving the manager of the radio station, which – despite its call letters – is not affiliated with the TV channel WWL Louisiana.
Two days before the interview, an archdiocese spokesperson sent Bensel eight questions for Normand to ask Aymond. Bensel essentially forwarded the questions to Normand and the host’s station director while saying the suggested inquiries were “a great framework”. Normand, who alluded to his Catholic upbringing and a struggle to accept the reality of the clergy-abuse crisis, ultimately asked about half of the suggested questions in similar form to the way they were proposed. Aymond answered the rest unprompted.
In the years since, on his show, Normand has criticized Aymond’s handling of the local Catholic clergy-abuse crisis.
A statement on Saturday from the corporation that owns WWL Radio, Audacy, said: “WWL stands by its coverage of this story. We have no additional comment.”
