Here are prominent people named in the Saints clergy-abuse emails | New Orleans clergy abuse

Like the Saints and Pelicans owner, Gayle Benson, Jay Zainey is a devout Catholic. He has been a judge at New Orleans’ federal courthouse since 2002.

He once publicly said he had a chance encounter with New Orleans’ archbishop, Gregory Aymond, after a series of scandals locally and nationally revived the worldwide Catholic church’s clergy-abuse scandal. And during that encounter, he suggested to Aymond that Greg Bensel – the vice-president of communications for Benson’s two professional sports franchises – could help him navigate his messaging about the scandal. 

Based on the emails and time stamps from them, Zainey would have had to make that entreaty offline before one particular July 2018 newspaper article that was problematic for Aymond was published or very shortly thereafter.

The emails establish that Bensel in July 2018 asked Benson to tell Aymond that Bensel wanted to offer crisis communications help to the New Orleans archdiocese. Over the next year, Bensel communicated with Aymond, others at the archdiocese and outside allies with the evident goal of easing critical news media coverage and scrutiny of both the church and its leader.

Among the recipients of some of those communications was Zainey, who has publicly described himself as friends with Bensel – and once said he even met with Bensel and Aymond about the clergy-abuse scandal at one point. Zainey in one email credited Bensel for providing “wonderful advice”. He wrote of Aymond: “The Arch[bishop]’s sincerity will open their minds and hearts.” And, in a separate message, Zainey wrote: “By his example and leadership, Archbishop Aymond, our shepherd, will continue to lead our church in the right direction – helping us to learn and to rebuild from the mistakes of the past.”

The archdiocese would later file for bankruptcy protection as it grappled with a wave of clergy-abuse lawsuits seeking civil damages for survivors. Zainey was among several judges who recused themselves from presiding over any cases that could directly affect the bankruptcy. But at one point, Zainey did rule in a case involving a Catholic religious order that a 2021 Louisiana law enabling clergy-abuse survivors to seek damages over decades-old child molestation was unconstitutional. 

Zainey’s ruling was widely interpreted as potentially a decisive – if indirect – win for the archdiocese, which hoped the judge’s decision could let it settle abuse claims tied up in the bankruptcy case for less money than otherwise. But the state supreme court later upheld the law that Zainey struck down, in effect negating his ruling. 

Zainey declined comment for this report.

He was nominated for his federal judgeship during George W Bush’s presidency, and the US Senate confirmed him to the post in 2002. Like Lauscha and Bensel, he is also an alum of New Orleans’ Jesuit high school. He furthermore has served on the governing board of the New Orleans archdiocese-run college that educates prospective priests.

When the Saints emails began, Wendy Vitter was the general counsel of the archdiocese of New Orleans. She is also the wife of the former Republican US senator David Vitter and had been nominated to serve as a judge at the city’s federal courthouse by Donald Trump in his first presidency. 

Trump’s appointment of Wendy Vitter was confirmed in 2019 by the congressional chamber which her husband previously served. But before then, she spent at least some of her final months at the archdiocese being copied on emails from Bensel about the media messaging campaign that he was helping devise.

One of the times Vitter emailed Bensel was to share her excitement about a Saints victory in Baltimore less than two weeks before he helped the archdiocese publish a list of credibly accused clergy abusers who had worked locally. “WHAT A GAME!!” she wrote to Bensel, who had traveled to the game as part of his Saints duties. “Congratulations!”

“Amazing win, was fun (cold and windy, too),” Bensel replied.

An email from Bensel to Vitter a little more than a month after the list came out said he was glad that she and her husband had been able to attend a recent Saints game with their family. In that email, Bensel also asked her what the aftermath of the list’s release had been like from her perspective. 

“I have not wanted to bother the Archbishop, but was just curious … how has the reaction been relative to lawsuits or any other issues that we feared may arise,” Bensel wrote. “It seems as though [publicly] it has been fairly quiet.”

It is not clear if Vitter replied. But the number of additional civil lawsuits prompted by the list – marketed as a gesture of contrition and transparency – drove the church into bankruptcy. The church had not managed to resolve the bankruptcy successfully at the time of the publication of this report. If the church ever manages to do that, the case could cost the church hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to clergy-abuse victims. 

Furthermore, there was evidence uncovered during the bankruptcy that facilitated the prosecution of a serial child molester clergyman who had been shielded by the church for decades. 

The cleric, 93-year-old Lawrence Hecker, pleaded guilty in December 2024 to child rape, received a mandatory life sentence and shortly thereafter died. The prosecution of Hecker by New Orleans district attorney Jason Williams’ office then kickstarted a separate Louisiana state police investigation in which troopers alleged that they had probable cause to believe the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring that allowed Hecker and other clergymen to inflict sexual abuse on minors for decades – and that church bureaucrats then illicitly covered up those crimes.

Vitter did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Leon Cannizzaro – a self-described pious and practicing Catholic as well as former altar boy – had been New Orleans’ district attorney for about a decade when the city’s archdiocese released its clergy-abuser list.

On the morning that roster was published, using abbreviations commonly used for “conference call” and “with”, Bensel emailed the Saints and Pelicans president, Dennis Lauscha, hours before the disclosure and said: “Had a cc w Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take certain people off the list. 

“This list will get updated, and that is our message that we will not stop here.” 

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, he said: “No.” Through an email that same year from a spokesperson, Cannizzaro said to an Associated Press reporter that “he 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”.

Recently, Cannizzaro said in an interview: “I was not on any conference call with anybody from the Saints about this.”

The Guardian asked Cannizzaro about a 29 October 2018 typed message informing him of a call from Vitter. Vitter was “following up on conversation you had with Archbishop Aymond”, said the message left for Cannizzaro just four days before the list’s release.

“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,” Cannizzaro said.

But Cannizzaro insisted: “I did not at any time ask the archdiocese or tell the Saints to tell the archdiocese … ‘remove this name from the list’.

“I do not ever remember having a conversation with the Saints about any case going on with our office” at that specific time.

On Saturday, a statement from a Saints lawyer also said that no one from the team spoke with Cannizzaro. Instead, the statement said, 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 top assistant district attorney, Graymond Martin, was not impressed with the list when supplied with it. The list lacked some details that Martin considered basic, including the number of accusations against each clergyman as well as the nature of the alleged abuse. Martin drafted a request six days after the roster’s release seeking more information about the listed clergymen, including “when each act … occurred” and “some description of each of the alleged acts”.

It is unclear whether the request was formally sent to the archdiocese. 

Cannizzaro filed charges of child rape against one clergyman on the list before leaving office in 2021. The church had paid settlements totaling more than $3m or so to 16 victims of that clergyman, deacon George Brignac. Brignac, 85, died in 2020 while awaiting trial on charges that dated back to the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Unflattering news coverage in July 2018 of an out-of-court $550,000 settlement that the archdiocese paid to the victim in Cannizzaro’s case against Brignac was what prompted Bensel – with Benson’s blessing – to involve the Saints in the church’s clergy-abuse messaging in the first place. 

Cannizzaro has since become the chief of the criminal cases division at the Louisiana state attorney general’s office.

Newell Normand was the sheriff of the suburban New Orleans area of Jefferson parish for 10 years beginning in 2007, when he left his elected office and began a second career as a talkshow host for the local WWL Radio station. 

The radio station – which is not affiliated with the TV channel WWL Louisiana despite its call letters – has long held the exclusive rights to the Saints’ local broadcasts. And on Normand’s show, the station hosted the one live, on-air interview that Aymond granted the day that the archdiocese published its credibly accused clergy-abuser list. 

Emails among him, WWL Radio’s station director and archdiocesan officials show Bensel brokered the conversation between Normand and Aymond. And Bensel sent copies to Normand and the station director a list of eight questions for the host to ask Aymond. Bensel called the questions, which were prepared by the archdiocese, “a great framework for Newell”.

Normand ended up asking about half of the suggested questions. Aymond answered the rest without being prompted.

Normand also asked questions that weren’t provided for him. And in the years since that interview, Normand has used his show to criticize 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.”

Prominent local businessman John Georges bought the Advocate in 2013 and expanded the newspaper’s coverage area into the city from Baton Rouge after the Times-Picayune reduced the number of days it delivered printed editions as well as heavily cut newsroom jobs. He acquired the Times-Picayune in May 2019 and consolidated it with the Advocate, which at the time had just won its first Pulitzer prize for a series that helped change a law allowing non-unanimous jury verdicts in Louisiana.

That ended what was an intense fight over news scoops and commercial business. 

The Saints emails show both papers – before their consolidation – drew Bensel’s attention as he tried to take some of the edge off their coverage of Aymond’s handling of the local clergy-abuse crisis. He personally implored leaders at both the Times-Picayune and the Advocate to “get behind … and work with” the archbishop. 

And, at Aymond’s request months after the list went out, Bensel coordinated the writing of an opinion piece in the Advocate – under Benson’s name – that extolled the local church’s efforts to combat sex trafficking along with other ills.

One of the clergy-abuse lawsuits that drove the archdiocese into bankruptcy court turned up evidence of some of the communications among the church, Bensel and his Saints colleagues. Plaintiffs’ attorneys then successfully argued that they needed to subpoena all those communications.

While the Saints and the church complied with the subpoena, they fought efforts by the media to access copies of them. And when an Advocate reporter now at the Guardian contacted Bensel for possible comment about the subpoena, he sarcastically told the journalist to ask Georges for comment. He also forwarded an email from the reporter seeking comment to Georges. 

There is no indication in the emails that Georges and Bensel had a discussion after that. 

Georges, a former Louisiana gubernatorial and New Orleans mayoral candidate, is coincidentally a neighbor of Gayle Benson and has donated some of his wealth to Catholic institutions, according to publicly available information. The Advocate was also printing the archdiocese’s weekly newspaper as of at least 2020. 

Nonetheless, the merged Times-Picayune and Advocate owned by Georges subsequently joined a coalition of media organizations that sued to access the emails between the Saints and the church. The church bankruptcy essentially prevented that suit from being ruled on.

At one point, New Orleans news station WVUE-TV reported being told by an anonymous source that Georges “may have participated in behind the scenes communications involving the archdiocese’s release of credibly accused pedophile priests”. 

Georges told the station, which had once been owned by Gayle Benson’s late husband, Tom: “Your source is incorrect.

“I had no contact with the archdiocese during the period in question.” 

The Saints emails contain only the message Bensel forwarded to Georges in July 2019, months after the list’s release.

A statement from the consolidated Times-Picayune and Advocate said, “No one gets preferential treatment in our coverage of the news. Over the past six years, we have consistently published in-depth stories highlighting the ongoing serious issues surrounding the archdiocese sex abuse crisis, as well as investigative reports on this matter by WWL [Louisiana] and by the Associated Press.” Some of those WWL Louisiana reports were produced in partnership with the Guardian.

The newspaper’s statement continued: “As the largest local media company in Louisiana, we often hear from community leaders, and we welcome that engagement, but it does not dilute our journalistic standards or keep us from pursuing the truth.”