Sexual abuse survivors grill NFL amid New Orleans Saints church scandal | New Orleans clergy abuse

Clergy sexual abuse survivor support groups have called on the National Football League to investigate whether leaders of the New Orleans Saints flouted the NFL’s goals by campaigning alongside the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese to soften critical media coverage of how the church handled its clerical molestation scandal.

A statement from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (Snap) pointed out how the NFL’s website expresses a commitment to “addressing and preventing domestic violence and sexual assault”. Yet emails first reported on Monday morning by the Guardian, its reporting partner WWL Louisiana, the Associated Press and the New York Times establish how the Saints – owned by the devout New Orleans Catholic Gayle Benson – and team executives were far more involved in helping its local archdiocese spin media coverage of the abuse scandal than the organizations had previously acknowledged.

The Saints and New Orleans’ archdiocese have each characterized the correspondence between them as well-intended public relations help that has been misconstrued by journalists.

Nonetheless, Snap’s statement said the Saints “used their vast resources” as an NFL franchise “to support an organization that is accused of covering up sexual assault on innocent boys and girls”. The accusations to which Snap referred are contained in a sworn law enforcement statement filed in New Orleans’ criminal courthouse last April as part of a joint state and federal child sex-trafficking investigation focused on the archdiocese, which is alleged to have allowed clergymen to inflict sexual abuse on minors for decades and then successfully covered up most of those crimes.

“The New Orleans Saints, the Catholic church, and every institution wielding influence over our communities must do more than protect their own reputations,” said a statement attributed to Letitia Peyton, the executive director of the clergy-abuse survivor support group TentMakers of Louisiana and the leader of Snap’s chapter in the state. “Prioritizing [public relations] over survivors perpetuates harm.”

At a media briefing on Monday afternoon six days before New Orleans hosts Super Bowl LIX, the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, hailed Benson and the Saints’ top brass as “great corporate citizens” when asked if the league would investigate the team’s use of its servers and logo in the emails with the church.

“I’m confident that they are playing nothing more than a supportive role to help be more transparent in circumstances like this,” Goodell said of the Saints, who had fought in court to keep the emails out of public view.

Benson also owns the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans. The NBA – whose logo is also in the communications – has not responded to multiple requests for comment about the emails.

In his own statement, the Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse (SCSA) founder Richard Windmann dismissed Goodell’s statement about the Saints and Pelicans emails with the church as “frivolous” and “avoiding the true issue”.

“If the NFL has policies towards … sex abuse as they advertise publicly, we have not seen any action on them,” Windmann said. “Actually addressing this issue head-on would be a much better measure to maintain their reputations than using their PR teams to spin the story.”

Snap, meanwhile, contended that Goodell “should use the power of his office to open an independent, thorough investigation into these disturbing revelations”.

“We urge him to immediately undertake a probe of the New Orleans Saints, and when completed to make his findings public,” the Snap statement said.