A federal judge used the findings of a US justice department investigation to justify expelling clergy molestation survivors from a committee trying to negotiate settlements with the bankrupt New Orleans Catholic archdiocese after their lawyer tipped off a high school that its chaplain was an admitted child molester.
But now, for the first time, having obtained a long-sealed report on the matter, the Guardian and reporting partner WWL Louisiana can reveal that the judge, Meredith Grabill, made that decision even after the justice department’s bankruptcy trustee specifically said the lawyer’s clients should not be punished – though the trustee believed the attorney had violated a confidentiality order in trying to protect children from an abuser.
The lawyer, Richard Trahant, has always denied violating the secrecy orders governing the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy, one of the most contentious of the 40 such cases filed by Catholic institutions across the US amid the worldwide church’s ongoing reckoning with its history of clergy abuse.
He is still appealing a $400,000 fine that Grabill handed him.
Meanwhile, three years since that ruling from Grabill, a settlement in the bankruptcy hasn’t been reached, leaving unresolved a case first filed in May 2020 as the archdiocese sought to limit its liability from hundreds of claims of clergy abuse, mostly involving the victimization of children and spanning several decades.
The archdiocese has racked up well over $40m in legal fees.
It is selling off real estate. And it is preparing to nix its newspaper’s print edition beginning in July.
Court records also show how a then bankruptcy judge in Houston, David Jones, spoke with Grabill about the sanctions against Trahant as well as his clients before she imposed them.
Jones then used Trahant’s clients’ removals in New Orleans as a legal basis to expel a member of a creditors’ committee during a separate bankruptcy case in his court in Texas.
Jones has since admitted having an affair with an attorney in that case, whose client was a business competitor to the committee member ousted by Jones. Jones has resigned and is now the subject of an FBI corruption investigation.
Precisely how Grabill arrived at what is widely viewed as one of the most consequential rulings in the New Orleans archdiocese’s tortuous bankruptcy case has been among the proceeding’s most elusive secrets.
To get the most complete glimpse yet of those circumstances, the Guardian and WWL Louisiana used a public records request to obtain the report that Grabill commissioned from the US trustee’s office – which assists in administering bankruptcy cases – before punishing Trahant and his clients.
Grabill had sealed the 41-page document, along with corresponding exhibits. Yet they all became part of the case file compiled by New Orleans state prosecutors in their aggravated rape and kidnapping case against Lawrence Hecker, a self-admitted child molester and retired local archdiocesan priest.
Hecker pleaded guilty as charged in December and died days into serving a mandatory life sentence, making archdiocesan records obtained during his prosecution available under Louisiana’s public records law.
Essentially, the report determined that Trahant violated Grabill’s secrecy order simply by making reference to the name and position of the abusive chaplain – Paul Hart – while communicating with the principal of Brother Martin high school, where the clergyman worked.
Brother Martin’s principal, Ryan Gallagher, happened to be a cousin of Trahant.
The report also asserted that Trahant violated the secrecy order by telling a journalist – then with New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper but now at the Guardian – to keep Hart on his “radar”.
But the report found it was actually the church itself that informed Brother Martin about the particulars of Hart’s abusive past after Trahant mentioned his name to both Gallagher and the journalist.
Hart was forced to retire and leave the school, although the archdiocese publicly blamed his departure on his poor health.
The trustee’s investigation report said it could not determine exactly who may have assisted the journalist with an article he later published about how Hart’s abusive past compelled him to retire.
Investigators came to that realization partly because the archdiocese declined to cooperate with efforts to determine everyone on the church’s side who had access to the information in the newspaper piece.
All the report could really conclude was that it wasn’t Trahant.
Trahant has maintained that he was careful only to share information about Hart that was publicly available – his name and job, for instance – because the secrecy order enabled him to do that.
He points to a provision of the order which reads “information that is in the public domain at the time of disclosure … shall not be governed by [the] protective order”.
Nonetheless, after the attorney testified that he knew his prior work representing clergy molestation survivors meant Gallagher and the journalist would infer Hart was an abuser simply from his mentioning the priest’s name out of the blue, Grabill sanctioned Trahant and his clients, claiming she was protecting the “functioning of the committee”.
Asked to review the episode and comment on it as a knowledgable outside observer, Leslie Griffin, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas law professor, said it appeared to her as if Grabill’s handling of the matter signaled that “bankruptcy means the archdiocese can talk about whatever it wants while the survivors” or their advocates “must be silent”.
“Both Trahant and the archdiocese [acted] on the confidential information … to ensure that Paul Hart could not harm anyone else,” Griffin said. “To an outsider, it looks like Trahant and [the archdiocese] were treated differently for doing the same thing, namely using the court’s information in trying to protect minors from a known abuser.
“It looks like a system that could be more protective of the abusers than of the abused. And the reasons for that are not clear.”
Neither Grabill nor Trahant – nor his clients James Adams, Jackie Berthelot, Theodore Jackson and Eric Johnson – immediately responded to requests for comment.
Hart has since died.
‘Completely disgusted’
The complicated legal saga in some ways centering on Hart began with the decision of the New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, to station him at Brother Martin beginning in 2017.
Aymond made that decision even after Hart, in about 2012, had admitted to the archbishop that he kissed, groped and engaged in “dry sex” – simulated intercourse while clothed – in the early 1990s with a 17-year-old girl who belonged to a youth group run out of Hart’s church at the time.
Aymond, though, declined to substantially punish Hart because church, or canon, law in effect at the beginning of the 1990s considered 16 the age of consent. US bishops adopted a policy making 18 the age of consent in 2002 – after the abuse happened but before Hart’s admitted behavior.
In late 2021, through his work representing people whose clergy abuse claims were tied up in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy, Trahant learned some of those facts.
The archdiocese had never disclosed Hart’s history.
And because of that, on New Year’s Eve 2021, Trahant sent Gallagher a text message reading: “Is Paul Hart still the chaplain at BM?”
Gallagher wrote back, “Yes.” Trahant said, “You and I need to get together soon,” prompting Gallagher to reply: “Shit.
“That’s … ominous coming from you.”
Things developed quickly in the days that followed, according to the US trustee investigation. Trahant told members of the committee to which his clients belonged that there was a “pressing situation” with respect to Hart but did not elaborate.
Trahant did not represent the committee itself, but the lawyers that did told the archdiocese that they understood Hart to be “a danger to children based on information” in personnel files produced to the body.
They demanded the archdiocese remove Hart as soon as possible.
In the meantime, by 5 January 2022, Aymond had gotten on the phone with the president of Brother Martin’s governing board, David Gallo, as well as the director of schools for the religious order in charge of the campus, John Devlin.
Saying he was concerned for the person whom the priest admitted abusing, Aymond indicated “the information concerning Hart should not have been released … and sought to find out the source”, the US trustee report said, citing sealed testimony taken later from Gallo and Devlin.
Gallo subsequently recalled that Aymond “provided … specific details of the abuse allegations: that the allegations against Hart involved a ‘legal adult’ under canon law applicable at the time”, the report stated.
As Devlin recalled, Aymond characterized Hart’s behavior as “a boundary violation”.
Hart at the time had been diagnosed with brain cancer. But he planned to be back on campus before the end of that month, as Brother Martin understood it, according to what Gallagher said during a conversation following up on his initial text exchange with Trahant.
And, despite Aymond’s assurances that nothing criminal occurred, Brother Martin officials agreed that “they would never have accepted [Hart] as chaplain” if they had previously known about any “boundary violation or inappropriate behavior” by him, according to the report.
Devlin reportedly testified that the school “agreed to start the process to request that Hart no longer continue as chaplain”.
Hart offered in writing to remove himself as Brother Martin’s chaplain “temporarily, until the matter in question has been resolved”, just one day after the conversations Devlin and Gallo recalled having with Aymond.
Aymond evidently waited one week – until 13 January 2022 – to answer Hart’s offer in writing, saying the priest would instead be retiring and therefore would be permanently “relieved” from his role as Brother Martin’s chaplain.
School officials at the time were insisting Aymond provide them something in writing showing the archbishop had removed Hart from Brother Martin.
A community notice issued to Brother Martin said that the school had not learned of Hart’s removal until 13 January.
But the date on Aymond’s letter is 10 January 2022, creating the impression that Aymond had actually written it days earlier.
A survivors committee attorney, Omer “Rick” Kuebel, eventually testified that the metadata on the letter – its digital timestamp – established that the document was not created until the 13th, according to a deposition transcript obtained through a public records request pertaining to the Hecker case.
A US trustee investigator later asked Aymond, under oath, whether he wrote the letter on 10 January 2022. “Correct,” Aymond said, according to a deposition transcript. “Yes, sir.”
The investigator did not ask Aymond about the metadata discrepancy.
The archbishop later adjusted his testimony to say the letter may have been dictated on the 10th though not sent that same day. He said the decision to remove Hart “was made already … so it would not have made any difference”.
Similarly, while still under oath, Aymond denied that either he or anyone at the archdiocese provided Brother Martin officials confidential details about Hart.
That strongly contradicted testimony from multiple Brother Martin officials who were cited in the US trustee’s report as saying that they learned the particulars of Hart’s past from the archbishop’s side.
But Aymond was not confronted about that discrepancy during his testimony, according to the transcript of his deposition.
Asked for comment about his testimony, Aymond said in a statement recently: “Very simply, I accepted Paul Hart’s retirement while I was out of town on retreat and finalized it upon my return to the office.”
He also said: “I am a man of integrity and have dedicated my life to ministry in service to the people of God. These past years navigating the bankruptcy proceedings have been challenging and made even more difficult by constant attacks and insinuated accusations that are deliberate attempts to discredit me and undermine the archdiocese of New Orleans in our bankruptcy.
“I have instructed our team to bring the bankruptcy proceedings to a just and equitable conclusion for the good of all, especially the survivors.”
The statement did not address his and Brother Martin officials’ conflicting testimony about the archdiocese having disclosed the details of Hart’s misconduct.
Regardless of the timing of the archbishop’s letter to Hart, in early 2022 the archdiocese told the journalist who wrote of the Brother Martin chaplain’s retirement that he had stopped working to focus on his fight with cancer.
The letter the school sent to its campus community was starkly different. It made no mention of Hart’s health and said his removal came at Brother Martin’s request after the school learned of “an issue from [his] distant past that could preclude his being able to serve as chaplain”.
Hart died at age 70 in October of that year.
Gallagher at one point texted Trahant to thank him for putting Brother Martin “in a better position … to weather this”.
Gallagher added that the entire affair had left him “completely disgusted”.
The archdiocese was displeased, too. Its attorneys filed documents with Grabill alleging “serious breaches of the protective order from the disclosure of the Hart information”, prompting the judge to task the US trustee with investigating the matter.
‘Overly burdensome’
Beside sorting out exactly how Brother Martin learned of Hart’s past misconduct, a major focus of the investigation was to determine who may have leaked the information reported in the Times-Picayune on 18 January 2022.
Investigators determined that Trahant, Adams and other people on their side had access to the Hart information. But they all denied providing the journalist the information he reported.
The US trustee’s report acknowledged it could not defeat those denials.
And, in fact, the report said there was evidence supporting Trahant’s denials of being the journalist’s source.
Notably, though Trahant had first received a portion of Hart’s files with minimal details more than two weeks before the article’s publication, he had not gotten the full set of documents on the priest until a few hours before the story’s release, the report said.
After declining to comment to the journalist who wrote the article, Trahant asked a colleague to send him Hart’s entire personnel file roughly three hours before the piece was published.
The article “was clearly well advanced by this time”, the US trustee’s report said. Several hours earlier, the journalist had already asked the archdiocese for comment about Hart’s misconduct and retirement, making it “difficult to see how [Trahant] could have been the source” for that information, the report said.
Meanwhile, investigators’ efforts to identify the source of the article’s information were frustrated in part by the archdiocese’s refusal to make available every person on its side who over the years may have known about Hart.
Attorneys and various employees at the archdiocese who had access to Hart’s information did submit denials of having provided assistance to the journalist.
But the church said it was “impractical and overly burdensome” to supply statements from members of a board that advised Aymond as he weighed what to do in response to the misconduct confessed by Hart.
A US trustee investigator questioned the journalist, who – adhering to the ethics of his profession – declined to reveal his sources or methods.
‘Disruption’
Ultimately, the US trustee concluded it “cannot determine who provided … the information” about Hart reported by the Times-Picayune.
Despite that, the office said it was confident Trahant had done enough to have “violated the terms of the protective order”. But members of the committee are “not responsible for these violations”, the US trustee’s report said.
Trahant’s “actions cannot be imputed to the committee”, the US trustee wrote in its report, issued under a court seal on Friday, 3 June 2022.
“To the extent the court believes further relief may be appropriate under the circumstances, such relief should be considered in further proceedings in open court so that the court may hear and consider all relevant evidence.”
Grabill held no such proceeding. On the following Tuesday, the second business day after the US trustee report was issued, she ruled that Trahant deserved punishment over “disclosure of confidential information”.
The judge later fined Trahant $400,000.
She also expelled Adams, Berthelot, Jackson and Johnson from their roles on the committee. Grabill maintained that she was “forced to impute Trahant’s actions to those of his clients” in order “to protect against disruption of the bankruptcy process”.
That morning, Adams – who had been the chairperson of the committee – and his three ousted colleagues had been prepared to read statements to Aymond about having endured clergy abuse as part of bankruptcy settlement negotiations. But that meeting was canceled because of Grabill’s ruling.
Trahant and his clients appealed.
Multiple legal commentators – among them some who insisted on speaking privately for fear of ending up in court in front of Grabill – have told the Guardian and WWL that such severe punishments for Trahant and his clients were highly unusual, especially because the end result was a self-acknowledged abuser’s ejection from a high school campus.
But federal district judges have left the sanctions in place.
Trahant’s clients’ appeal – arguing that their removals were unlawful – was shot down by the federal fifth circuit court in May.
In that same court, Trahant’s appeal remained pending as of the publication of this article.
Among his main arguments is that Grabill – at the suggestion of the archdiocese – had already made up her mind to heavily fine him and punish those associated with him before she had even ordered the Hart-related US trustee investigation.
Another of Trahant’s arguments: while those who conducted the investigation knew what Grabill wanted, they still would not endorse what the judge at one point described as “the nuclear option”, which was booting Trahant’s clients from the survivors’ committee.
Trahant has also noted that Grabill, along with other judges who have upheld her decisions, have repeatedly charged him with “willfully” violating her protective order.
But, Trahant has said in court, the US trustee report does not use that adverb in describing his actions concerning Hart.
And at one point, before fining him, Grabill told Trahant in court, “It became clear that you didn’t think that you had violated the [secrecy] order,” according to a transcript.
There has been one other prominent endorsement of the sanctions: from the resigned bankruptcy judge Jones.
At one point before the removals of Trahant’s clients, an archdiocesan attorney remarked in court that Grabill had spoken with Jones about what to do over the controversy.
Grabill did not dispute the church lawyer’s statement.
Then, in his courtroom in March 2023, Jones brought up Grabill’s sanctions himself. He said they were “actually pretty thoughtful”.
And then he held them up as a useful precedent to justify his granting a request from a bankrupt pharmaceutical firm, Sorrento, to remove one of the company’s competitors from participating in a creditors committee in that case.
The FBI later launched an investigation into whether Jones was fairly administering bankruptcy cases after a lawsuit revealed his sexual relationship with an attorney who had represented Sorrento in his courtroom.
Jones had not been charged as of this article’s publication.
But he ultimately resigned in late October 2023, less than three months after he traveled to New Orleans and was the guest of honor at a continuing legal education seminar hosted by Grabill.
