Roman Catholic priest Paul Hart had admitted to inappropriate conduct with a teenage girl; been accused of rape by one woman, which he denied; and faced rumors of sexually harassing another when New Orleans’s archbishop assigned him to be a high school chaplain in 2017.
When an attorney representing survivors of a clergy abuse scandal that drove the city’s archdiocese into bankruptcy learned about Hart’s past, he took steps to get him removed from the Brother Martin high school, an all-boys institution that draws dance team members from a girls-only college preparatory school.
A federal judge presiding over the church’s bankruptcy fined the lawyer, Richard Trahant, more than $400,000.
Two higher courts have left that 2022 sanction in place. So now Trahant has asked the US supreme court – which includes a graduate of the girls’ preparatory school, Amy Coney Barrett – to provide him relief, contending he was not accorded his right to due process.
The judge punishing Trahant, Meredith Grabill, took the extraordinary measure of placing virtually the whole record concerning the sanction under seal.
But the Guardian has obtained the entire case file, thousands of pages long, through a public records request made with New Orleans state prosecutors who collected it while securing the guilty plea of another priest charged with rape and kidnapping.
A review of the record provides the case’s clearest view yet – and establishes that Hart’s history was more stained than previously known.
Furthermore, sworn deposition transcripts and evidentiary exhibits show that Hart and his allies resented their treatment throughout the saga, culminating months before the priest died from brain cancer at age 70, in October 2022.
“I’m a victim,” Hart said in a sworn deposition that May, four months after his removal from the Brother Martin high school.
In his own deposition then, church attorney Dirk Wegmann suggested the misconduct costing Hart his Brother Martin chaplaincy was “inappropriate” but “consensual”.
“‘Father Hart is a respected member of [the] school,’” Wegmann said in the deposition, quoting what he recalled telling a school official shortly before the priest’s January 2022 removal. “‘I heard nothing but great things about him.’”
Trahant declined comment, other than to say: “My lawyers and I have known what really happened here for years.” In their supreme court filing, he and his lawyers asserted his sanction unduly caused “severe damage to [his] good name, reputation, honor and integrity on its face”.
An archdiocese spokesperson declined comment, citing a policy against discussing pending litigation.
A Brother Martin spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did Grabill, who sanctioned Trahant after her finding that he disclosed information about Hart.
Trahant, meanwhile, has long argued that the information which ended Hart’s Brother Martin tenure was actually disclosed by New Orleans’s then archbishop, Gregory Aymond – since retired – and associates, all subject to the same confidentiality order Grabill says Trahant violated.
‘Angry, angry’
Trahant for years has represented people with unresolved claims of Catholic clergy abuse that helped drive New Orleans’s archdiocese to file for bankruptcy protection. Through that work, he discovered Hart’s career included serious transgressions alleged and in one case acknowledged.
The person Hart conceded to having sexual contact with was a then 17-year-old girl he met through his priestly duties in the early 1990s. She came forward to Aymond’s administration in 2012, prompting a church investigation.
Also, a church-hired private investigator wrote of speaking to Hart about a woman who “accused him … of rape” in 1993 or 1994, according to the new records.
Hart claimed the woman was “angry, angry” and having marital problems that he tried to help her with, the PI’s notes read. Claiming the allegation had “no basis”, Hart reportedly said the archdiocese still “sent him to Philadelphia for an analysis by a psychologist”.
The investigator also noted how Hart was later rumored to have sexually harassed “a young female teacher” at a parochial school. Hart reportedly declared, seemingly without evidence, that the teacher “was on drugs and had a [drunken-driving] arrest” – and that he was never investigated regarding her.
Hart, according to the PI, denied that he initiated contact with the 17-year-old girl, who as an adult accused him in 2012. But he acknowledged some contact. Though he was 37 at that time, he blamed the contact on his being young and liking how “bouncy” and “vivacious” she was.
US bishops made 18 the legal age of sexual consent under church – or canon – law in 2002, 10 years before Hart’s conversation with the PI. Before that, 16 was the canon law age of consent. Louisiana law sets the age of consent at 17.
A board advising Aymond on clergy abuse cases recommended that the archbishop remove Hart from ministry, citing his admission to misconduct with someone canon law now considered a minor, according to archdiocese records reviewed by the Guardian. Ignoring that advice, Aymond ordered Hart not to communicate with the complainant, to avoid certain churches and not to commit additional misconduct, lest he be suspended, those records showed.
Aymond then stationed Hart at the Brother Martin high school when it asked for an archdiocesan chaplain.
In autumn 2018, as the worldwide Catholic church’s longstanding clergy abuse crisis flared up again, Aymond felt compelled to publish a list of dozens of local clergymen with credible child molestation accusations.
Hart was not on that list.
‘Ominous’
Trahant was alarmed on learning about Hart’s record through his access to church documents from representing clergy abuse claimants involved in the archdiocese’s bankruptcy.
On New Year’s Eve 2021, he sent a text to the principal of Brother Martin, his cousin Ryan Gallagher. It read: “Is Paul Hart still the chaplain at BM?”
Records reviewed by the Guardian show that although Hart was battling brain cancer, he was still Brother Martin’s chaplain, slated for a school-wide liturgy at the end of January 2022.
Gallagher texted back: “Yes,” prompting Trahant to reply: “You and I need to get together soon.”
Like many others in New Orleans, Gallagher had seen news coverage generated by clergy abuse lawsuits his cousin had filed on behalf of survivors.
“Shit,” Gallagher wrote. “That’s … ominous … coming from you.”
Trahant called Gallagher days later, to inform him of what he later described as “a credible allegation from Father Paul’s past that involved a minor”. During proceedings concerning Trahant’s fine, Gallagher said in a deposition that his cousin said a protective order prevented him from giving specifics.
Gallagher nevertheless texted Trahant that evening: “Thanks for the phone call. I’m completely disgusted on a number of levels. We’re in a better position now to weather this.”
Gallagher then met with other Brother Martin leaders, who spoke with Aymond.
The Brother Martin officials would say in depositions that Aymond and a lay volunteer adviser, Lee Eagan, shared specifics of the 2012 complaint against Hart. One suggested the archbishop disclosed the name of the complainant, which was confidential, though the official couldn’t remember it, according to a deposition.
Another Brother Martin official described learning from Aymond of “a boundary violation … that involved a 17-year-old female. The … behavior was not appropriate in that it was something that Father Paul, as a priest, should not have done. But the archbishop made it clear to me that it was not anything that was ever criminal.”
Nonetheless, had Brother Martin known that about Hart beforehand, it would not have accepted him as chaplain, multiple school officials said while being deposed.
Yet another Brother Martin official said under oath that Aymond apologized “for originally [assigning] Father Paul to the school after this situation had occurred”.
Hart was soon forced to retire. He would say in a deposition that Brother Martin compelled him to resign “to save their reputation” and groused that his admitted 2012 misconduct was “so bogus that it looked like it was almost made up”.
On New Year’s Day 2022, Trahant told this journalist to keep Hart on his “radar”. Trahant refused to elaborate, saying a protective order barred him from going further.
This journalist later reported on Hart’s Brother Martin departure using other sources. Hart lied to this journalist, saying: “I retired because I have cancer.”
An archdiocese statement echoed Hart, offering prayers for his “struggles with treatment for brain cancer”.
Brother Martin sent a letter to its community saying it had successfully requested Hart’s retirement over “an issue from [his] distant past that could preclude his being able to serve as chaplain”.
‘This is BS’
The newly reviewed files demonstrate how incensed the archdiocese was over Hart’s exposure. Eagan even stated in a deposition that Aymond said: “This is BS.”
“Someone leaked information,” Eagan recalled Aymond saying. “The leaks have to stop.”
In his own deposition, Wegmann, the church attorney, said he cautioned a Brother Martin official in January 2022 that the complaint against Hart a decade earlier was just one side of a complicated story involving a “respected member” of the campus community.
The archdiocese found a sympathetic ear in Judge Grabill. “The fact that someone picked up the phone and called Brother Martin is a violation of the protective order,” Grabill said at a hearing weeks after Hart’s removal, before ordering an investigation.
At another hearing afterward, still before ordering an investigation, Grabill said she had “no patience” for Trahant’s opting “to pick up the phone”.
Trahant later insisted to the US supreme court that he acted as he did because he “became concerned that the priest remained a threat to underage high school students”.
Grabill allowed that protecting children is “understandable, honorable – whatever”. Yet she wondered whether “a more cynical person” might have acted how Trahant did to gain “leverage” against the archdiocese as it tried negotiating a settlement to resolve the bankruptcy protection filing it made in May 2020.
An archdiocese bankruptcy attorney, Mark Mintz, offered a suggestion: “Should Richard Trahant pay for it as an act or – attorneys’ fees are part of a sanction that your honor can look at.”
Trahant was kept out of those proceedings – now one ground on which he is appealing to the supreme court.
Grabill ultimately said she wanted the US trustee’s office, a bankruptcy court watchdog, to completely investigate – by the end of May 2022 – whether there had been a protective order violation in Hart’s Brother Martin downfall.
Investigators subsequently deposed nearly 20 people, including Trahant, four of his clients on a particular bankruptcy committee, Aymond, Eagan, Wegmann, Gallagher and Brother Martin officials.
They concluded that Trahant violated the protective order in the bankruptcy by speaking with Gallagher and emailing this journalist about Hart.
Investigators also said Trahant’s clients should not be punished and recommended that Judge Grabill hold a hearing before taking any action. Yet Grabill waited one business day from receipt of the report to remove Trahant’s four clients from a committee of clergy abuse survivors trying to negotiate an archdiocese bankruptcy settlement.
Those expulsions came the same morning that those survivors – James Adams, Jackie Berthelot, Theo Jackson and Eric Johnson – were set to speak to Aymond in connection with settlement negotiations. Grabill indicated she believed expelling the survivors would be best for those negotiations’ prospects.
She later fined Trahant $400,000, a figure largely derived from the US trustee investigation’s cost. She then sealed from public view the investigative file compiled by the US trustee’s office, which declined a request for comment from the Guardian. That file remained there until the Guardian’s public records request.
Grabill’s decision did not address discrepancies in the depositions of Aymond and Brother Martin officials on two major points: Aymond said under oath that he did not ever share confidential information with them about Hart, despite the school officials’ depositions.
And despite what school leaders stated in their depositions, Aymond said “no” while being deposed when asked whereas “these allegations in the past” made Brother Martin officials worry about having Hart as their chaplain.
‘Honor and integrity’
Trahant asked New Orleans’s federal district court to reconsider his punishment and then appealed to the US fifth circuit – each unsuccessfully. Accruing interest, his fine had grown to about $460,000 when he went to the supreme court.
He contends, among other things, that Aymond effectively waived confidentiality about Hart when he spoke extensively to Brother Martin officials. Trahant has also said he was within his rights to tell a reporter to keep a priest on his radar without sharing anything else.
Trahant’s 6 May request for a chance to appeal to the US supreme court says he deserves to defend his “good name, reputation, honor and integrity” from “judicial action taken without notice and an opportunity to be heard”. It was pending as of publication of this article.
Aymond retired on 11 February, succeeded by James Checchio, the former bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey. That was one day after Aymond concluded a series of meetings with clergy abuse survivors, a requirement of a $305m settlement the archdiocese and its insurers agreed to with about 600 survivors in December.
Approximately 80 of those survivors are clients of Trahant and his associates. Survivors were told they could begin receiving payments in April. A recent bankruptcy filing pushed that back potentially to the fall.
