This week saw a flurry of stories on the release of 300 emails showing the help the New Orleans Saints football organization gave the Archdiocese of New Orleans in responding to its child-sex-abuse crisis. The stories provide an inside look at some typical crisis communications, though one aspect of it seems amiss.

The team’s involvement has been known since 2020. What’s new is the release of the emails from a lawsuit alleging abuse. The electronic missives were obtained by The New York Times, The Guardian and the Associated Press after the Saints fought in court to prevent their disclosure.

A lot of the coverage focuses on the activities of Greg Bensel, the Saints’ senior vice president of communications and broadcasting. (He has the same title with the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans — the two teams share an owner — but most attention has been on the NFL team.)

‘Credibly Accused’

In October 2018, the archdiocese was about to release a list of “credibly accused” priests, and Bensel was helping prepare for the media firestorm. For example, he wrote to editors at The Advocate and The Times-Picayune, asking them to support the church and offering an “exclusive sit-down” with Archbishop Gregory Aymond.

The media outreach is typical crisis communications. What makes us a little uneasy, and really isn’t the usual approach, was Bensel’s entreaty to media outlets that they help out the archbishop and the church. It assumes journalists have an interest in promoting your cause, which they don’t. Better to make a plea for fairness and to show what measures are being taken to address the crisis.

“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,” Bensel wrote, referring to Aymond. Bensel tried to coax the outlets into supporting the archdiocese in the way they had supported the city’s professional sports teams. “We need to tell the story of how this Archbishop is leading us out of this mess,” he wrote.

Talking Points

Bensel engaged in other typical crisis communications. He wrote talking points for Aymond and edited the letter the archbishop would send to parishioners about the list. He wrote in an email to Aymond about a forthcoming interview, “The Archbishop must have IN-CHARGE and POSITIVE body language and comments. Everything is POSITIVE and FORWARD MOVING.”

A main thrust of the coverage has been that the Saints did something wrong in aiding the archdiocese. Frankly, we don’t see it, at least not to the extent the coverage suggests. It’s not unusual for a company to provide assistance to a nonprofit organization in a time of need.

The most damning accusation is that one email Bensel wrote shows the Saints helped convince the then-D.A. to remove certain names from the list before it was made public. But the details are unknown, including whether any evidence was brought to bear that certain people should be removed. The Saints and the D.A. have denied they had anything to do with removing anyone from the list.

Headquarters Protest

Also, many people simply feel it was wrong for the team to help an organization accused of child abuse, or covering it up. When the Saints’ involvement with the archdiocese’s communications efforts became known, clergy-abuse survivors protested outside the team’s headquarters. Their pain and anger are understandable.

Just as the accused deserve to have lawyers, they often deserve to have — or at least should have — crisis communications counselors to advise them on how to deal with the intense media attention. “Most of the Saints’ communications about clergy abuse focused on Aymond’s handling of the issue,” The Guardian wrote.

Photo Credit: New Orleans Saints via Facebook

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