NEW ORLEANS — A lawyer representing dozens of child molestation victims against the bankrupt New Orleans Archdiocese argued in a federal appeals court Wednesday that he was in an “untenable” situation when he learned in late 2021 that the chaplain at a local Catholic high school had admitted years earlier to groping and simulating sex with a high school student.
The lawyer, Richard Trahant, decided to warn the principal at Brother Martin High School, who happened to be his cousin, about the school’s chaplain, priest Paul Hart. Trahant also told newspaper reporter Ramon Antonio Vargas to put Hart “on his radar.”
On Jan. 18, 2022, Vargas, now a reporter for the Guardian, reported in The Times-Picayune that Hart had been named chaplain at Brother Martin in 2017, five years after he had admitted to a sexual act with a 17-year-old girl. That same day, Brother Martin sent a letter to parents explaining the school had asked Archbishop Gregory Aymond to remove Hart as chaplain after learning about allegations from Hart’s “distant past.”
A leak investigation by the U.S. bankruptcy trustee found someone else, not Trahant, had provided Vargas with the information about what Hart had done in the 1990s. Reporting in 2023 for the Guardian, Vargas uncovered more secret records showing a church review board in 2012 had found Hart committed child sexual abuse under church law, as it then stood.
But Aymond later cleared him of that charge because the church considered 17-year-olds adults prior to 2002. Hart was then named chaplain at Brother Martin in 2017.
Hart died in October 2022.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Grabill found Trahant in contempt, removed his clients from a committee of abuse victims negotiating a settlement with the church and ordered Trahant to pay $400,000 in sanctions for violating her order protecting the secrecy of records produced by the Archdiocese of New Orleans in its bankruptcy case. Trahant’s clients are separately appealing to the 5th Circuit to try to reverse Grabill’s decision to remove them from the abuse victims’ committee.
Trahant’s attorney, Paul Sterbcow, argued Wednesday before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that Trahant was careful not to violate the protective order and Grabill ruled against him without affording him proper due process.
“It's a moral choice and a legal choice,” Sterbcow said in an interview on the steps of the courthouse in downtown New Orleans. “And the two choices are mutually inconsistent. You have to go one way or the other. And he took the moral road, and the priest was ultimately quickly, removed from campus. So, from that standpoint, mission accomplished.”
Chief Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman said from the bench that sometimes the right thing to do morally conflicts with someone’s legal obligations.
Arguing for the archdiocese, Mark Mintz told Richman, Judge Andrew Oldham and Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez that the church removed Hart as soon as it was alerted to Brother Martin’s concerns, even though the information about what Hart did came from the church’s files.
Mintz argued that Trahant should have come to the archdiocese or Judge Grabill with his concerns, rather than violating the secrecy order.
Sterbcow called that “Monday morning quarterbacking.”
“Going to court is fine, except going to court takes time,” he said. “And there was no time here. This had to be done immediately.”
The church has been in bankruptcy for nearly four years to address about 500 claims that more than 300 of its priests and employees molested children or vulnerable adults, and Trahant is still the only one ordered to pay any penalties.
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