New Orleans This article is more than 6 months oldEighth federal judge may withdraw from New Orleans Catholic church litigation
This article is more than 6 months oldClergy sexual abuse claimant is calling on Judge Jane Triche Milazzo, who has donated money to archdiocese, to step aside
An eighth federal judge in New Orleans may withdraw from handling litigation involving the local Roman Catholic archdiocese as ties between the city’s legal elite and the church remain deep as ever.
A New Orleans Catholic clergy abuse claimant, who is urging the federal judge Jane Triche Milazzo to unseal secret files related to the self-confessed predator priest Lawrence Hecker, has demanded that the jurist recuse herself from his case over her publicly acknowledged donations to the church.
It is unclear whether Milazzo will grant the request filed on Friday by Aaron Hebert. Her seven recused colleagues also have various connections to the archdiocese, related institutions or the law firm representing it in the bankruptcy, vividly illustrating how enmeshed the church is with the legal elite in a region with about a half-million Catholics.
After filing a 2019 lawsuit asserting that the confessed clerical child abuser Hecker had victimized him decades earlier, Hebert and his legal team have repeatedly, albeit unsuccessfully, sought to more widely disseminate records demonstrating how the local archdiocese handled the priest.
Those records – a portion of which the Guardian obtained and recently reported on – are under seal largely because of broad secrecy rules pertaining to the church’s bankruptcy. Notably, the bankruptcy was opened in 2020 after a wave of lawsuits like Hebert’s.
The files show that Hecker, in 1999, confessed to his New Orleans archdiocese superiors that he had either molested or harassed numerous children whom he met through his work as a priest in prior years. They also show that, as a result, archdiocesan leaders had Hecker – now 91 – undergo a psychiatric evaluation which found him to be a pedophile who should not be working with children or other vulnerable people.
Still, the church let Hecker return to work after that evaluation. He was forced to retire in 2002 amid the fallout from a clerical abuse and cover-up scandal that consumed the archdiocese of Boston and later spread across the US.
Though that controversy prompted the global Catholic church to promise transparency when it came to abusive priests and deacons, the New Orleans archdiocese did not inform the public that Hecker was a molester for another 16 years. It wasn’t until subsequent scandals, like the one in Boston, pressured the archdiocese to release a 2018 list of clerics whom it considered to be credibly suspected child predators.
Hecker has never been criminally charged, though state prosecutors in New Orleans have been investigating him more recently.
On 15 June, Milazzo heard arguments for and against Hebert’s position that releasing the full set of Hecker documents would be appropriate as a matter of public safety and interest. At the start of the hearing, Milazzo indicated that she was Catholic, went to Catholic school while growing up and gave money to the Catholic church where she and her husband were members.
She went forward with the hearing, though without immediately ruling, and asked anyone with concerns about whether she could be fair despite her Catholic background to note their objections by Friday. Hebert’s legal team did so through a motion to disqualify Milazzo.
The 11-page motion focused on Milazzo’s donations to her and her husband’s church, which pays an assessment to the archdiocese that employed Hecker and paid his retirement benefits until the bankruptcy judge ordered the organization to halt that support.
Hebert’s attorneys do not list an amount for the donations, but their mere existence was enough for a “reasonable person, with knowledge of all the facts, [to] conclude that the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned”, therefore meriting recusal under federal court regulations, according to the motion.
Attorneys for the archdiocese had not responded to Hebert’s motion in court later on Friday.
Before Friday’s filing, the New Orleans federal court judges Wendy Vitter, Jay Zainey, Sarah Vance, Ivan Lemelle, Lance Africk and Greg Guidry, and magistrate Michael North had all recused themselves from litigation associated with the local archdiocese.
They are among New Orleans’s 14 federal district judges and five magistrates, who mostly handle pre-trial matters.
Vitter was the archdiocese’s general counsel before her 2019 appointment to the bench. She had helped negotiate settlements with clerical molestation claimants. Less than eight weeks before being confirmed as a federal judge, Vitter signed off on paying $30,000 to a Hecker accuser to settle his claims privately and out of court, according to records obtained by the Guardian.
Zainey has acknowledged a role in a private media relations campaign that executives of the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints helped the archdiocese mount before and after the release of its abusive clerics list. Lemelle has served on the board of directors for a non-profit that supports various archdiocesan ministries. Vance’s husband is an attorney representing the archdiocese in its bankruptcy, work that has generated more than $10m in billings for his office, according to public filings.
Guidry, meanwhile, upheld a $400,000 fine against one of Hebert’s attorneys, Richard Trahant, who was ruled to have violated the bankruptcy’s confidentiality rules by warning a local Catholic school principal – his cousin – that a priest named Paul Hart who had been assigned to his campus had previously admitted to sexually molesting a teenage girl.
Guidry later recused himself amid scrutiny of his donations to the Catholic church as well as his close professional relationship with an attorney representing archdiocesan-affiliated organizations in insurance disputes.
Trahant asked another New Orleans federal judge appointed during Donald Trump’s presidency, Barry Ashe, to consider overturning Guidry’s decision about the fine. On Wednesday, Ashe upheld the fine, and Trahant said he intended to seek relief from the US fifth circuit court of appeal.
Meanwhile, North ruled against an earlier request from Hebert’s legal team to unseal a deposition taken from Hecker in late 2020. North later recused himself; his wife has served on a board that manages an archdiocese-owned healthcare system that the church has agreed to sell in a deal that is probably worth millions.
North’s recusal set the stage for Hebert’s legal team to ask Milazzo to release the Hecker-related church files, a request which has drawn supportive filings from child advocacy groups and media outlets, among others.
The leader of one of those advocacy groups, ChildUSA’s Kathryn Robb, said she believed the links between New Orleans’s federal judiciary and the Catholic church “threaten fairness and justice”.
“I don’t think these judges are thinking of protecting children first,” Robb said. “I think they’re looking to protect their image and their … allegiance to this institution.”
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