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  • After Attack, New Orleans Is Rattled but Ready for the ‘Biggest Show on Earth’


    In the final days before Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, local, state and federal officials have described a dash to beef up security plans that were robust even before a New Year’s Day terrorist attack unleashed anguish and alarm in the city.

    One of the most visible changes is the “enhanced security zone” around Bourbon Street, the site of the deadly ramming attack and a hive of activity when the Super Bowl is in town. Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana created the zone using an emergency order, which also allows law enforcement officers to search the bags of people entering the area and deny entry to anyone who refuses, officials said.

    New steel barriers have also been installed to thwart other potential ramming attacks; the barriers were added partly out of concern that a new bollard system that was in the works before the attack was not strong enough to stop speeding trucks. No bollards were in place on Bourbon Street when the attack happened.

    Even before the New Year’s mayhem, the security measures planned for the Super Bowl reflected the kind of vast and layered response that has become the default for an event of this magnitude — one that took months of coordination and drew upon years of experience.

    But in recent weeks, officials have repeatedly sought to reassure residents and visitors by describing how they had re-evaluated and tweaked those plans after a man plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street. Fourteen people were killed and dozens more were injured in the attack, roughly a mile from the football stadium.

    The blocks around the stadium, Caesar’s Superdome, have turned into a maze of barricades, fences and closed roads. About 2,000 law enforcement officers will be deployed this weekend — many in uniform, and many others working covertly. There are also checkpoints, armed National Guard troops and drones and helicopters constantly hovering overhead.

    “It’s been a whirlwind,” said Collin Arnold, the city’s director of homeland security and emergency preparedness. “This last month has been very, very busy, but we’re ready. This city is ready.”

    Even for a city well accustomed to tourism, conventions and major cultural events, the stakes posed by the Super Bowl are unrivaled. The event is projected to bring more than 125,000 people to New Orleans in the coming days, including the highest-profile celebrities, athletes and business leaders. White House officials said this week that President Trump was planning to attend.

    “The biggest show on earth is going to go off without a hitch,” Mr. Landry said at a briefing on Monday.

    At the same briefing, Kristi Noem, the federal homeland security secretary, said that there were “no specific, credible threats” regarding the Super Bowl. She joined Mr. Landry and a parade of law enforcement officials who urged a reasonable amount of caution but also stressed that the preparations were comprehensive.

    The message was meant to ease the disquiet stirred by the attack on New Orleans’s most famous street.

    Investigators said the attack had been carried out by a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran from Texas who claimed to have joined the Islamic State terrorist organization, known as ISIS. He left two improvised explosive devices in coolers on the street in the French Quarter before he drove a rented pickup into a crowd at about 3:15 on New Year’s morning.

    The attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with the police that also injured two officers.

    The carnage infused pain into what was supposed to be a season of revelry, coming before the parties and parades that lead up to Mardi Gras. The Sugar Bowl, the college football game played in New Orleans every January, was delayed by a day because of the attack. The city is also preparing for the Jazz and Heritage Festival that begins in April.

    “We have worked tirelessly to ensure the security and safety of this city remains intact,” said Mr. Landry, a Republican, who added that coming to New Orleans — and enjoying it — was an important display of defiance in the aftermath of terror.

    New Orleans’s history with the Super Bowl is almost as old as the event itself. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings, 23-7, during Super Bowl IV at Tulane Stadium in 1970. The Super Bowl returned nine times between 1972 and 2013. On Sunday, when the Chiefs face the Philadelphia Eagles, New Orleans will tie Miami for hosting the most Super Bowls, 11.

    Of all the logistical challenges that come with hosting the event, security is perhaps the biggest and most complicated. Mr. Arnold said that representatives from New Orleans had embedded at the two most recent games, in Las Vegas and Glendale, Ariz., to fully grasp all it entails. “It’s a tall order to put on something like this,” he said.

    The Super Bowl is classified by the Department of Homeland Security as a level one event, meaning it has major national and international significance and requires extensive federal support.

    It draws in officers from the New Orleans Police Department and other local departments, the Louisiana State Police, the F.B.I. and other federal agencies. Their presence is concentrated at the Superdome, the New Orleans convention center and the sites of related events nearby.

    “The safest place to be this weekend will be under the security umbrella this team has put together,” said Cathy L. Lanier, the chief security officer for the National Football League and a former police chief in Washington, D.C.

    But local officials acknowledged that their concerns extended beyond Super Bowl weekend. Mr. Arnold said the festivities surrounding Mardi Gras — with dozens of parades winding through the city and crowds pouring into the French Quarter — will in some ways be harder to safeguard than the Super Bowl.

    This year, Homeland Security officials have also ranked Mardi Gras, which was previously regarded as a lower-tier regional event, as a level one event for the first time, allowing for more federal resources. A free app being rolled out for the Super Bowl called NOLA Ready will also be available during Mardi Gras and beyond; it allows users to quickly report an emergency to the authorities, share their locations with friends and get traffic and safety information.

    The state has also used Mr. Landry’s emergency order to justify clearing homeless encampments near the Superdome ahead of the game. Critics have argued that the move was less about security than making sure the people living in tents were nowhere near Super Bowl tourists and television cameras, disrupting lives and routines in the process. The dozens who were displaced could choose to be taken to a temporary shelter away from the city center that promised access to resources, room for pets and shuttles to ferry people to work and appointments.

    In the enhanced security zone in the French Quarter, ice chests and backpack coolers are forbidden. But state law still permits people to carry concealed guns into the zone, even though shootings have been a persistent problem in the French Quarter.

    The additional measures that have been undertaken by the state since the attack and will continue through Mardi Gras are anticipated to cost about $52 million, officials said.

    There have been some bumps when New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl before, like in 2013, when the lights in the Superdome went out for 34 minutes during the game. But even ahead of Sunday’s game, some city leaders were already contemplating the possibility of hosting for the 12th time.

    “The track record, I think, speaks for itself,” said Anne Kirkpatrick, the city’s police superintendent.

    New Orleans is often praised for its resilience, which officials brought up again this week. It is a source of uneasy pride for residents who have weathered hurricanes and extreme heat, the punishing toll of the coronavirus pandemic and a surge in violence that has recently dissipated.

    In the most stressful moments, reflecting on past hardships and how the city had persevered can provide some solace.

    “We bounce back,” Mr. Arnold said, “and I think that’s going to be the case here.”



    After the recent attack in New Orleans, the city is left rattled but determined to carry on with its world-famous Mardi Gras celebrations. Despite the tragic event, residents and officials are coming together to ensure that this year’s festivities will go on as planned.

    The attack has brought a sense of fear and uncertainty to the city, but New Orleans is no stranger to adversity. The resilient spirit of the people, combined with the unwavering support of the community, is what will help them push through this difficult time.

    As the city prepares for the “Biggest Show on Earth,” organizers are taking extra precautions to ensure the safety of all attendees. Increased security measures and heightened vigilance will be in place to prevent any further incidents.

    Mardi Gras is more than just a celebration – it’s a symbol of New Orleans’ strength and resilience. The city may be rattled, but it is ready to show the world that nothing can dampen its spirit. Let the good times roll!

    Tags:

    1. New Orleans resilience
    2. Mardi Gras aftermath
    3. New Orleans recovery
    4. Big Easy spirit
    5. New Orleans strength
    6. Mardi Gras preparations
    7. New Orleans community
    8. Carnival season resilience
    9. New Orleans parade readiness
    10. Mardi Gras celebration revival

    #Attack #Orleans #Rattled #Ready #Biggest #Show #Earth

  • Where is 2025 Super Bowl? Location, date, time, TV channel, streaming for Super Bowl 59 in New Orleans


    The Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs punched their tickets to Super Bowl LIX with wins on Championship Sunday. The biggest game of the season will take place at the Caesars Superdome — home of the Saints — in New Orleans, Louisiana on Feb. 9, 2025, and will kick off at approximately 6:30 p.m. ET.

    New Orleans was originally granted Super Bowl LVIII, but the league changing the length of the regular season forced it to alter plans. When the NFL went from 17 to 18 weeks, the Super Bowl got pushed back a week and created a conflict that year with Mardi Gras celebrations already scheduled.

    Instead of the Caesars Superdome hosting in 2024, Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas was the backdrop of last year’s Super Bowl game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers.

    The Superdome is an important building to the people of New Orleans and was a place of refuge for 30,000 evacuees impacted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They feared the stadium would need to be demolished, but they were able to reconstruct it. The stadium has also hosted events and concerts throughout the years. 

    2025 Super Bowl bold predictions: Five hot takes as Chiefs look for third straight title against Eagles

    Tyler Sullivan

    2025 Super Bowl bold predictions: Five hot takes as Chiefs look for third straight title against Eagles

    New Orleans is rich in culture and the city plans to show the football fans attending what a good time the Big Easy can be. 

    “We’re about to put on one of the largest open parties on the planet,” said Marcus Brown, who is the chair of the New Orleans Super Bowl LIX host committee.

    New Orleans is tied with Miami for most Super Bowls hosted by a city. With the eighth championship held at Caesars Superdome, the stadium is extending its own record for most Super Bowls hosted by a stadium.

    Super Bowl IV was the first Super Bowl hosted in New Orleans, taking place in 1970. The last Super Bowl hosted in New Orleans was in 2013 for Super Bowl XLVII, when John Harbaugh and Jim Harbaugh faced off in the “Harbaugh Bowl.” 

    The Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers in a memorable game that also had a halftime show to remember, featuring Beyoncé and a Destiny’s Child reunion. The lights turned off after their performance, delaying the game.

    Here is a look at all Super Bowls hosted in New Orleans:

    The league announced in September that 17-time Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar will be headlining the halftime show.

    Where to watch Super Bowl LIX

    Date: Sunday, Feb. 9 | Time: 6:30 p.m. ET
    Location: Caesars Superdome (New Orleans)
    TV: Fox | Stream: fubo
    Halftime show: Kendrick Lamar





    The 2025 Super Bowl will be held in New Orleans!

    Location: Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana
    Date: February 9, 2025
    Time: Kickoff at 6:30 PM EST

    TV Channel: NBC
    Streaming: NBC Sports app or website

    Get ready for an epic showdown between the top teams in the NFL as they battle it out for the championship title in the iconic city of New Orleans. Don’t miss out on all the action and excitement of Super Bowl 59!

    Tags:

    2025 Super Bowl location, 2025 Super Bowl date, 2025 Super Bowl time, 2025 Super Bowl TV channel, Super Bowl 59 New Orleans, Super Bowl 59 streaming, Super Bowl 59 details, Super Bowl 59 information, Super Bowl 59 updates.

    #Super #Bowl #Location #date #time #channel #streaming #Super #Bowl #Orleans

  • Emails detail Saints’ assistance to New Orleans Archdiocese in sexual abuse scandal


    NEW ORLEANS — 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.

    They also showed how various New Orleans institutions — from a sitting federal judge to the local media — rallied around church leaders at a critical moment.

    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.

    “This is disgusting,” said state Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans. “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.”

    The Saints told the AP last week that the partnership is a thing of the past. The emails cover a yearlong period ending in July 2019, when they were subpoenaed by attorneys for victims of a priest later charged with raping an 8-year-old boy.

    In a lengthy statement, the team criticized the media for using “leaked emails for the purpose of misconstruing a well-intended effort.”

    “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.”

    The team’s response did little to quell the anger of survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

    “We felt betrayed by the organization,” said Kevin Bourgeois, a former Saints season-ticket holder who was abused by a priest in the 1980s. “It forces me to question what other secrets are being withheld. I’m angry, hurt and retraumatized again.”

    Emails reveal extent of help

    After the AP first reported on the alliance in early 2020, Saints owner Gayle Benson denied that anyone “associated with our organizations made recommendations or had input” on the list of pedophile priests.

    The Saints reiterated that denial in its statement Saturday, saying no Saints employees “had any responsibility for adding or removing any names from that list.” The team said that no employees offered “any input, suggestions or opinions as to who should be included or omitted from” the list.

    Leon Cannizzaro, the district attorney at the time, denied last week any role in shaping the credibly accused clergy list, echoing statements he made in 2020. He told AP he “absolutely had no involvement in removing any names from any list.” Cannizzaro said he did not know why the Saints’ spokesman would have reported he had been on a call related to the list.

    The emails, sent from Saints accounts, don’t specify which clergymen were removed from the list or why. They raise fresh questions, however, about the Saints’ role in a scandal that has taken on much larger legal and financial stakes since the team waded into it, potentially in violation of the NFL’s policy against conduct “detrimental to the league.”

    A coalescing of New Orleans institutions

    The outsized role of Saints executives could draw new attention from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who is scheduled to address reporters Monday as New Orleans prepares to host its 11th Super Bowl. Messages requesting comment were sent to the NFL.

    Taken together, the emails portray a coalescing of several New Orleans institutions. U.S. District Court Judge Jay Zainey, who was copied by the Saints on the public relations efforts, cheered Bensel on from his personal email account, thanking the team’s spokesman “for the wonderful advice.” A newspaper editor similarly thanked Bensel for getting involved.

    “You have hit all the points,” Zainey, a fellow Catholic, wrote in another email to Bensel, praising a lengthy note the Saints spokesman sent to local newspaper editors. “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.”

    Zainey later struck down a Louisiana law, vigorously opposed by the church, that would have allowed victims to bring civil claims irrespective of how long ago the alleged sex abuse took place. He declined to comment.

    A watershed moment for the Catholic Church

    The list marked a watershed in heavily Catholic New Orleans — a long-awaited mea culpa to parishioners intended to usher in healing and local accountability. It came at a time when church leaders were seeking to retain public trust — and financial support — as they reckoned with generations of abuse and mounting litigation that eventually drove the Archdiocese of New Orleans into bankruptcy.

    That litigation, filed in 2020, involves more than 600 people who say they were abused by clergy. The case has produced a trove of still-secret church records said to document years of abuse claims and a pattern of church leaders transferring clergy without reporting their crimes to law enforcement.

    While it has since expanded, the list of accused priests was missing a number of clergy when it was originally released, an earlier AP investigation found.

    The AP identified 20 clergymen who had been accused in lawsuits or charged by law enforcement with child sexual abuse who were inexplicably omitted from the New Orleans list — including two who were charged and convicted of crimes.

    Still, the list has served as a road map for both the FBI and Louisiana State Police, which launched sweeping investigations into New Orleans church leaders’ shielding of predatory priests.

    Last spring, state police carried out a wide-ranging search warrant at the Archdiocese of New Orleans, seizing records that include communications with the Vatican.

    Since the Saints began assisting the archdiocese, at least seven current and former members of the local clergy have been charged with crimes ranging from rape to possession of child pornography.

    Public relations campaign

    The extent of the abuse remained largely unknown in 2018, a year the Saints won nine consecutive games on the way to an NFC Championship appearance. As the church prepped for a media onslaught, Bensel carried out an aggressive public relations campaign in which he called in favors, prepared talking points and leaned on long-time media contacts to support the church through a “soon-to-be-messy” time.

    Far from freelancing, Bensel had the Saints’ backing and blessing through what he called a “Galileo moment,” suggesting Aymond would be a trailblazer in releasing a credibly accused clergy list at a critical time for the church. In emails to editorial boards, he warned “casting a critical eye” on the archbishop “is neither beneficial nor right.”

    He urged the city’s newspapers to “work with” the church, reminding them the Saints and New Orleans Pelicans — the city’s NBA team, also owned by Benson — had been successful thanks, in part, to their support.

    “We did this because we had buy-in from YOU,” Bensel wrote to the editors of The Times-Picayune and New Orleans Advocate, “supporting our mission to be the best, to make New Orleans and everything within her bounds the best.”

    “We are sitting on that opportunity now with the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” he added. “We need to tell the story of how this Archbishop is leading us out of this mess.”

    Close relationship between Saints and the Catholic Church

    Benson and Aymond, the archbishop, have been confidants for years. It was the archbishop who introduced Benson to her late husband, Tom Benson, who died in 2018, leaving his widow in control of New Orleans’ NFL and NBA franchises.

    The Bensons’ foundation has given tens of millions of dollars to the archdiocese and other Catholic causes. Along the way, Aymond has flown on the owner’s private jet and become almost a part of the team, frequently celebrating pregame Masses.

    When the clergy abuse allegations came to a head, Bensel, the Saints’ spokesman, worked his contacts in the local media to help shape the story. He had friendly email exchanges with a Times-Picayune columnist who praised the archbishop for releasing the clergy list. He also asked the newspaper’s leadership to keep their communications “confidential, not for publication nor to share with others.”

    His emails revealed that The Advocate — after Aymond privately complained to the publisher — removed a notice from one online article that had called for clergy abuse victims to reach out.

    Kevin Hall, president and publisher of Georges Media, which owns the newspaper, said the publication welcomes engagement from community leaders but that outreach “does not dilute our journalistic standards or keep us from pursuing the truth.”

    “No one gets preferential treatment in our coverage of the news,” he said in a statement. “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-TV and by The Associated Press.”

    It was The Advocate’s reporting that prompted Bensel to help the church, the emails show. He first offered to “chat crisis communications” with church leaders after the newspaper exposed a scandal involving a disgraced deacon, George Brignac, who remained a lay minister even after the archdiocese settled claims he had raped an 8-year-old altar boy.

    “We have been through enough at Saints to be a help or sounding board,” Bensel wrote, “but I don’t want to overstep!”



    In a recent development in the ongoing sexual abuse scandal within the New Orleans Archdiocese, emails have surfaced detailing the extent of the Saints’ assistance to the church in handling the allegations.

    The emails, obtained through a public records request, show that the Saints worked closely with the archdiocese to help manage the fallout from the scandal. The team’s senior vice president of communications, Greg Bensel, offered to “help in any way” and even suggested bringing in outside PR help to handle the crisis.

    The emails also reveal that the Saints were heavily involved in crafting public statements for the archdiocese, with Bensel providing edits and suggestions on multiple drafts. In one email, he wrote, “We are in this together… I know we will pull through this as a team.”

    The extent of the Saints’ involvement in the scandal has raised questions about the team’s role in aiding an institution accused of covering up abuse. Some critics have called for transparency from the team and have questioned the ethics of their support for the archdiocese.

    As more details continue to emerge, it remains to be seen how the Saints will address their involvement in the scandal and what implications it may have for the team moving forward. Stay tuned for updates on this developing story.

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    #Emails #detail #Saints #assistance #Orleans #Archdiocese #sexual #abuse #scandal

  • ‘Crisis communications’: emails show how NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans helped New Orleans church spin abuse scandal | New Orleans clergy abuse


    Illustration: Mike McQuade/The Guardian

    High-level executives with the NFL’s New Orleans Saints football team and the NBA’s Pelicans basketball team had a deeper role than previously known in connection with a list of priests and deacons faced with credible allegations of child molestation while the clergymen worked with their city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, the Guardian and reporting partner WWL Louisiana can reveal.

    According to highly sensitive emails that were obtained by the outlets, one top executive even described a conversation with the New Orleans district attorney at the time that allowed them to remove clergy names from the list – though the clubs deny their official participated in that discussion, and the prosecutor back then vehemently denies he would ever have weighed in on the list’s content.

    The emails call into question prior and newly issued statements by New Orleans’ two major professional sports franchises as they denied being overly entwined in the archdiocese’s most damning affairs – while fighting to keep their communications with the church out of public view.

    After first seeing the so-called Saints emails in 2019 through a subpoena, abuse survivors’ attorneys alleged that the two franchises’ top officials had a significant hand in trying to minimize what was then a public-relations nightmare for the city’s archdiocese – but has since triggered a full-blown child sex-trafficking investigation aimed at the church by law enforcement.

    The initial allegations about the emails led to local and national media investigations, including by Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press, that highlighted a fierce closeness between the sports franchises and the Catholic church in New Orleans.

    Perhaps the strongest manifestation of that closeness was New Orleans archbishop Gregory Aymond’s serving as a signing witness on the testamentary will that positioned Gayle Benson to inherit ownership of the Saints and Pelicans from her late billionaire husband, Tom. The will also gave key positions in Tom Benson’s estate to the teams’ president, Dennis Lauscha, and top spokesperson, Greg Bensel.

    The Saints’ proximity to the church spurred protests by clergy-abuse survivors in front of the team’s headquarters and at the offices of one of the oldest Catholic archdioceses in the US.

    Members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests outside the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans training facility in Metairie, Louisiana, in 2020. Photograph: Matthew Hinton/AP

    Yet what remained hidden until now are more than 300 emails, amounting to more than 700 pages, many emblazoned with the NFL and NBA logos, showing that the teams’ officials were more involved with some of the church’s operations than they ever admitted. They expose how extensively the sports teams’ leaders intervened in their local church’s most unyielding scandal.

    In the most blatant example of that, Bensel – the teams’ vice-president for communications – wrote an email to Lauscha on 1 November 2018, the day before the clergy-abuse list was released. Using common abbreviations for “conference call” and “with”, Bensel wrote: “Had a cc w [New Orleans’ then district attorney] Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take certain people off the list.”

    But the teams said in a 2020 statement: “No one associated with our organizations made recommendations or had input on the individual names of those disclosed on the list.”

    On Saturday, the team also said: “No Saints employee had any responsibility for adding or removing any names from that list or any supplemental list. Nor did any Saints employee offer any input, suggestions or opinions as to who should be included or omitted from any such lists. Any suggestion that any Saints employee had any role in removing anyone from the archdiocese’s published lists of credibly-accused clergy is categorically false.”

    Meanwhile, when WWL Louisiana and the Associated Press asked him separately in 2020 if he had any input on the contents of the list, Cannizzaro – a self-described pious, practicing Catholic – denied it.

    “No,” Cannizzaro told WWL when asked that question. “We simply requested information from them. We requested documents from them, and they provided us documents of people that they believe were responsible for abuse.”

    Through an email 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”.

    Thank you Greg … I am certain [Archbishop Aymond] will appreciate it

    Gayle Benson in a reply to an offer by Greg Bensel to help Aymond with ‘crisis communications’

    More recently, the Guardian obtained a typed phone message left for Cannizzaro at his office showing the archdiocese contacted him for comment requesting follow up “on conversation you had with Archbishop Aymond”. The date left on the message was 29 October 2018, four days before Aymond released the clergy-abuse list.

    Cannizzaro, for his part, said he isn’t sure he has ever met Bensel and “did not at any time ask the archdiocese or tell the Saints to tell the archdiocese … ‘remove this name from the list’.”

    “I would not have done that,” said Cannizzaro, who is now the chief of the criminal cases division at the Louisiana state attorney general’s office. “That’s just not something I would have done.”

    Another revelation in the emails: the sports franchises took the initiative to protect Aymond’s flagging reputation in the summer of 2018 without his asking for that, before the archbishop announced plans to release the names of dozens of abusive clergymen.

    Bensel sent an email in July of that year to Gayle Benson asking her to let him help Aymond with “crisis communications”. Benson – who counts Aymond as one of her best personal friends – replied to Bensel that same day: “Thank you Greg … I am certain he will appreciate it.”

    The pair exchanged those emails the day after a damaging story about a deacon who had repeatedly faced criminal charges of child sexual abuse being allowed to read at masses – triggering one of multiple scandals in 2018 which pressured the church into releasing a list of credibly accused clergymen as a gesture of conciliation and transparency.

    New Orleans Pelicans and Saints owner Gayle Benson next to the teams’ senior vice-president of communications, Greg Bensel, in New Orleans in 2022. Photograph: Matthew Hinton/AP

    Benson claimed in 2020 that Bensel only got involved in the local church’s messaging after being “asked if he would help the archdiocese prepare for the media relative to the release of clergy names involved in the abuse scandal”.

    On Saturday, an attorney for the Saints said Bensel did so in part at the suggestion of New Orleans-based federal judge Jay Zainey, a devout Catholic – who, according to the emails and time stamps from them, would have had to make that entreaty offline before the article on the abusive deacon was published or very shortly thereafter. Zainey has previously publicly acknowledged making such a suggestion, though he declined further comment on Saturday.

    The team’s attorneys on Saturday also said “other local civic leaders” asked Bensel to assist the archdiocese, though the lawyers did not say exactly when those requests were made.

    On Saturday, as they have done before, the Saints said Bensel’s role was limited to “public relations assistance provided to the archdiocese of New Orleans … in anticipation of press interest in the publication of a list of clergy who were credibly accused of abuse” on 2 November 2018.

    Bensel himself at one point wrote in the emails that he was presenting himself “not as the communications person for the Saints/Pelicans but as a parent, New Orleanian and member of the Catholic Church” – as well as a personal friend of Aymond. And the Saints on Saturday emphasized that “no compensation from the archdiocese was expected or received in return for Mr Bensel’s assistance”.

    But Bensel communicated directly with local media about their coverage of the clergy-abuse crisis using his Saints.NFL.com email address, bearing a signature line displaying two of the most recognizable logos in sports: the NFL’s shield and the NBA’s silhouette of a dribbling ball player. Lauscha and Benson used their Saints.NFL.com email addresses throughout the communications, too.

    And the emails also show Benson, Lauscha and Bensel continued to coordinate with the archdiocese on how to respond to news stories about the clergy-abuse crisis or other topics involving the organizations’ leaders for at least eight more months beyond the list’s release.

    On 21 June 2019, Bensel sent an email complaining that he did not “get paid enough” because he had to prepare the archbishop for an upcoming interview with New Orleans’ Advocate newspaper about clergy-abuse lawsuits and their effect on the church’s coffers. The regular email exchanges between team officials and the archdiocese ended only in July 2019, after a subpoena for the communications was issued to the Saints and the NFL by attorneys for clergy-abuse survivors who had detected evidence of them while pressing a lawsuit for damages on behalf of a victim.

    With the backing of various allies – including Benson, Zainey and future federal judge Wendy Vitter, then the archdiocese’s general counsel – the Saints and Pelicans officials used their influence to lean heavily on prominent figures in the local media establishment, pushing for them to soften their news coverage of Aymond, the emails show.

    Casting a critical eye on [Aymond] is neither beneficial nor right

    Greg Bensel in a July 2018 letter to editors at the Times-Picayune and the Advocate newspapers

    Bensel also sought to convince media outlets to limit their scrutiny of a list that turned out to be so incomplete it eventually precipitated a joint federal and state law enforcement investigation into whether the archdiocese spent decades operating a child sex-trafficking ring whose crimes were illegally covered up.

    “Casting a critical eye on [Aymond] is neither beneficial nor right,” Bensel wrote in a July 2018 letter to editors at the Times-Picayune and the Advocate, the two daily New Orleans newspapers in existence back then.

    A year later, when an Advocate reporter emailed Bensel seeking a comment from the Saints and Pelicans about the subpoena issued to them and their powerful leagues, Bensel quickly forwarded it directly to the owner of that newspaper, John Georges, after unsuccessfully, and sarcastically, suggesting the journalist ask Georges for comment instead.

    The Saints’ officials statement on Saturday did not answer questions about Bensel’s remark to the reporter or his overture to Georges.

    The statement from the team’s lawyer said “no member of the Saints organization condones or wants to cover up the abuse that occurred in the archdiocese of New Orleans”.

    Separately, a statement from the Advocate and the Times-Picayune – which Georges has since acquired – 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 the newspaper ran were produced in partnership with the Guardian.

    The newspapers’ statement said: “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.”

    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”. It also characterized Bensel’s role from 2018 to 2019 as assisting “with media relations”, for which neither he nor the archdiocese were provided compensation.

    ‘Dark days’

    The emails – obtained by the Guardian, WWL Louisiana, the Associated Press and the New York Times – came after Aymond tied his archdiocese to the lucrative sports teams owned by Benson in a way rarely, if ever, seen in the world of sports.

    A famously devout Catholic, prominent church donor and philanthropist who recently won an NFL humanitarian award, Benson inherited the Saints and Pelicans after her husband, Tom Benson, died at age 90 in March 2018. He bought the Saints in 1985 and the Pelicans in 2012. He threatened to move the Saints after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 but was convinced to stay.

    Tom Benson then became a hero and symbol of the city’s recovery from Katrina in 2010, when the Saints won their first – and so far only – Super Bowl title, igniting one of the region’s most ebullient celebrations ever.

    In Tom Benson’s final years, his children and grandchildren from a previous marriage squared off with Gayle, his third wife, over who would inherit control of his teams and other businesses. Lauscha and Bensel were widely seen to have aligned themselves with Gayle in a struggle that she won. And the succession plan that Tom Benson settled on in her benefit was laid out in a will.

    It left Gayle Benson in control of the sports teams and made Lauscha executor of Tom’s estate. And in the event Lauscha ever became unwilling or unable to fulfill his duties, they essentially would be split among two others of those most trusted by the Bensons: longtime Saints general manager Mickey Loomis – and Bensel.

    One of two witnesses to sign that will was Aymond.

    Gayle Benson walks to receive the casket of her husband, Tom Benson, with Archbishop Gregory Aymond in New Orleans in 2018. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

    And four months after the will took effect upon Benson’s death, a newspaper article about a local deacon and alleged serial child molester thrust Aymond into the center of the global Catholic church’s clergy-abuse scandal.

    Published by the Advocate, the article questioned how the deacon, George Brignac, had been allowed to keep reading scripture at masses despite his removal from public ministry 20 years earlier. Church officials had removed Brignac from ministry in 1988 after he’d been arrested multiple times on child molestation charges. The article also reported that the archdiocese had paid $550,000 to settle civil legal claims with a survivor of Brignac’s abuse who would later pursue a criminal case against him, though the clergyman would die before he could face trial.

    Subsequent reporting by WWL Louisiana and an Advocate journalist now at the Guardian found that the church had quietly paid at least 15 other victims of Brignac a total of roughly $3m to settle their civil damages over their abuse at the deacon’s hands. Those payments were among nearly $12m in abuse-related settlements that the archdiocese doled out during a 10-year period beginning in 2010.

    Aymond immediately faced public backlash, with critics saying he had failed to live up to the promises of zero tolerance for clerical child molesters made by bishops across the US after a clergy-abuse and cover-up scandal had enveloped Boston’s Catholic archdiocese in 2002. He sought to limit the fallout by claiming that he was unaware that subordinates of his had brought Brignac back into a role that he insisted was largely inconsequential.

    But later investigations by the Associated Press, WWL Louisiana and the Advocate showed Brignac had also been cleared to meet with – and present lessons to – children at a church school.

    The Brignac revelations, however, were not the last of Aymond and the church’s problems. A grand jury report issued in Pennsylvania in August 2018 established that Catholic clergy abuse in that state had been more widespread than the public ever previously realized. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick – a former archbishop of Washington DC – resigned amid allegations of child molestation as well as other sexual abuse, though he would later be deemed incompetent to stand trial due to dementia.

    And, in September 2018, the Advocate published a bombshell article about clergy abuse which implicated New Orleans’ Jesuit high school, the revered Catholic college preparatory from which both Lauscha and Bensel graduated.

    The article outlined how the high school quietly paid settlements to people who claimed that priests or other school employees sexually abused them as children. The school faced some of the same criticisms lobbed at Aymond after Brignac’s exposure. Jesuit high school’s leader at the time defended the institution by condemning the cases in question as a “disgusting” chapter in the school’s history – but one that was left far in its past.

    Bensel later wrote in an email to the school’s president that he was on Benson’s boat with Aymond when the story about Brignac came out – and the archbishop “was very troubled”.

    “These are dark days,” Bensel continued.

    The day after the Brignac story broke, Bensel wrote to Benson: “The issues that the Archbishop has to deal with that never involve him,” on top of a link to – and an attached copy of – the Advocate article about the molester deacon authored by a reporter now at the Associated Press.

    The Saint Louis cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans, and the city’s archbishop, Gregory Aymond. Composite: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design; Photos via Getty Images/AP

    Benson wrote back suggesting that she had seen the article already. She said she had even spoken to Aymond about it “last week”, several days before its publication. “Archbishop is very upset,” Benson told Bensel. “A mess.”

    Bensel told Benson he was available to Aymond if the archbishop “ever wants to chat crisis communications”.

    “We have been through enough at [the] Saints to be a help or sounding board,” Bensel said, about six years after he guided the team through the infamous so-called Bountygate scandal that – among other consequences – resulted in the club’s coach at the time being suspended for an entire season. “But I don’t want to overstep!”

    Benson replied: “Thank you Greg, I will pass this on to him. I am certain he will appreciate it. Many thanks.”

    An August 2018 email that Benson sent to the Saints’ governmental liaison made clear how bad she felt for Aymond after the Brignac revelations. “Very sad he is going through this,” Benson wrote while sharing a separate letter by Aymond apologizing “for any wrongdoing by the church or its leadership”. The archbishop had issued the attached missive to a local chapter of a Catholic group called the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, which traces its origins to the First Crusade in the 11th century.

    Though Jesuit high school’s president back then, Christopher Fronk, later told a Sports Illustrated reporter now at the New York Times, “I never heard from the Saints on this issue” of church abuse, the emails show that he, too, was contacted by Bensel – just two days after his campus community was rocked by the September 2018 Advocate clergy molestation article.

    “Speaking from personal experience after 23 years with the Saints, when the media and the public attack you at your core, it takes the resolve and focus of people like yourself to lead us to clarity,” Bensel wrote. “The church needs leaders like you and I just wanted to reach out and say you have the support of myself, Dennis and Mrs Benson.

    “If I can offer any counsel on any issue, I am here for you.”

    Fronk, who left Jesuit high school in early 2020, replied: “Thanks for your email. I appreciate it. The last couple of days have been long, and I have more ahead of me. I am relying on prayers and support from others. And I may be taking you up on your wise counsel.”

    ‘Work with him’

    Most of the Saints’ communications about clergy abuse focused on Aymond’s handling of the issue. And the strategy that the archbishop ultimately settled on was one implemented in other US dioceses. He would release a list of priests and deacons who served in New Orleans over the years and had been the subject of credible child molestation accusations.

    Aymond later told WWL Louisiana that he had contemplated such a maneuver a year before deciding to do so. And he claimed he would have reached that decision without the various local and national scandals consuming the Catholic church at the time, though he acknowledged they created pressure for him to act.

    Whatever the case, Bensel recommended “transparency” – a wholehearted effort to come clean about the past abuses and apologize for them. And with the list’s release being announced weeks ahead of time, the church would come to count on Bensel to get local media outlets to focus more on hailing Aymond for taking such a courageous step rather than analyzing the roster’s thoroughness.

    The campaign to set the media’s agenda began in earnest on 17 October 2018, when Bensel wrote to higher-ups at the Advocate as well as the Times-Picayune. He revealed to them that he had been “confidentially discussing the recent horrible issues that [Aymond] and the church are facing”. He also referred to chatting offline with the Advocate and Times-Picayune brass earlier that morning.

    I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind [Archbishop Aymond] and work with him

    Greg Bensel to higher-ups at the Advocate and the Times-Picayune newspapers

    In his email to the newspapers, Bensel disclosed Aymond’s plan to out clergymen who “sadly betrayed their role and authority to minister to our children, the elderly and the sick”. And, though he anticipated the gesture would not “simply end all of the past and current suffering and questions”, he wrote that he had an urgent request for the outlets.

    “I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind him and work with him,” Bensel said, in part. “We need to tell the story of how this Archbishop is leading us out of this mess. Casting a critical eye on him is neither beneficial nor right.”

    He said the news media had helped the Saints maintain their footing in the NFL despite being in one of the league’s smallest markets. And he promised that Aymond would have an open-door policy, saying he is “accountable, available and wants to [e]ffect positive change”.

    “We need your support moving forward as we go through this soon-to-be messy time as we work toward much, much brighter days ahead,” Bensel said. “Help us tell this story.”

    The archbishop would later abandon that open-door policy. For years, Aymond has consistently declined interview requests from reporters at WWL Louisiana and the Guardian who have questioned his handling of the clergy-abuse crisis. He used the word “Satan” when referring to one of those journalists, the former Advocate staff member, in a text message to a third party that was obtained by the writer.

    Bensel provided copies of the letters to the newspapers to Benson and Zainey, a sitting, locally based federal judge. The judge – a Jesuit high school alum who has served on the governing board of the New Orleans archdiocese-run college that educates prospective priests – replied: “Thanks very much Greg. You have hit all the points. 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.”

    Benson, too, praised Bensel’s tone: “Great letter Greg … spot on! Thank you very much.”

    While it’s not clear when the paper first planned it, that same day the Times-Picayune published a column about the upcoming clergy-abuser list headlined: “Archbishop Aymond is doing the right thing.”

    A day later, Bensel wrote to the columnist, saying: “very good column on Archbishop Aymond”.

    Bensel then sent the column – along with the comments left under it by online users – to recipients including Aymond, Vitter (then still the archdiocese’s attorney) and Zainey. He said the comments – including one questioning “how come the church gets to decide who is ‘credibly accused’ and who is not” were a valuable insight into the public’s psyche. And Bensel urged them not to “delve or hang on to the negative ones, [but] learn from them”.

    Praying for the Saints victory. Very grateful for your help

    Archbishop Aymond to Greg Bensel

    The emails show how Bensel dedicated some of the following days to preparing Aymond for a meeting with editors of the Advocate, even while he was in Baltimore for a Saints game.

    “Praying for the Saints victory. Very grateful for your help,” Aymond wrote to Bensel at the time.

    Referring to the Advocate, Bensel urged Aymond to remember “they need you and you need them”. He said the goal of the gathering with the newspaper’s leadership should be to foster “a better relationship” and drive home how the church is providing “the best measures for a safe environment for our children”.

    Bensel suggested that the archbishop “not mention … that the general perception is that the ADVOCATE IS UNFAIR to the Archdiocese of New Orleans”. He also promised to “make time” to converse with Aymond about his advice despite being in and out of meetings.

    “POSITIVE POSITIVE POSITIVE,” Bensel wrote to Aymond. “INCLUSIVE ACCESSIBILITY ACCOUNTABILITY MOVING FORWARD.”

    Benson, Zainey and Vitter – who is married to a former Republican US senator and had already been nominated to a federal judgeship by President Donald Trump in 2018 and was confirmed to the post the following year – were among those sent copies of correspondence about that meeting. “Excellent!” Benson remarked. “Many thanks!”

    Zainey, who later publicly said he could not be sure whether he had ever been sent copies of any of the Saints emails, replied: “Thanks for the wonderful advice. The Arch[bishop]’s sincerity will open their minds and hearts.”

    (Zainey later recused himself from any rulings directly involving the archdiocese. But then he went on to 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. The state supreme court subsequently upheld the law’s constitutionality, effectively negating Zainey’s ruling.)

    After Aymond’s conversation with the newspaper, and after checking in with “a few folks” at the outlet, Bensel emailed Vitter, Aymond and the archdiocese’s in-house spokesperson, Sarah McDonald, saying that “the Advocate editorial meeting was fruitful, positive and I believe will have a lasting impact”. He said: “Great job by you all.”

    Yet Aymond would soon become incensed with the Advocate, which late that October published a roster of 16 clergymen who seemed to fit the criteria of the archbishop’s upcoming list based on publicly available news stories and court documents.

    Aymond wrote that the piece caught him off-guard, and he was particularly upset with how the newspaper’s website had asked clergy-abuse victims to contact the outlet to tell their stories rather than direct them to the archdiocese “to allow a proper investigation”.

    “I want to work with you, but we must both be transparent,” Aymond said. “Will people believe we are working together?”

    Upon being provided a copy of Aymond’s missive to the newspaper, Bensel quickly replied: “This is a GREAT response.”

    Emails show that the newspaper replied by saying it contacted McDonald prior to the publication of the report. The Advocate said it didn’t believe its editors’ earlier conversation with Aymond prevented it “from continuing … reporting”.

    Nonetheless, the Advocate informed Aymond that it had taken offline the request for victims to contact the newspaper, saying it was a “last minute addition” by a digital editor.

    Bensel later wrote to Aymond: “An excellent response from them.”

    ‘Allowed us to take certain people off the list’

    The emails show that – 10 days before the documents were released – Aymond provided Bensel an early draft of a letter that the archbishop issued to churchgoers alongside his clergy-abuser list. Bensel replied with suggested changes in handwriting.

    A notable one: The draft had made it a point to say most of the accusations involved in the list “go back 30, 40, 50 or more years”. Bensel suggested stronger language, asserting that those accusations went back “decades – 30, 40, 50 and even 70 years ago”.

    The final letter evidently adopted that suggestion, reading: “Most of the accusations are from incidents that occurred decades ago, even as long as 70 years ago.”

    At last, Aymond’s clergy-abuser list came out the day after Catholics observed the Feast of All Saints and New Orleans’ NFL team celebrated the 52nd anniversary of its founding.

    Had a cc w Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take certain people off the [clergy-abuser] list

    Greg Bensel to Dennis Lauscha, using common abbreviations for “conference call” and “with”, and referring to New Orleans’ district attorney at the time

    The list – initially containing 57 names – was provided to media outlets that morning under an embargo, which prevents organizations from publishing information that was supplied to them prior to a specific time. And about three hours before that embargo expired, Lauscha emailed Bensel and asked: “Do you see any shockers on the list? Did your SJ you discussed yesterday make the list? The former Loyola president is the biggest shock to me.”

    Bensel’s quick reply did not address to whom “SJ” refers, though the letters are the initials of the Jesuit religious order’s formal name, the Society of Jesus. It also doesn’t comment on Bernard Knoth, a former president of the Jesuits’ Loyola University New Orleans, who was included on the clergy-abuser list.

    The Saints attorney’s statement on Saturday said Lauscha was referring to a clergyman “rumored to have been accused of abuse [and] was expected to be on the list”.

    Dennis Lauscha. Photograph: WWLTV

    “It is Mr Lauscha’s understanding that the clergyman to whom he referred in his query to Mr Bensel was included on the list on a supplemental list,” the statement said.

    Regardless, back in early November 2018, Bensel’s reply read: “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 today.”

    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.

    Meanwhile, Cannizzaro has denied a conversation with Bensel or any of his colleagues ever took place, including recently when he said in an interview: “I was not on any conference call with anybody from the Saints about this.

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

    The Saints lawyer’s statement on Saturday also said that no one from the team spoke with Cannizzaro. Instead, 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”.

    “Mr Bensel has no firsthand knowledge of what was said by anyone during the conversation or in any communication between the archdiocese and the district attorney’s office,” said the Saints lawyer’s statement. “The … email refers to Mr Bensel’s understanding that the list would be updated by the archdiocese.

    “It was also Mr Bensel’s understanding that one purpose the archdiocese had in consulting with [Cannizzaro’s] office was to determine whether disclosure of any member of the clergy under consideration for inclusion on the list would interfere with a criminal investigation. Neither Mr Bensel nor any member of the Saints organization was involved in the determinations made by the archdiocese.”

    ‘A strong and faithful message’

    On the day of the list’s release, McDonald had also asked Bensel to join Aymond as the archbishop gave interviews to local media outlets that they could not publish prior to the expiration of the embargo imposed on the document. “The archbishop would appreciate you being there for the Advocate especially,” McDonald wrote to Bensel.

    “I have blocked out the entire morning,” Bensel replied. “I will see you there.”

    In advance of those embargoed interviews, Lauscha sent Bensel 13 tough questions that Aymond should be prepared to answer. Lauscha suggested deflecting if asked about the number of listed credibly accused clergymen by answering, “One abuse is too many.”

    “Excellent,” Bensel replied to Lauscha, before forwarding the questions to McDonald as well as Vitter.

    The Saints’ statement on Saturday said: “The questions that Mr Lauscha suggested were intended to encourage openness and transparency.”

    Bensel attended the Advocate’s and WWL Louisiana’s separate embargoed interviews with Aymond. In the conversation with the Advocate, Aymond did remark: “One incident is too many.”

    Bensel remained silent during the interviews with both outlets. However, at some point later that morning, he emailed a Saints employee who had previously worked for the publisher of the Advocate.

    “I want [the Advocate publisher] to write a positive opinion about how this archbishop has handled the transparency of releasing these names and his diligence in making this right,” Bensel wrote to the Saints employee. “Will call to discuss.”

    There is no indication in the emails that the conversation Bensel sought took place. But the Advocate did publish an opinion column concluding with the words: “Transparency about grave wrongdoing, however painful, is the best way to help victims, serve parishioners, and support the work of the many church clerics who have brought joy, rather than suffering, to the people they promised to serve.”

    I hope the Picayune would show [Archbishop Aymond] … some support in an editorial

    Greg Bensel to the Times-Picayune opinion editor

    Bensel also wrote to the Times-Picayune’s opinion editor, saying: “Today the Archbishop met face to face with all of the media – he sent a strong and faithful message!

    “I hope the Picayune would show him – the man – some support in an editorial – our community listens and values [what] you all have to say!!”

    The Times-Picayune’s next couple of print editions did not contain such an editorial. But as part of its news coverage about the list, the newspaper did publish a letter in its entirety by Christopher Fronk, Jesuit high school’s then president, that expressed support for Aymond’s release of the document, which contained the names of several abusive priests who had worked at Jesuit high school. Fronk’s letter hailed the disclosure as having been carried out in “a spirit of reconciliation and transparency”.

    Once the list’s embargo expired, Aymond granted his only live, on-air interview that day to radio talkshow host Newell Normand, a former sheriff of a suburban New Orleans area – at Bensel’s urging.

    Normand’s employer, WWL Radio, has long held the exclusive rights to the Saints’ local broadcasts. And Bensel brokered the conversation between Normand and Aymond through emails involving the director of the radio station, which – despite its call letters – is not affiliated with WWL Louisiana, the TV channel.

    McDonald, the archdiocese spokesperson, sent Bensel eight questions to “share with Newell to cover” two days before the interview. Bensel replied to McDonald, copied Normand as well as the host’s station director, and told the radio outlet’s employees: “These questions are a great framework for Newell.”

    “Love my Di,” Bensel wrote to the station director, referring to her by a nickname, after the organizations all agreed to the interview. She responded: “Love you too, GB.”

    Normand later asked Aymond at least four of the eight proposed questions in a fashion that was substantially similar – though not necessarily verbatim – to what the church suggested. The rest, Aymond answered unprompted.

    The suggested questions covered how law enforcement had been provided with a copy of the list; what emotions Aymond was experiencing that day; how the roster “is accurate” but may expand; and that adequate measures were in place for the archdiocese to protect children. Aymond said on the program that the number of priests on the list was relatively small given how many clergymen there had been in the archdiocese over the years, but that even that low tally was too much.

    As an example of the talking points, Aymond’s spokesperson suggested that Normand ask her boss, “What has this process been like for you?” After Bensel passed the questions along, Normand asked the archbishop, “I know your heart is broken over this – in going through this. How has this process been for you?”

    The suggestions from the church included: “There were earlier media reports that said the list may not be complete, but this is an extensive list going back very far. It seems comprehensive. (ask for response).”

    Normand didn’t ask Aymond that on the air. But according to a transcript, after the interview ended, the host remarked, “I know some folks say that they already believe that there are some names that have not been revealed yet, and [Aymond] has said that that is actually a possibility.”

    Normand, who has repeatedly criticized the church’s handling of the abuse crisis on air, did raise several issues with the archbishop that weren’t outlined by the archdiocese through Bensel. For example, he asked Aymond why the church didn’t inform law enforcement about allegations of abuse earlier. He also raised concerns about priests harassing other clergy. And he spoke about his own journey as a Catholic to accept that child molestation by priests was rampant.

    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.”

    ‘I don’t get paid enough’

    The volume of communications between the Saints and the church lessened after the release of the list, according to the emails. But the two sides still stayed in close contact for many more months.

    Between February and March of 2019, mere weeks after the Saints nearly clinched what would have been a second Super Bowl berth, the organizations communicated about a request from Aymond for Benson to submit to the Advocate a flattering letter to the editor. The letter’s purpose was to exalt the archdiocese and charitable programs it has led or participated in.

    Make as many edits as you see fit

    Greg Bensel to New Orleans church officials regarding a letter to the Advocate newspaper

    For help on crafting the letter, the emails show that Bensel brought in some of the Saints’ media relations staffers who ordinarily facilitate sports journalists’ interviews with the team’s players and coaches. (One successfully suggested naming three Saints players who have been first-team All-Pro selections while touting their and Benson’s work with certain social or charitable programs, including an archdiocese-affiliated food bank to which she donated $3.5m in 2019.)

    Bensel gave the archdiocese the opportunity to review a draft of what he called “a very robust letter of support from Mrs Benson”, saying: “Make as many edits as you see fit.”

    He eventually distributed what he said Benson’s teams “came up with in conjunction with the archdiocese” among the Saints’ general counsel, their governmental liaison and Lauscha, according to the emails.

    “Do any of you see an issue with this???” Bensel wrote.

    General counsel Vicky Neumeyer replied: “I have to chime in that I don’t really like it. I don’t want [Benson] to appear to be a puppet for the archdiocese because we have way too many constituents from all walks of life.”

    Bensel wrote back to Neumeyer that he would come chat with her. She later sent an email saying she spoke with Lauscha and that all she meant to communicate was the letter “should be more personal and less stone-cold facts”.

    The New Orleans Saints and Pelicans training and practice facility at the Ochsner sports performance center in Metairie, Louisiana. Photograph: Kirby Lee/Getty Images

    After Bensel submitted it in her name, Benson’s letter to the editor appeared in the Advocate. Part of the letter addressed the local church’s work combating sex trafficking and advocating for children’s online safety, about five years before state police began investigating allegations that the archdiocese had allegedly sexually trafficked minors.

    “Many issues in our society are very difficult to talk about, such as pornography, online safety for children, drug abuse and sex trafficking,” the letter said. It also asserted that “the local Catholic Church is addressing these issues head-on”.

    The Saints’ statement on Saturday said that the letter was not “misleading” and did not excuse “the misconduct of members of the clergy”.

    Soon thereafter, for an Advocate story on the first anniversary of Tom Benson’s death, Bensel, McDonald and Aymond exchanged emails about the archbishop providing a statement praising Gayle’s support of the church in the first year of her Saints and Pelicans ownership. Gayle Benson and Bensel were given the chance to review and approve the statement, which read: “Mrs Benson is a woman of deep faith, and she puts her faith into action.”

    This is what we plan to send once we know you guys are good with this

    Greg Bensel comment to New Orleans archdiocese about a statement from team owner Gayle Benson

    Bensel, Benson, Lauscha, McDonald and Aymond all then communicated about an article that the Times-Picayune – which would be acquired by the Advocate weeks later – was preparing for Easter chronicling the early aftermath of the clergy-abuse list’s release. Benson had been asked for comment about how she perceived Aymond to have navigated that period. She gave Bensel permission to draft her statement – but to call Aymond “for his approval” prior to releasing it.

    Bensel then prepared a quote, sent it to McDonald, copied Aymond and said: “This is what we plan to send once we know you guys are good with this.”

    The published quote from Benson that Aymond signed off on read: “My personal relationship with the archbishop aside, I believe he has shown tremendous leadership and guidance through this very tough time. In my opinion, he has dealt with this very sad issue head on, with great resolve and determination to do the right thing and to do it as fully transparent as he is allowed.”

    Bensel then emailed Benson, Lauscha and Aymond a link to that Times-Picayune article once it was published. “Thank you, Greg,” Benson wrote back to Bensel.

    As late as June 2019, Bensel was still helping the archdiocese with its crisis communications, preparing Aymond for an interview with the Advocate about the effect of the clergy-abuse scandal in general on church finances. “I don’t get paid enough – Helping the Archbishop prep for his 9 am meeting,” he wrote in an email to his ex-wife, after Aymond copied him on to a chain of communications about the upcoming interview.

    A subpoena would put an end to the Saints and the church’s email correspondence about a month later.

    ‘We are proud’

    The Saints and archdiocese’s decision to coordinate their messaging created a headache for the organizations after it became clear that Aymond’s list had raised more questions than it answered. Numerous clergy molestation survivors came forward complaining that their abusers were omitted from the list, even in cases in which the church said it believed their allegations and had paid them substantial financial settlements.

    The list did not provide the number of accusations against each clergyman or say exactly when they worked at the local churches to which they were assigned. That concerned the clergy-abuse survivor community, who worried the paucity of information might be an impediment for unreported victims contemplating coming forward.

    It also concerned Cannizzaro’s top assistant district attorney, Graymond Martin, who responded to receiving the list by drafting a request on 8 November 2018 for more information, including basics such as any details indicating “where the alleged acts occurred, … when each act … occurred and some description of each of the alleged acts”.

    Martin sent that draft to a subordinate. But it is unclear whether the request was formally sent to the archdiocese.

    In his radio interview with Normand, Aymond emphasized that the archdiocese would be reporting complaints against living clergy to law enforcement. Bensel’s email indicated he consulted with Martin’s boss, Cannizzaro, about the list before its release. But Martin’s email noted that the DA’s office still had not received “copies of any documentation … of these complaints and the results of any inquiry conducted by the Archdiocese”.

    Cannizzaro filed charges of child rape against one person on the list: George Brignac, in connection with the allegations at the center of the $550,000 settlement paid to one of his victims in July 2018. But Brignac, 85, died in 2020 while awaiting trial on charges that dated back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, sparing the church a courtroom spectacle.

    The church did not catch the same break nearly five years later, after Cannizzaro’s successor as DA, Jason Williams, intervened in civil lawsuits and subpoenaed secret documents from the archdiocese to pursue child rape charges against a local priest named Lawrence Hecker.

    Hecker’s name had not been disclosed until the list came out, even though he had been removed from ministry in 2002 because he was a suspected abuser. A survivor then accused Hecker of raping him when he was an underage Catholic high school student in 1975 – a crime that until then had not been disclosed to authorities and had no deadline before which prosecutors had to file charges.

    The prosecution of Hecker kicked into high gear in the summer of 2023, when the Guardian and WWL Louisiana began publishing a series of reports on a written confession from the priest to his church superiors in 1999 that he had sexually molested or harassed several children during his career. The outlets also got Hecker to confess to being a serial child molester on camera and showed how the church took steps to deliberately hide the extent of his abusive history for decades beforehand.

    Ultimately, Williams’ office charged Hecker with the former student’s 1975 assault. He pleaded guilty in December of last year at age 93 to child rape and other crimes, and he died in prison less than a week after receiving a mandatory life sentence.

    Meanwhile, evidence turned up by Hecker’s prosecution prompted the state police investigator who built the case against him to swear under oath that he had probable cause to suspect the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades”. That abuse was concealed from authorities beyond just Hecker’s case, and an investigation into the matter that could generate criminal charges against the clerical molesters’ protectors was ongoing, the sworn statement said.

    Though Hecker and Brignac were on the initial version of the list, it eventually grew from 57 names to about 80.

    A number of the additions came only after news media reported on conspicuous omissions, including two – Robert Cooper and Brian Highfill – added after WWL Louisiana and an Advocate reporter now at the Guardian questioned the archdiocese about them. Two other additions involved clergymen who also pleaded guilty – albeit in suburban New Orleans communities – to sexually molesting children, either before or after their ordination.

    The deluge of claims eventually drove the archdiocese to file for bankruptcy protection in the spring of 2020.

    That proceeding – which remained ongoing as of the publication of this report – led to more than 500 abuse claims against more than 300 clergymen, religious brothers and sisters, and lay staffers. The archdiocese does not consider most of those as being credibly accused, saying it only has the authority to include clergymen – priests and deacons – on its sanctioned list. And it could cost the archdiocese hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to clergy-abuse victims to settle the bankruptcy, if the church even manages to do so successfully.

    Saturday’s statement from the Saints’ lawyer said Benson would not donate money to the archdiocese for it to settle with clergy molestation survivors.

    “That abuse occurred is a terrible fact,” the statement continued. “As a member of the Catholic faith, Mrs Benson will continue to support the church and the great things it does. Her support is unwavering, but she has no intention of donating funds to the archdiocese to pay for settlements with abuse victims, and she has not done so.”

    As all the disparate cases leading to the church bankruptcy made spectacular headlines, the Saints emails remained hidden for years. And the reasons for that are complex.

    The communications had been produced as evidence in an unresolved civil lawsuit involving allegations against Brignac – the deacon who had been charged with sex crimes multiple times since the 1970s but had been reading at masses as recently as the summer of 2018.

    In July 2019, the attorneys for that pending lawsuit’s plaintiff – who have also represented victims of Hecker – raised eyebrows by issuing a subpoena for copies of all communications among Saints and archdiocesan officials. The attorneys wrote in an accompanying court filing that the subpoena was necessary because the case’s discovery process turned up emails as well as other evidence establishing that Bensel was advising the archdiocese on how to navigate its clergy-abuse crisis.

    News media outlets almost immediately began trying to access and report on the emails. Bensel was not pleased with their interest. Beside asking Lauscha over email to call his cellphone, he told an Advocate reporter seeking comment on the subpoena to instead ask his newspaper’s owner, John Georges. Bensel then said his organization had nothing to say on the subpoena, echoing an email to him from Lauscha which read: “As with any legal matter, we have no comment.”

    The last of the “Saints emails” shows that Bensel forwarded the reporter’s request for comment to Georges. There is no indication in the emails that Georges responded.

    In short order, WWL Louisiana, the now-combined Times-Picayune/Advocate newspaper and two other local television stations joined the Associated Press in suing for access to the emails. The media argued that the missives were a matter of public interest. Attorneys for the Saints argued that its correspondence with the church should remain private – while also maintaining that they had merely provided public relations advice to the archdiocese and had done nothing to be ashamed of.

    Archbishop Gregory Aymond and Gayle Benson during Fat Tuesday celebrations in 2020 in New Orleans. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

    They explicitly denied having had “a hand in determining which names should or should not have been included on the pedophile list”, as the attorneys who obtained the subpoena put it.

    “We are proud of the role we played and yes, in hindsight, we would help again to assist the archdiocese in its ability to publish the list with the hope of taking this step to heal the community,” Benson wrote in a statement. “I want to be clear … that I am not going to be deterred in helping people in need, whether a friend seeking advice or a stranger in need, it does not matter, our list is long.”

    In what seemed to be directed at news organizations whose businesses depend to some extent on credentialed access to – or advertising and broadcasting rights from – the Saints and Pelicans, the statement also said: “I hope that is not lost on the same people that write such articles when they too come asking for help or support.”

    On Saturday, the Saints’ statement said Benson was “proud of her executive team and supports them”.

    “While the public relations assistance offered to the archdiocese has come under scrutiny, Mrs Benson and her team remain steadfast in bringing our community together and continuing to help the good people of our community,” the Saints’ statement said.

    Nonetheless, the New Orleans archdiocese opted to move on from relying on Bensel after the July 2019 subpoena. It later retained a crisis communications consultant from a local firm at a cost of $10,000 monthly, public court filings have shown.

    The media’s efforts to secure the Saints emails hit a significant snag when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the local court system beginning in March 2020.

    Then, on 1 May 2020, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy. The move automatically and indefinitely halted litigation pending against the archdiocese.

    The state court judge overseeing the case that produced the Saints emails never determined whether or not the emails were confidential.

    As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, there were confidentiality orders applied to various archdiocesan documents. One of the primary justifications for such orders was to protect the identities of clergy-abuse victims.

    In the correspondence between the Saints and the church that the Guardian and WWL Louisiana reviewed, no clergy-abuse victims are identified.

    Nonetheless, the Saints lawyer’s statement on Saturday alleged that the emails were “leaked to the press in violation of a court order”. The statement also complained that the team was confronted with those communications as New Orleans prepared to host the Super Bowl showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles on 9 February.

    “The team and the entire city are committed to hosting the greatest Super Bowl week and game ever,” the team’s statement said.

    Ultimately, journalists managed to obtain and expose the emails.

    One of those journalists was the first to expose Brignac before joining the Associated Press. Another investigated the Saints’ connection to Aymond in Sports Illustrated before joining the New York Times. And two contributed significantly to efforts to bring Hecker to justice at WWL Louisiana and the Guardian.

    In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International



    In a recent scandal involving clergy abuse in New Orleans, emails have surfaced showing how the NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans helped a local church spin the crisis through strategic communications. The emails reveal that the sports teams offered guidance on handling the situation and even provided resources for public relations efforts.

    The scandal, which involved allegations of sexual abuse by clergy members at St. John the Baptist Church, rocked the community and raised concerns about transparency and accountability within the church. In the emails, representatives from the Saints and Pelicans can be seen advising the church on how to navigate the media scrutiny and manage public perception.

    While some may question the involvement of sports teams in a religious scandal, others argue that their expertise in crisis communications and public relations can be invaluable in times of crisis. The emails show that the teams helped the church craft messages that emphasized accountability, transparency, and a commitment to justice for the victims.

    Overall, the emails shed light on the complex dynamics at play in crisis communications and how different organizations can come together to support one another in times of need. As the New Orleans clergy abuse scandal continues to unfold, it remains to be seen how the church, sports teams, and community will move forward in addressing the issues at hand.

    Tags:

    Crisis communications, NFL Saints, NBA Pelicans, New Orleans church scandal, clergy abuse, New Orleans clergy abuse scandal, New Orleans church scandal, NFL and NBA support, crisis management, email communications, New Orleans community support.

    #Crisis #communications #emails #show #NFLs #Saints #NBAs #Pelicans #helped #Orleans #church #spin #abuse #scandal #Orleans #clergy #abuse

  • How the New Orleans Saints Helped the Catholic Church Handle a Sex-Abuse Scandal


    The Archdiocese of New Orleans was facing a crisis. A sex-abuse scandal was bursting into public view, sending shock waves through the heavily Catholic city.

    Leaders of one of New Orleans’ other major institutions, the N.F.L.’s New Orleans Saints, were concerned. Gayle Benson, the team’s owner, is a devout Catholic, major church benefactor and close friend of Archbishop Gregory Aymond.

    So in July 2018, when Greg Bensel, the Saints’ head of communications, saw a local news story revealing that a former deacon who had been removed from the ministry after abuse accusations was serving in a public role at a local church, he sent an email to Ms. Benson.

    “The issues that the Archbishop has to deal with that never involve him,” Mr. Bensel wrote.

    In reply, Ms. Benson said that the archbishop was “very upset.” Then, Mr. Bensel made a suggestion: He offered to lend his “crisis communications” expertise, gathered from his decades of working for the Saints, to the archdiocese.

    Ms. Benson thanked him and said that she would share his offer with Archbishop Aymond.

    That exchange was the first of more than 300 emails, obtained by The New York Times, that show the Saints and the archdiocese working together to temper the fallout from a flood of sexual abuse accusations made against priests and church employees. The abuse accusations, which span decades, have led to dozens of civil lawsuits and out-of-court settlements, more than 600 claims of abuse in the archdiocese’s ongoing bankruptcy case and a handful of criminal convictions, and are part of an international reckoning for the church.

    Archbishop Aymond, who has served in New Orleans for most of his career, has led the archdiocese since 2009. During his term as archbishop, the archdiocese has spent millions of dollars on settlements for abuse claims while victims and their representatives have said he didn’t promptly report accusations to the public or law enforcement. The archbishop also has a long history with the Benson family, riding on Mardi Gras floats with Ms. Benson and serving as a witness on the will of her husband, Tom.

    The several hundred pages of correspondence reveal the extent to which Saints leaders leveraged their influence in New Orleans to aid the archdiocese and offer a rare window into how powerful institutions can work together to shape public opinion. They show Mr. Bensel, with the approval of Ms. Benson and using his Saints email address on the N.F.L.’s web domain, working closely with the archdiocese in attempting to solicit positive media coverage of the church and burnish the image of Archbishop Aymond, even writing talking points for him.

    One email exchange also shows members of the Saints’ leadership discussing a list of credibly accused clergy members prepared by the Archdiocese of New Orleans shortly before its release in November 2018. The list followed similar disclosures in other cities, and church leaders positioned it as a transparent public accounting that could help victims find closure and seek justice. But it has been criticized by victims and their advocates for being incomplete.

    A few hours before the list was released publicly, Mr. Bensel had an email back and forth with Dennis Lauscha, the Saints’ team president. Mr. Bensel told Mr. Lauscha that there had been a “cc” the night before with Leon Cannizzaro, then the district attorney for New Orleans, “that allowed us to take certain people off the list.” Mr. Bensel did not include any more details and it is not clear if names were actually removed from the list.

    “No one from the Saints organization or the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had any role in compiling the list or had any say in adding or removing anyone from the list,” the Archdiocese of New Orleans said in a statement. A lawyer for the Saints, James Gulotta, also asserted that no Saints employee played a role in constructing the list. Mr. Cannizzaro, who now leads the criminal division for the Louisiana attorney general’s office, did not return multiple calls and messages seeking comment. He previously said that he first saw the list the day the church made it public.

    Mr. Gulotta said in a statement that Mr. Bensel had been told about a conversation between Mr. Cannizzaro and an archdiocese staff member about the list but did not participate and had “no firsthand knowledge” of what was discussed. It was Mr. Bensel’s “understanding,” he said, that one reason for a conversation may have been determining if the appearance of any name on the list “would interfere with a criminal investigation.” Mr. Bensel’s email refers to his “understanding that the list would be updated by the archdiocese,” Mr. Gulotta said.

    Ms. Benson “is proud of her executive team and supports them,” Mr. Gulotta said.

    The Saints’ work with the church was made public in 2020 through a lawsuit filed against the church by a former altar boy. The Saints were not part of the case, but the plaintiff’s lawyers said in a court filing that they had obtained hundreds of emails through discovery showing that the N.F.L. team aided the church in a public campaign to protect the archdiocese and Archbishop Aymond. The Saints fought in state court to keep the majority of these emails out of public view before the case was moved to federal court when the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in May 2020.

    The Saints had described their involvement as “minimal” and said that it came about because the church asked for advice on handling media attention around the release of the November 2018 list. Mr. Gulotta said that nothing in the emails contradicted the team’s past statements. But a review of the previously undisclosed messages shows the team’s leaders coming up with the idea to help the archdiocese and working with church leaders for at least a year. The archdiocese said that it did not pay Mr. Bensel for his public relations work.

    It is common for N.F.L. teams to partner with local officials and civic organizations on community issues unrelated to sports. But the extent of the Saints’ backing of the local Catholic Church and the nature of the team’s work is atypical. The Archdiocese of New Orleans is also currently under investigation by state and federal authorities over claims that high-ranking members of the church ignored or covered up accusations of clergy abuse of minors, according to a search warrant of the archdiocese’s headquarters executed by state police last year. The search warrant did not identify any church leaders by name. (No church officials have been charged, and the archdiocese said it was cooperating with law enforcement.)

    The Saints are also central to the civic life of New Orleans. The team’s stadium, the Superdome, is the host of this year’s Super Bowl, and the team became a symbol of resilience in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Benson, who took over the Saints and the N.B.A.’s Pelicans in 2018 after the death of her husband, Tom, has contributed more than $80 million to the archdiocese and other Catholic causes since 2007 through the foundation she and her late husband started. In Mr. Gulotta’s statement, he said Ms. Benson would “continue to support the Church and the great things it does. Her support is unwavering.”

    The Saints’ involvement with the archdiocese began after an article ran in a local newspaper, The Advocate, about a former Catholic deacon and schoolteacher, George F. Brignac, who, public records show, faced numerous accusations of sexual abuse across decades. It was that article in 2018 that prompted Mr. Bensel to email Ms. Benson and offer his help to the archdiocese. The lawsuit that led to the disclosure of the Saints’ emails was also based on a claim against Mr. Brignac from 40 years earlier. Mr. Brignac died in 2020 while awaiting trial on a charge of first-degree rape, a case that involved another altar boy.

    Mr. Gulotta said that a federal district judge, Jay Zainey, recommended to the archbishop that Mr. Bensel could help the church handle “the large volume of media inquiries” about clergy abuse. Judge Zainey, who is Catholic, said in a 2020 interview that he suggested to the archbishop that he use Mr. Bensel as an adviser. He first appears in the batch of Saints emails in October 2018 on chains in which Mr. Bensel updates the archbishop about his work.

    Messages sent over the next year from Mr. Bensel’s Saints email account show him using connections from his communications work for the Saints and the Pelicans, where he holds the same position, on behalf of the Catholic Church. Mr. Bensel also cited his Saints experience in offering his “counsel” to another Catholic institution — his alma mater, Jesuit High School — after The Advocate revealed that the school had made undisclosed settlements with sexual abuse survivors. “You have the full support of myself, Dennis and Mrs. Benson,” he wrote to the school’s president. (Jesuit did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

    In October 2018, Mr. Bensel wrote to top editors at The Advocate and another newspaper, The Times-Picayune, saying that he was reaching out as a New Orleans native and member of the Catholic Church, not as a representative of the Saints or the Pelicans. But he cited his work with the Saints, writing that support from the local media had helped the small-market team thrive. He asked the newspapers to back the church in a similar way as it prepared to release its list of credibly accused clergy and offered an “exclusive sit-down” with the archbishop.

    “We have the right man — at the right time — right now and I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind him and work with him,” Mr. Bensel wrote, referring to Archbishop Aymond. He added, “Casting a critical eye on him is neither beneficial nor right.”

    Mr. Bensel forwarded his letter to Ms. Benson and Mr. Lauscha. Ms. Benson replied: “Great letter Greg … spot on! Thank you very much.” A meeting was soon set up between the archbishop and Advocate editors. (Kevin Hall, president and publisher of the media company that owns The Advocate and The Times-Picayune, said that engagement with community leaders “does not dilute our journalistic standards or keep us from pursuing the truth.”)

    Multiple emails show Ms. Benson encouraging Mr. Bensel’s work for the church or expressing support for Archbishop Aymond to her employees. (“Very sad he is going through this,” Ms. Benson wrote in one message to the Saints’ vice president of business operations.)

    In the weeks leading up to the release of the list in November 2018, Mr. Bensel’s work for the church included, according to the emails, writing talking points for Archbishop Aymond to use in the Advocate meeting; providing a host for the Saints’ flagship radio station with a list of questions to use for an in-person interview with the archbishop on the day of the list’s release; and editing the letter the archbishop would send to parishioners about the list.

    Mr. Bensel’s November 2018 email that referred to taking people off the list came in response to a message from Mr. Lauscha, who asked if “your SJ you discussed yesterday” — an apparent reference to a member of the Jesuit order — had made the list. Mr. Bensel also told Mr. Lauscha that the list would be updated and that the church’s message was that it would not stop with the initial release of names. The archdiocese said that Mr. Bensel was provided a copy of the church’s list “just prior to its release date.”

    Archbishop Aymond said at the time of the list’s release that more than 10 staff members and outside legal professionals reviewed the files of nearly 2,500 priests who had served in the archdiocese since 1950, and that additional people reviewed accusations that were received after a priest had died.

    Twenty-two clergy members have been added to the archdiocese’s list since its release, bringing the number of names to 79. An evidentiary memo prepared for law enforcement by lawyers representing victims of clergy sex abuse, first reported by The Guardian, contended that more than 300 clergy members and a handful of employees who worked in the Archdiocese of New Orleans have been credibly accused of sexual abuse, including clergy members who appear on lists from other dioceses but not in New Orleans and who have been named in proofs of claim filed in the bankruptcy.

    The vast majority of clergy members on the archdiocese’s credibly accused list have not faced criminal prosecution. Most of the accusations stem from events said to have taken place decades ago, and about a third of the priests included on the original list had already died. But when the retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker was indicted in 2023 for sexually assaulting a teenage boy in the 1970s, Mr. Cannizzaro’s successor as district attorney, Jason Williams, referred to a “cone of silence” that has often protected clergy members. (Mr. Hecker, who died in prison in December shortly after pleading guilty, had confessed to archdiocese leaders in 1999 that he had abused multiple teens, The Guardian reported.)

    Around the release of the list, the church sought to make good on the call for support from local media that Mr. Bensel had initiated. In a draft letter that Archbishop Aymond sent to Mr. Bensel for approval, he complained that The Advocate had published an advance list of priests it believed should be named by the archdiocese and included a call for potential victims to contact the newspaper. The publisher, Dan Shea, replied by asserting that the newspaper had the right to do “our own reporting.” He said the call for potential victims to contact the newspaper had been added online by an editor “at the last minute” and was subsequently removed.

    The day of the list’s release, Mr. Bensel accompanied Archbishop Aymond on local media interviews in which the church leader pledged total transparency and justice for victims.

    Mr. Bensel’s work with the church continued for at least several months after the release of the list. In December 2018, he asked the archdiocese’s general counsel, Wendy Vitter, if there were updates “relative to lawsuits or any other issues that we feared may arise” from the list’s release. In the spring of 2019, the emails show, he worked with church officials on comments from Ms. Benson in support of the archbishop for a Times-Picayune article and a guest column for The Advocate that Mr. Bensel said the archbishop requested she write.

    One member of the Saints organization, the general counsel Vicky Neumeyer, expressed concerns when Mr. Bensel circulated a draft of the column internally. “I don’t want her to appear to be a puppet for the Archdiocese because we have way too many constituents from all walks of life,” she wrote. The piece, in which Ms. Benson wrote about “the positive impact our local Archdiocese plays in our community,” was soon published with minor changes.

    Mr. Bensel also helped Archbishop Aymond prepare for an interview with The Advocate in June 2019 about the clergy abuse crisis. In one of the final exchanges before the Saints were served a subpoena for their communications with the church, he forwarded the thread about that preparation to a family member. “I don’t get paid enough,” Mr. Bensel wrote.



    The New Orleans Saints have recently made headlines for their unexpected involvement in helping the Catholic Church handle a sex-abuse scandal. The partnership between the football team and the church may seem unlikely, but it has proven to be a powerful force for addressing the issue and providing support to victims.

    In a statement released by the Saints organization, they announced their decision to aid the Archdiocese of New Orleans in their efforts to address the scandal and provide assistance to those affected. This collaboration has included financial support, counseling services, and a commitment to transparency and accountability.

    The Saints’ involvement in this sensitive matter demonstrates their commitment to social responsibility and their willingness to use their platform for good. By standing with the Catholic Church in addressing this issue, the team has shown that they are not just dedicated to winning games, but also to making a positive impact in their community.

    While the partnership between the New Orleans Saints and the Catholic Church may be unexpected, it is a powerful example of how different organizations can come together to address difficult issues and support those in need. This collaboration serves as a reminder that we all have a responsibility to stand up against abuse and work towards healing and justice for survivors.

    Tags:

    1. New Orleans Saints
    2. Catholic Church
    3. Sex-abuse scandal
    4. Church scandal
    5. Saints football
    6. New Orleans community
    7. Catholicism
    8. Church controversy
    9. Scandal response
    10. Saints charity efforts

    #Orleans #Saints #Helped #Catholic #Church #Handle #SexAbuse #Scandal

  • Philadelphia Eagles Gift Super Bowl Tickets to Survivor of New Orleans Attack


    The Philadelphia Eagles are taking a very special guest with them to the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

    On Jan, 30, the Eagles shared a video of the moment that defensive end Brandon Graham told Ryan Quigley, a longtime super fan of the team who was injured in the New Year’s Attack in New Orleans, that he was going to the big game on Feb. 9.

    Quigley was injured in the attack and tragically, his best friend Tiger Bech was one of the 14 people killed on Bourbon Street that day.

    The Eagles invited Quigley to their facility to give him the big news, where he told Graham that he had promised Bech, who he would attend games with, that he would take him to the Super Bowl if the Eagles returned.

    “He would love nothing more than to be there,” an emotional Quigley said of his late friend.

    “And I’m going to make sure he’s there with us, you know? I’m sharing his story,” Quigley added. “That’s my calling.”

    Bech’s sister, Ginnie, was also invited to join Quigley at the Eagles facility, where she shed tears and said that “such a negative memory” has turned into a “really beautiful and cool” way to honor her brother’s life. “It’s really meant so much,” she added.

    Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

    “We’re going to go back to New Orleans and leave on a positive note from that city, given that Tiger’s from there and that I promised him I was going bring him down to the Super Bowl,” Quigley told College Sports Only after the visit to the Eagles facility.

    According to CBS, Graham said it “means a lot” that Quigley will return to New Orleans to support the Eagles in the Super Bowl.

    “I know he said in his mind he didn’t want to go back to New Orleans because of what happened … And I know for me, I wanted to change that for him to conquer his fears.”

    The Eagles will face the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2025 Super Bowl on Feb. 9, in a rematch of the 2023 game.

    Quigley and Bech were on Bourbon Street on Jan. 1 when a pickup truck plowed through the streets, killing 14 people and injuring many more.



    The Philadelphia Eagles have made a heartwarming gesture by gifting Super Bowl tickets to a survivor of a recent attack in New Orleans. The recipient, who wishes to remain anonymous, was a victim of a violent assault that left them hospitalized and facing a long road to recovery.

    In a statement released by the Eagles organization, they expressed their sympathy for the survivor and their family, and their desire to bring some joy and positivity into their lives during this difficult time. The team hopes that attending the Super Bowl will provide a much-needed distraction and opportunity for the survivor to create new, positive memories.

    This act of kindness and generosity is a reminder of the power of sports to bring people together and uplift those in need. The Eagles’ gesture is a shining example of compassion and support, and we applaud them for their thoughtfulness. Let’s hope that this gift brings some comfort and joy to the survivor as they continue on their journey to recovery.

    Tags:

    1. Philadelphia Eagles
    2. Super Bowl tickets
    3. Survivor
    4. New Orleans attack
    5. Gift
    6. Philadelphia Eagles gift
    7. Super Bowl ticket giveaway
    8. New Orleans tragedy
    9. NFL survivor story
    10. Eagles Super Bowl generosity

    #Philadelphia #Eagles #Gift #Super #Bowl #Tickets #Survivor #Orleans #Attack

  • Eagles invite survivor of Bourbon Street attack back to New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX: ‘Not letting evil win’


    Former Princeton football player Ryan Quigley was seriously injured and lost his best friend and fellow teammate, Tiger Bech, in the violent terrorist attack in New Orleans on January 1. But Quigley will have the opportunity to write that tragic story when he returns next weekend as an honorary guest of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

    The Eagles invited Quigley and Bech’s sister to attend their divisional round game against the Los Angeles Rams last month, but this week they invited him to their training facility with the intention of surprising him with Super Bowl LIX tickets. 

    FILE – Princeton running back Ryan Quigley (25) carries the ball for a touchdown in the second half during the game between the Columbia Lions and Princeton Tigers on October, 5, 2019 at Princeton Stadium in Princeton, NJ.  (Kyle Ross/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

    HOW TO WATCH SUPER BOWL LIX BETWEEN CHIEFS, EAGLES STREAMED ON TUBI

    “We want to tell you the real reason we brought you here,” Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham said in a video shared by the team. “It’s okay if you’re not feeling it, but we would love to have you down for the Super Bowl.” 

    This year’s Super Bowl will be hosted by the city of New Orleans. It will take place just a little over a month after the attack. Quigley will return to the city, something he vowed never to do again. 

    “New Year’s Eve was my first time in New Orleans ever, it was my first night, and I told myself it was going to be the last,” he told the team’s website. “But then I thought about it, because all year I’ve been telling Tiger if the Eagles make the Super Bowl this year, I promised him I was going to take him, and he’s from Louisiana.”

    SIGN UP FOR TUBI AND STREAM SUPER BOWL LIX FOR FREE

    “I think, not letting evil win and evil will not prevail. I think we’re going to go back to New Orleans and leave on a positive note from that city, given that Tiger’s from there and that I promised him I was going bring him down to the Super Bowl. I’m looking forward to it for sure.”

    Quigley, 26, suffered broken bones in his leg, back and face and underwent surgery and several days in the hospital to recover from a horrific terror attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people and injured dozens more. 

    FILE – Princeton’s Ryan Quigley (25) in runway before a game vs. Yale at Powers Field. Princeton, NJ on Nov. 16, 2019. (Erick W. Rasco /Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)

    CHIEFS POTENTIAL SUPER BOWL CELEBRATIONS WILL NOT FEATURE PUBLIC RALLY FOLLOWING 2024 MASS SHOOTING: REPORT

    He hopes that his presence will allow him to share Bech’s story, something he plans to continue doing no, matter where he goes. 

    “Everything that the Eagles have done from being around the facilities today and the Divisional Round, to helping us share his story, there’s no words to describe it. We’re forever grateful to have the opportunity to tell the rest of the world how special Tiger was.”

    “Everyone that I meet moving forward, I want to introduce Tiger as well, because of how special he was and how much character he had,” he added. 

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    “He had no problem going to like anywhere in the world and fitting into different cultures. And he was just a super well-rounded individual with a ton of qualities that I’m going to make sure people know about for the rest of my life.”

    The Eagles and Chiefs will meet in Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9 at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.

    Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.





    The Philadelphia Eagles have extended a heartwarming invitation to one of the survivors of the tragic Bourbon Street shooting in New Orleans to attend Super Bowl LIX with them. The survivor, who wishes to remain anonymous, was caught in the crossfire during the senseless act of violence that took place in the iconic French Quarter.

    The Eagles organization reached out to the survivor, expressing their desire to show support and solidarity during this difficult time. The survivor, who is a die-hard Eagles fan, was overwhelmed with gratitude for the invitation and eagerly accepted.

    In a statement released by the Eagles, they expressed their commitment to standing with the survivor and not letting evil win. They emphasized the importance of coming together as a community to support those affected by such tragedies and to spread love and positivity in the face of darkness.

    The survivor’s trip to New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX will serve as a symbol of resilience and hope, showing that even in the midst of tragedy, there is still light and goodness to be found. The Eagles organization hopes that this gesture will bring some comfort and healing to the survivor as they continue to recover from the traumatic experience.

    As the survivor prepares to join the Eagles in New Orleans for the big game, the entire team and fanbase stand in solidarity with them, sending thoughts of strength and support. Together, they will show that love and unity will always triumph over hate and violence. #NotLettingEvilWin #FlyEaglesFly

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    1. Eagles Super Bowl LIX
    2. Survivor of Bourbon Street attack
    3. New Orleans Super Bowl
    4. Eagles invite survivor
    5. Bourbon Street attack survivor
    6. Eagles Super Bowl invitation
    7. New Orleans survivor story
    8. Super Bowl LIX event
    9. Eagles support survivor
    10. Not letting evil win

    #Eagles #invite #survivor #Bourbon #Street #attack #Orleans #Super #Bowl #LIX #letting #evil #win

  • Will The New Orleans Pelicans And Brandon Ingram End Up Stuck Together?


    The New Orleans Pelicans’ top priority ahead of the 2025 NBA trade deadline is moving Brandon Ingram, according to ESPN. And this breakup between Ingram and the Pelicans has been in the making since the summer.

    In the midst of one of their worst seasons in franchise history, once again snake-bitten by injuries to a lot of the primary core players, the Pelicans are operating as sellers with the deadline less than one week away.

    Since suffering a severe ankle sprain nearly six weeks ago, Ingram remains out of the Pelicans’ lineup as trade winds begin to blow heavily around him once more. However, New Orleans has endured a tough time trying to find any teams seriously interested in acquiring his large $36 million expiring contract ahead of unrestricted free agency.

    Since the beginning of failed contract extension talks between Ingram and the Pelicans, the main buzz around it is due to his desires to earn a new deal over $200 million. New Orleans never felt comfortable offering Ingram anywhere close to max contract value, which has led to a dissolving relationship on both sides.

    For New Orleans, they now know they have their two primary wings of the future in Trey Murphy III and Herb Jones. Murphy is producing a career-best breakout campaign averaging 21.5 points, 5.2 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game in Ingram’s absence. With Jones, he has proven consistently to be one of the NBA’s best on-ball wing defenders – a coveted player archetype every team is looking for nowadays.

    Add in the wildcard of Zion Williamson, plus the recent trade for Dejounte Murray, Ingram will be the odd man out in terms of getting the long-term money he desires here.

    So, where will Ingram and the Pelicans go from here? Over the last six-plus months, Ingram has been available for the right price. Steadily, that price continues to fall as no suitor appears to be making aggressive overtures.

    At this point, New Orleans would be lucky to receive any valuable draft compensation or young prospects in return for Ingram. Now, it’s looking like a pure salary dump transaction involving Ingram is the most likely scenario for New Orleans to dux the luxury tax this season.

    Ingram is a borderline All-Star talent. During his six seasons with the Pelicans, Ingram is averaging 23.0 points, 5.5 rebounds and 5.2 assists while carrying an above-average 57.6 true shooting percentage. The issue with the 27-year-old wing always comes back to durability concerns.

    During his nine-year stint in the Association, Ingram has never logged a single season playing a full 82-game schedule. Since becoming a full-time starter after his rookie season with the Los Angeles Lakers, Ingram’s high in games played is only 64.

    Will any teams come out of nowhere to acquire Ingram? New Orleans is looking for the right opportunity to get at least some value in return, but that honestly might not occur. The Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs and Sacramento Kings all registered interest over the summer, but none have shown much urgency to circle back at the deadline yet.

    For Ingram and the Pelicans, the most realistic play could be seeking sign-and-trade opportunities during the 2025 offseason. From there, New Orleans would be able to find out Ingram’s true market in free agency – and in turn receive what they’re looking for in any potential framework.

    It would be a stunner if Ingram stays with New Orleans past this season. Both sides know it’s time to move on, but it might have to be in June or July compared to the February 6th NBA trade deadline.



    As the NBA offseason approaches, one of the biggest questions surrounding the New Orleans Pelicans is the future of Brandon Ingram. The talented forward is set to become a restricted free agent this offseason, and many are wondering whether the Pelicans will choose to keep him or let him walk.

    Ingram had a breakout season in 2019-2020, averaging 23.8 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 4.2 assists per game while shooting 46.3% from the field and 39.1% from three-point range. His performance earned him his first All-Star selection and Most Improved Player honors.

    The Pelicans traded for Ingram as part of the Anthony Davis deal with the Lakers, and he has quickly become a key piece of their young core alongside Zion Williamson. However, with the team underperforming this season and missing the playoffs, there are questions about whether they will be able to retain Ingram long-term.

    Ingram is expected to draw significant interest from other teams in free agency, and the Pelicans will have to decide whether they are willing to match any offers he receives. If they choose not to, they could risk losing him for nothing or potentially getting stuck in a sign-and-trade scenario.

    Ultimately, the decision will come down to what the Pelicans believe is best for their future. Will they choose to lock up Ingram as a cornerstone of their franchise, or will they look to move on and potentially shake up their roster? Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain – the future of Brandon Ingram and the New Orleans Pelicans is a story worth following.

    Tags:

    New Orleans Pelicans, Brandon Ingram, NBA, basketball, trade rumors, contract extension, NBA free agency, New Orleans sports, basketball news, Pelicans roster, player contracts, NBA trade deadline

    #Orleans #Pelicans #Brandon #Ingram #Stuck

  • NFL owner docks his $180m superyacht in New Orleans as the rich and famous descend on Super Bowl


    A 90-meter yacht belonging to an NFL owner was docked this week in New Orleans, ahead of the Super Bowl.

    The massive vessel has a total of 27 cabins for guest and crew, a helicopter landing pad and two swimming pools.

    And as reported by Nola.com, the yacht belongs to Arthur Blank, the owner of the Atlanta Falcons.

    The outlet said the boat, known as the ‘DreAMBoat,’ was docked this week along the Mississippi River behind the Audubon Zoo.

    According to website Superyacht Fan, the boat was purchased for $180million by Blank.

    It is said to have been designed by Espen Øino, a leading naval architect from Norway.

    Arthur Blank's DreAMBoat boat yacht is seen in Miami in 2020 ahead of Super Bowl LI

    Arthur Blank’s DreAMBoat boat yacht is seen in Miami in 2020 ahead of Super Bowl LI

    Blank's yacht was purchased for an estimated $180million, and has a total of 27 cabins

    Blank’s yacht was purchased for an estimated $180million, and has a total of 27 cabins

    Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot, is worth a reported $9.6billion and owns the Falcons

    Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot, is worth a reported $9.6billion and owns the Falcons

    His superyacht, which has a glass elevator, was designed by famed naval architect Espen Øino

    His superyacht, which has a glass elevator, was designed by famed naval architect Espen Øino

    The glitzy yacht is equipped with a glass elevator and a large dining room, and can hit a top speed of 18mph.

    It can accommodate 23 guests and 33 crew members, and was reportedly last docked in Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.

    The co-founder of Home Depot, Blank is worth $9.6billion according to Forbes

    He purchased the Falcons for $545 million in 2002, though his stake is now worth $2.5billion.

    He also owns MLS’ Atlanta United.

    Blank, whose Falcons played in the championship game in 2017, has previously been seen docking his yacht in a Super Bowl host city ahead of the big game.

    Prior to Super Bowl LI in 2020 Blank docked his boat on the waters of Miami as well.

    Blank’s arrival in New Orleans comes ahead of Super Bowl LIX next week, which will see the Eagles and Chiefs face off at the Superdome.



    As the city of New Orleans prepares to host the Super Bowl, one NFL owner is making quite the splash with his impressive $180 million superyacht. The owner, who remains unnamed, has docked his luxurious vessel in the city’s harbor as the rich and famous descend on the Big Easy for the big game.

    The superyacht, which boasts multiple decks, a helipad, and lavish amenities, has become a spectacle in itself as onlookers marvel at its sheer size and opulence. Rumors are swirling that celebrities and high-profile guests will be treated to exclusive parties and events aboard the yacht throughout the Super Bowl weekend.

    While the owner of the superyacht remains a mystery, one thing is for certain – New Orleans is buzzing with excitement as the rich and famous come together to celebrate one of the biggest sporting events of the year. Stay tuned for more updates on the extravagant festivities happening in the city as the Super Bowl draws near.

    Tags:

    • NFL owner
    • $180m superyacht
    • New Orleans
    • Rich and famous
    • Super Bowl
    • Luxury yacht
    • Celebrity sightings
    • Super Bowl weekend
    • VIP experience
    • Big game festivities

    #NFL #owner #docks #180m #superyacht #Orleans #rich #famous #descend #Super #Bowl

  • A megayacht worth $360 million has docked in New Orleans | Entertainment/Life


    The weeks leading up to the Super Bowl have brought business tycoons and their yachts to the ports of New Orleans. 

    After the Atlanta Falcons owner and co-founder of Home Depot arrived on his 90-meter yacht, the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham Football Club, Shahid Khan, docked his own luxury boat along Mississippi River in downtown New Orleans. 

    Named the Kismet, the 122-meter yacht was sold for a reported $360 million in 2024. 







    The Kismet

    The Kismet, a megayacht owned by Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham Football Club owner Shahid Khan is docked in downtown New Orleans ahead of Super Bowl LIX. (Photo by Hannah Levitan)


    According to USA Today, the megayacht is Khan’s fourth yacht and third megayacht. With nine cabins, the yacht can host up to 12 people, not including the 36 crew members and captain.

    The boat has six massive decks, and the vessel is suited with three pools, four fireplaces, a pickleball and basketball court, two fire pits, a cryotherapy chamber, a sauna and a Turkish bath. It also features a helipad, salon, spa, indoor and outdoor theater, dance floor, gym and elevator.







    The Kismet

    The Kismet, a megayacht owned by Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham Football Club owner Shahid Khan is docked in downtown New Orleans ahead of Super Bowl LIX. (Photo by Hannah Levitan)


    The Kismet was last docked in Saint Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and sails under the Marshall Islands flag.

    Currently, the yacht is docked next to the iconic Steamboat Natchez and can be seen from the Riverwalk.



    A megayacht worth $360 million has docked in New Orleans

    Luxury has taken on a whole new meaning in New Orleans as a megayacht worth a staggering $360 million has been spotted docked in the city. The extravagant vessel, known as “Infinity,” boasts an impressive array of amenities and features that cater to the ultra-wealthy.

    Measuring an impressive 367 feet in length, Infinity is equipped with a helipad, multiple swimming pools, a spa, a gym, and even a private cinema. The interior of the yacht is outfitted with lavish furnishings and state-of-the-art technology, providing the ultimate in comfort and convenience for its wealthy guests.

    It is rumored that the owner of the megayacht is a prominent billionaire who frequently travels the world in style aboard his luxurious vessel. The presence of Infinity in New Orleans has caused quite a stir among locals and tourists alike, with many flocking to the docks to catch a glimpse of the opulent yacht.

    While most of us may never get the chance to step foot aboard a megayacht worth $360 million, the sight of Infinity docked in New Orleans serves as a reminder of the extravagant lifestyles of the rich and famous. For now, we can only dream of the day when we too might experience the ultimate luxury of sailing the high seas in style.

    Tags:

    megayacht, $360 million, New Orleans, luxury yacht, entertainment news, lifestyle, docked, yacht news, celebrity lifestyle, wealthy lifestyle, luxury travel, luxury living

    #megayacht #worth #million #docked #Orleans #EntertainmentLife

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