Takeaways from NFL emails outlining Saints' damage control for clergy sex abuse crisis

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — When New Orleans church leaders prepared to publish a list of predatory Catholic priests, they turned to a well-oiled public relations machine: the city's NFL franchise.

What came next was a 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 emails show team executives played a more extensive role than previously known in a public relations campaign to mitigate fallout from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. And they shed new light on a behind-the-scenes effort driven by the team’s devoutly Catholic owner, a close friend of the city’s embattled archbishop.

Here are some key takeaways from the emails, which the team for years sought to keep secret:

Saints executives helped church in PR effort

Team executives were so closely involved in the church's damage control efforts that a Saints spokesman briefed his boss on a 2018 call with the city's top prosecutor hours before the Archdiocese of New Orleans released a list of accused clergymen. The call, the spokesman reported to his boss, “allowed us to take certain people off” the list.

Team officials were among the first people outside the church to view the list, a carefully curated yet undercounted roster of suspected pedophiles that invited civil claims against the church and drew the 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. Meanwhile, the team's spokesman provided fly-on-the-wall updates to Lauscha about media interviews, the emails show.

When the clergy abuse allegations came to a head, the team's spokesman, Greg Bensel, carried out a public relations campaign in which he called in favors, prepared talking points and leaned on long-time media contacts to “work” with the church through a “soon-to-be-messy” time.

Bensel, the Saints' senior vice president of communications, sent lengthy emails to local newspaper editors invoking the team's impact on the community while asking them to keep their communications confidential. Far from freelancing, Bensel had the Saints’ backing and blessing, working on the campaign even as he traveled to road games in a 2018 season in which the Saints appeared in the NFC Championship.

The Saints have stood behind Bensel and other team officials. In a lengthy statement issued last week, the team blasted the media for using “leaked emails for the purpose of misconstruing a well-intended effort.”

Saints say team played no role in producing list of accused priests

The Saints drew criticism from fans and others in 2020 after the AP first reported on its alliance with the church in 2020. The team insisted it had urged the church to be transparent even as it went to court to keep its internal emails secret.

The team told the AP last week the partnership is a thing of the past.

“No member of the Saints organization condones or wants to cover up the abuse that occurred in the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” it said in its statement. “That abuse occurred is a terrible fact.”

The team also reiterated denials it made in 2020 that it did not help shape the roster of clergy accused of sexual abuse that was published two years earlier by the church. No Saints employees “had any responsibility for adding or removing any names from that list,” the team said.

Revelations anger community

The AP's findings angered members of the New Orleans community.

“This is disgusting,” said state Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans upon being told of the AP's findings. “As a New Orleans resident, taxpayer and Catholic, it doesn’t make any sense to me why the Saints would go to these lengths to protect grown men who raped children. All of them should have been just as horrified at the allegations.”

Kevin Bourgeois, a survivor of sexual abuse by a priest, said he felt “felt betrayed by” the Saints.

“It forces me to question what other secrets are being withheld,” he told AP. “I’m angry, hurt and re-traumatized again.”