NFL’s Saints helped Catholic church amid abuse crisis, emails show
Hundreds of internal emails obtained by The Washington Post on Monday shed new light on the role New Orleans Saints executives played in helping the city’s Catholic church leaders deal with the fallout of a sex abuse crisis years ago.
In one 2018 email, sent the night before the Archdiocese of New Orleans released a list of former clergy credibly accused of sex crimes, Saints vice president of communications Greg Bensel wrote of a call with a local prosecutor that “allowed us to take certain people off the list.”
For years, Saints officials have denied allegations by lawyers for victims that team officials had input on the list of accused clergy, produced amid a sex abuse crisis that sent the archdiocese into bankruptcy proceedings.
Bensel deferred questions from The Post on Monday to the Saints’ lawyers, who did not reply with any comment.
The emails were produced as part of litigation filed by hundreds of alleged victims of sex abuse by local Catholic priests. Lawyers for the Saints and the Archdiocese of New Orleans had successfully fought in court to keep the emails from public view. The emails were also obtained and reported earlier Monday by The Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Guardian.
In statements to those news outlets, the Saints maintained that Bensel and the team had no input on the clergy list, and that the email in question described “a conversation he was told had occurred … concerning the list.”
The prosecutor whom Bensel mentioned in the email, Leon Cannizzaro, has repeatedly denied having any input on the list. Cannizzaro did not reply to requests for comment on Monday.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans, in a statement to The Post on Monday, also denied that the team or local prosecutors had any input on the clergy list.
“The relationship between the New Orleans Saints and the Archdiocese of New Orleans in regard to the 2018 release of the list of those removed from ministry for abuse of a minor was limited to assistance in a public relations capacity. 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 said.
The bulk of the rest of the 770 pages of emails shared by Saints executives in 2018 and 2019 show the extent to which Bensel, also the top communications executive for the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans, provided public relations guidance to church officials, including Archbishop Gregory Aymond.
Bensel helped prepare Aymond for interviews, the emails show, offered suggested edits on a letter to the editor and lobbied local news outlets for favorable coverage of Aymond and the church.
“I am writing this email not as the communications person for the Saints/Pelicans but as a parent, New Orleanian and member of the Catholic Church … I am a close friend of Archbishop Aymond and have been confidentially discussing the recent horrible issues that he and the Church are facing,” Bensel wrote to a top editor at the New Orleans Advocate newspaper in Oct. 2018.
“I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind him and work with him … Casting a critical eye on him is neither beneficial nor right,” Bensel wrote.
The emails began in July 2018, when Bensel shared a news story with Gayle Benson, who owns both the Saints and Pelicans. The story regarded a deacon who continued to hold a role with a New Orleans-area church until the month before, despite sexual abuse allegations dating to the 1980s.
The deacon, George Brignac, was later criminally charged with raping a 7-year-old altar boy but died while awaiting trial.
“Yes, I saw this, Archbishop is very upset. He told me last week … a mess,” wrote Benson. Like Bensel, Benson is Catholic and a friend of Archbishop Aymond.
In response, Bensel suggested to Benson he could help Aymond and the church with crisis communications.
“We have been through enough at Saints to be a help or sounding board- but I don’t want to overstep!” Bensel wrote.
“Thank you Greg, I will pass this on to him. I am certain he will appreciate it,” Benson replied.
Benson spoke at a news conference held by the Super Bowl host committee Monday in New Orleans, but she did not address the issue or take questions from reporters. She did not respond to a question on the matter shouted by a reporter as she left.
The Saints have previously characterized the public relations guidance Bensel offered as “minimal,” and emphasized that he encouraged the church to be transparent.
“Never did the Saints organization offer advice to conceal information,” the team said in 2020.
In one email, Bensel suggested the church offer a public decree of support for abuse victims that the church’s top spokeswoman found a step too far.
“Is there a benefit to saying we support a victim’s right to pursue a remedy through the courts?” Bensel wrote in Oct. 2018.
“I don’t think we want to say we ‘support’ victims going to the courts but we certainly encourage them to come forward,” replied archdiocese director of communications Sarah McDonald, who did not reply to a request for comment on Monday about this email exchange.
The trove of emails ends in July 2019, after Bensel received an email from a reporter at the New Orleans Advocate about two developments: lawyers for abuse victims had sent a subpoena to the Saints, and then a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, seeking documents relating to communications with the archdiocese.