NOTE: This musing also appears today on our sister site Leblanguage. Please visit it regularly for musings on media, politics, sports and life.
I get it, timing is everything, and that’s especially true in the case of the city of New Orleans. It’s been a pretty arduous start to 2025 for them, beginning with the New Year’s Eve terror attack on Bourbon Street that resulted in 14 civilian deaths and 57 injuries as a result of a senseless joy ride steered by a Texas terrorist named Shamsud Din-Jabbar, who fortunately became a victim himself after a police shootout. Then, a atypically severe blizzard that crippled the city’s infrastructure in a manner that many saw as reminiscent of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So even getting to the point where they are seemingly ready to host their first Super Bowl in 18 years is perhaps an act of divine intervention. And we know how important both faith and football are to New Orleans.
So maybe Monday morning wasn’t the most opportune time for THE ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Jim Mustian and Brett Martel to drop this party-pooper of an update on yet another blot on Arlo Guthrie’s favorite subject:
As New Orleans church leaders braced for the fallout from publishing a list of predatory Catholic priests, they turned to an unlikely ally: the front office of the city’s NFL franchise.
What followed was a monthslong, crisis-communications blitz orchestrated by the New Orleans Saints’ president and other top team officials, according to hundreds of internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.
The records, which the Saints and church had long sought to keep out of public view, reveal team executives played a more extensive role than previously known in a public relations campaign to mitigate fallout from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The emails shed new light on the Saints’ foray into a fraught topic far from the gridiron, a behind-the-scenes effort driven by the team’s devoutly Catholic owner who has long enjoyed a close relationship with the city’s embattled archbishop.
Among the key moments, as revealed in the Saints’ own emails:
— Saints executives were so involved in the church’s damage control that a team spokesman briefed his boss on a 2018 call with the city’s top prosecutor hours before the church released a list of clergymen accused of abuse. The call, the spokesman said, “allowed us to take certain people off” the list.
— Team officials were among the first people outside the church to view that list, a carefully curated, yet undercounted roster of suspected pedophiles. The disclosure of those names invited civil claims against the church and drew attention from federal and state law enforcement.
— The team’s president, Dennis Lauscha, drafted more than a dozen questions that Archbishop Gregory Aymond should be prepared to answer as he faced reporters.
— The Saints’ senior vice president of communications, Greg Bensel, provided fly-on-the-wall updates to Lauscha about local media interviews, suggesting church and team leaders were all on the same team. “He is doing well,” Bensel wrote as the archbishop told reporters the church was committed to addressing the crisis. “That is our message,” Bensel added, “that we will not stop here today.”
The emails obtained by AP sharply undercut assurances the Saints gave fans about the public relations guidance five years ago when they asserted they had provided only “minimal” assistance to the church. The team went to court to keep its internal emails secret.
And since this story was being dropped just as a few thousand journalists and tens of thousands of well-heeled football revelers descended upon the city as Super Bowl Week festivities were about to commence, it likely brought out a fresh surge of outrage and disgust to those not already in the know. It certainly was my reaction, and apparently was shared by at least one reporter who was assigned to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual State of The Game press conference that usually kicks off Super Bowl week festivities. USA TODAY’s Jeremy Trottier provided this narrative in yesterday’s piece:
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.”
It was pure deflection to keep folks’ minds on just football, much as it was back in 2018. At the time, the Saints were on a nine-game winning streak under veteran quarterback Drew Brees and coaching genius Sean Payton en route to a surprising run to the NFC championship game. The last thing the city and its rabid fans needed was a scandal to get in the way of a religious experience right up there with a Sunday sermon. And with the current Saints having fallen on harder time, still without a head coach (Eagles assistant Kellen Moore is apparently waiting in the weeks to take the gig and will likely stick around Monday morning one way or the other to make it official), the last thing its ownership team needed at this time was to be reminded of this. Thank goodness that Goodell seems to have their back.
Naturally, this didn’t sit all too well with many who witnessed this deke, notably SB NATION’s James Dator, who hunt-and-pecked this scathing review yesterday:
Roger Goodell isn’t going to do anything about the New Orleans Saints. He said as much on Monday night. To be clear: The “supportive role” was being in constant communication with the archbishop of New Orleans to help him damage control while releasing the names of clergy members with credible allegations of sexual assault, whom the church had intentionally hidden until they were found out. The “support” was media training the archbishop to handle the local media, with one executive saying the Saints and the church were “on the same team,” with the other team being law enforcement and victims of sexual abuse.
When it comes to owners and conduct detrimental to the NFL it’s a different story, and Goodell is knowingly choosing not to enforce the Constitution and Bylaws of the NFL in deciding to leave this alone. The Saints are given money through the NFL’s profit-sharing agreement, and its employees were intimately involved in assisting the church during the sexual abuse scandal. So, by extension, every single fan who bought merchandise, tickets, paid for streaming services — everything, all unwittingly funded the Saints assisting the church in shaping its message.
Furthermore, Goodell is explicitly lying when he says “Her transparency of the emails are out there,” referring to Gail Benson. The Saints have been fighting in court for five years to suppress the release of emails between members of the Saints organization and the Catholic church. The “transparency” only began when courts sided with the Associated Press to release the emails, rather than the Saints who said they were private and not for the public.
Dator’s conclusion and call to action is equally compelling:
This could all be simply part of a plan by Goodell to get through Super Bowl week and then deal with this issue, but seemingly the plan is to ignore it. It’s on every football fan to ensure this doesn’t vanish from view and get swept under the rug, because this is a serious scandal that warrants more attention than the NFL commissioner is giving it.
Consider this one small step toward that goal.