One of the big stories in the United States relates to two major American sports franchises being involved in a child sexual abuse scandal. The teams in question are the New Orleans Saints of the NFL and the Pelicans of the NBA, both owned by Gayle Benson, widow of billionaire Tom Benson, who passed away in 2018. He acquired ownership of the football team in 1985 and the basketball team in 2012. The case is that senior executives from these franchises allegedly advised and assisted with a public relations strategy for the city’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese in a child sexual abuse case, both before and after it broke against the religious institution.
In 2018, the Archdiocese of New Orleans was forced to release a list of clergy members accused of sexual abuse. Since then, that list has grown. In 2019, the Saints were first implicated after victims’ attorneys gained access to the team’s files following a court subpoena. Shortly thereafter, the franchise announced that it would go to court to prevent the release of the contents of hundreds of emails, which allegedly showed that some of its executives had helped the church in one way or another to minimize damage to its growing image crisis. The owner of the Saints denied that any such advice had been given. The team’s lawyers were clear in 2020: “The Saints have not handled the public relations of criminals involved in pedophilia”.
Access to the emails that the Saints did not want to make public
All of this even led to an investigation into child sex trafficking. Now Associated Press has had access to the emails that the Saints did not want to make public and that could clarify the relationship between the Archdiocese and the franchise’s executives. In one of these emails, a senior executive of the football team even describes a conversation with the New Orleans district attorney at the time, which allowed them to remove some names of clergy accused of abuse from the list that was eventually published.
One of the most revealing things about the closeness of the two institutions, the sporting and the religious, is that thanks to these emails it has become known that New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond acted as a witness to the will that allowed Gayle Benson to inherit the Saints and Pelicans from her late billionaire husband, Tom. The will also granted key positions in Tom Benson’s estate to team president Dennis Lauscha and chief spokesman Greg Bensel.
One of the conclusions published by Associated Press about the content of the messages is that Dennis Lauscha drafted more than a dozen questions that Archbishop Aymond should be prepared to answer when facing the press. It also specifies that Saints vice president of communications Greg Bensel provided Lauscha with timely updates on interviews with local media, suggesting that church and team leaders should send the same kind of message to the community