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After more than five years of litigation, a federal bankruptcy judge has approved the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans’ proposal to pay $230m to roughly 600 survivors of sexual abuse by the church’s priests, deacons and other personnel.
Judge Meredith Grabill on Monday confirmed the settlement, which also includes major changes to how the church identifies and discloses past claims of sexual abuse by clergy and protects children and vulnerable adults going forward.
The settlement confirmation effectively concludes a case that began in May 2020, when the US’s second-oldest Catholic archdiocese filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid the fallout of the worldwide church’s decades-old child molestation scandal.
Grabill’s ruling came at the end of a three-week long trial designed to assess the fairness of the proposed settlement. The trial’s last full day of testimony on 2 December saw approximately 20 of the New Orleans archdiocese’s clergy abuse survivors provide emotive testimony about the sexual violence they endured.
“This legal thing may end, but the trauma done to us will not ever end,” Neil Duhon said on the stand after recounting how he was kidnapped and raped by serial pedophile priest Lawrence Hecker in 1975 and reported it to church officials, but wasn’t believed.
He said that didn’t change until the Guardian exposed Hecker’s internal abuse file and teamed with WWL Louisiana to confront the retired priest in 2023. That led to Hecker’s arrest, conviction and life sentence for aggravated rape and kidnapping – shortly before his death in December 2024.
“It’s ridiculous how much it destroyed us,” Duhon testified. “It won’t go away.”
Grabill on Monday struggled to hold back tears as she said to survivors, “I heard you and ached for you.”
She added: “I would like you to know how valuable and powerful your voices are.”
Attorneys for the church and abuse survivors made last-minute efforts Thursday and Monday to strike a deal with the archdiocese’s largest insurer, Travelers, the only one that refused to join the settlement.
Travelers objects to including hundreds of late-filed claims.
The insurer covered the church from 1973 to 1989, when a substantial portion of the alleged abuse occurred.
Though the $230m settlement approved Monday doesn’t include any money from Travelers, it reserves victims’ rights to pursue that insurer for additional compensation separately in civil court through a court-appointed trustee.
Archdiocesan attorney Mark Mintz promised money from the church and 150 affiliates would be in the settlement trust by 26 December, paving the way for settlement payments early in 2026.
New Orleans’ archdiocese is among more than 40 other US Catholic institutions that have filed for bankruptcy protection while hoping to affordably dispense with a mound of clergy abuse complaints. Nearly 30 of those cases have culminated in settlements, according to information from Penn State University’s law school.
The only one of those settlements higher than the agreement reached in New Orleans involved New York’s Rockville-Centre diocese: $323m.
When New Orleans’ archdiocese first filed for bankruptcy protection, the institution believed it could settle the proceeding at a financial cost of less than $7m, including compensation to clergy abuse victims, according to a letter Aymond sent to global Catholic church leaders at the Vatican.
That confidence evidently stemmed from the fact that an applicable Louisiana state law at the time prohibited survivors of decades-old childhood sexual abuse claims from pursuing civil court damages.
But then in 2021, Louisiana’s state legislature removed that prohibition and temporarily allowed the pursuit of such molestation claims no matter how many years earlier the abuse had been inflicted. The state’s supreme court upheld the law as constitutional in June 2024, despite arguments to the contrary from church allies.
Finally, in late October, survivors involved in the bankruptcy overwhelmingly voted in favor of the $230m settlement proposal which Grabill ratified on Monday. Yet, during the trial preceding Grabill’s approval, some survivors testified that no amount of money would be enough to make them feel whole or provide them adequate justice.
“They killed my soul,” survivor Billy Cheramie testified. “They kidnapped my innocence.”
Survivors also expressed disgust at how the archdiocese ultimately spent more than $50m in legal fees alone – a figure that is in addition to the victim compensation. And some said they were skeptical at how effective various non-monetary settlement terms would be, such as requiring independent, outside investigations over any future church molestation claims or more strident screening to weed out predators.
Notoriously, similar screening under the church’s Safe Environment program since 2002 failed to keep deacon and serial abuser George Brignac from getting a church lector position as well as lecturing elementary schoolchildren as recently as 2018.
Aymond told WWL Louisiana and the Guardian after court Tuesday that what happened with Brignac – who died in June 2020 – “was wrong”.
“There’s no way to say that any differently,” he remarked.
But he insisted “what we have now coming from the bankruptcy is something even more tight … and something more specific”.
“We’re living up to those standards now,” Aymond said.
Settlement payment amounts are going to be determined based in part on a points system administered by a court-appointed assessor. In sum, points will be assigned to each abuse claim based on the severity of the abuse – and its effects on each victim’s life.
Duhon, as a victim of forcible rape admitted by his abuser, stands to receive a high point total. But he testified to Grabill that he perceived the points system to be “degrading”.
“Survivors are being reduced to numbers,” Duhon said. “Where’s the humanity in that?”
The case has seen some uncommonly acrimonious moments.
For instance, in 2022, at the archdiocese’s urging, Grabill fined clergy abuse survivors’ attorney Richard Trahant and removed four of his clients from a committee that was about to start negotiating a settlement. Grabill ordered the fine and removals after Trahant took steps leading a high school to learn that its chaplain was an admitted child molester, prompting the priest’s expulsion from its campus.
“This felt very personal,” said James Adams, a client of Trahant whom Grabill dismissed from the committee. “First my church failed me – now the American justice system.”
Grabill told Adams she appreciated his candor and thanked him for his service to the committee – something he said he had never received.
She previously ruled that Trahant’s actions violated secrecy orders pertinent to the bankruptcy. Trahant appealed, but that matter has remained unresolved.
The investigation into Hecker eventually morphed into a wider inquiry over whether the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was kept under cover “and not reported” to authorities, sworn police statements have said.
At the time Grabill approved the bankruptcy settlement, none of Hecker’s superiors had been charged with a crime related to the church’s management of him.
Aymond has been New Orleans’ archbishop since 2009.
Pope Leo XIV has chosen his successor: archbishop James Checcio, who had previously been in charge of the diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey. Checchio has been tasked with overseeing New Orleans’ archdiocese alongside Aymond before the latter retires in the coming months.
