NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell called the New Orleans Saints “great corporate citizens” and praised team owner Gayle Benson for her transparency in response to reports Monday — including from the Associated Press and The New York Times — that showed team leaders had played a role in helping the Archdiocese of New Orleans handle the public relations fallout after sexual abuse accusations made against priests and church employees became public.
Asked during a pre-Super Bowl media session on Monday in New Orleans whether the NFL planned to investigate the findings, Goodell said it was a law enforcement matter.
“Mrs. Benson and the Saints are very involved in this community and they are great corporate citizens,” he said. “Mrs. Benson takes all these matters seriously, particularly for someone with the Catholic Church connections that she does. … This is a matter of the FBI. Local law enforcement — nationally and otherwise — are involved with this. Mrs. Benson first mentioned this back in 2018 in the context of this. She’s made multiple comments about this. Her transparency of the emails are out there. 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.”
According to the emails, communication between church leaders and Saints officials began in July 2018 after Greg Bensel, the Saints’ head of communications, shared a local news story with Benson about a former deacon who was removed from ministry due to abuse accusations.
Benson, a devout Catholic and close friend of local Archbishop Gregory Aymond, shared Bensel’s offer to help Aymond prepare for the fallout, according to the reports. Later emails show Saints team president Dennis Lauscha drafted more than a dozen questions for Aymond to prepare to answer from reporters.
One of the key details revealed in the emails, according to the reports, was from a Saints team spokesman who 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. According to the spokesman, the call “allowed us to take certain people off” the list of names. The spokesman did not include any more details, and it is not clear if names were removed from the list.
In 2020, Benson issued a lengthy statement defending her and her team’s roles in conversations with church leaders. According to Benson, “No one associated with our organizations made recommendations or had input on the individual names of those disclosed on the list, rather our suggestion was to be completely transparent.”
In a new statement to the AP, the Saints reiterated that: “No member of the Saints organization condones or wants to cover up the abuse that occurred in the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” the team said. “That abuse occurred is a terrible fact.”
(Photo: Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)
