New Orleans’ Jesuit high school agrees to pay seven figures to settle child molestation claim

Settlement over alleged child molestation by school janitors is latest in troubling string of allegations spanning decades

One of the most prominent Catholic high schools in New Orleans has agreed to pay a seven-figure monetary sum to settle a lawsuit claiming child molestation by janitors at the institution decades earlier.

The plaintiff struck the agreement with Jesuit high school ahead of a trial scheduled to start in the Louisiana city’s civil district courthouse on 15 June, roughly six years after he sued under a pseudonym.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Richard Trahant , said on Friday that he couldn’t discuss the specific amount associated with the settlement. Yet he would not issue a denial when asked if the settlement was worth seven figures – or if it was higher than a notable $2.4m verdict awarded to an unrelated Louisiana religious sexual abuse claimant in the summer of 2025.

Attorneys for Jesuit high school and the religious order did not immediately respond to those same questions.

The Guardian learned of the settlement when it contacted the chambers of the judge presiding over the case – Omar Mason – and asked if the 15 June trial date was still on.

A Mason staffer said the trial was off after attorneys working on the case reached out to say it had been settled out of court. Furthermore, a letter filed into the case record on Thursday announced the matter had been settled.

That agreement materialized as another client of Trahant who sued the Jesuit high school alleging childhood sexual abuse by one of the janitors named in the newly settled lawsuit prepares for a 21 September trial date.

Both lawsuits allege child sexual abuse in the 1970s – and they stem from the same long-developing Catholic clergy molestation scandal that drove New Orleans’ archdiocese to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.

But the cases pursued by both of Trahant’s clients are legally unrelated to the archdiocese’s bankruptcy, which that organization and its insurers have moved to resolve in large part by agreeing to pay $305m to abuse survivors.

Shocking depositions

Amid both the newly settled lawsuit and the pending one, Trahant as well as his associates Soren Gisleson and John Denenea secured shocking testimony from a past Jesuit high school president – along with the incumbent one – according to transcripts filed into the public record that the Guardian reviewed.

The Rev Anthony McGinn, a Jesuit high alum who was the school’s president from 1992 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2017, confirmed during a sworn deposition in January that nine of his colleagues – mostly clergymen – were considered credibly accused of child sexual assault. McGinn said that was while he worked with all of them at Jesuit high school over multiple stints dating back to the early 1970s

Gisleson, also a Jesuit alum, asked the former school president whether he understood “how rare it is for one person to work with nine people in the course of their career who are credibly accused of child sexual abuse”.

McGinn replied: “I have no – no speculation on that.”

Gisleson also established while deposing McGinn that Jesuit high school had previously paid at least seven out-of-court legal settlements in connection with a now-deceased serial child molester and janitor named Peter Modica. Modica had managed to work as a custodian at Jesuit high school in the 1970s even though he had pleaded guilty in 1963 to molesting boys at a suburban New Orleans playground that employed him as a supervisor.

McGinn was asked by Gisleson whether he agreed that Jesuit high school should have conducted a criminal background check into Modica before hiring him and paying at least seven abuse settlements involving the janitor during a 10-year stretch beginning in 2012. Gisleson also asked McGinn whether he agreed that Jesuit high school never would have employed Modica if the school adequately checked out his background.

Separately, while being deposed under oath by Trahant, the Rev John Brown – the high school’s president since 2021 – acknowledged that he theologically opposed an unsuccessful effort by Washington state to require Catholic priests and other faith leaders to report child abuse-related information to law enforcement even if they obtained it in the context of religious confession.

Trahant asked Brown whether he would report it to the police if a Jesuit high school employee or clergyman ever went to him in the confessional and said, “I’ve raped 100 kids in this school.”

Brown replied, “I would never reveal … the content of someone’s confession.” Seemingly alluding to how Catholic priests face automatic excommunication from the church if they are found to have violated the seal of what a penitent says in the confessional, no matter what it is, Brown continued: “I’m not allowed to reveal anything anybody says in confession.”

Trahant asked Brown whether he would report it to the police if an underage Jesuit student ever told him in the confessional that a priest at the school had been raping him.

“So I keep repeating myself,” Brown replied. “And I mean, you know this – I’m not allowed to reveal anything anybody says in confession.”

While deposing Brown, Trahant also learned that the Jesuit president serving between Brown and McGinn, the Rev Christopher Fronk, evidently deleted virtually all of his emails routinely. Fronk apparently did that even after it was clear that the school would have to grapple with abuse litigation from clients of Trahant and was legally required to preserve the emails because of that.

Brown told Trahant that he was under the impression that Fronk started that habit while the latter served as a US navy chaplain. “He learned … that at the end of every day, you clear out your [in]box and you delete whatever you don’t need,” Brown said while Trahant deposed him. “Let me be clear. He deleted all of his emails – nearly all of them, I should say.”

Gisleson, his fellow Jesuit alum Trahant and Denenea have requested court sanctions against certain attorneys of the school whom Brown recalled telling about the deleted emails back in 2020.

The request for those sanctions remained unresolved as of Friday.

Speaking out

The plaintiff in the newly settled lawsuit – who asked to be referred to as H Doe so as to not be identified as a victim of sexual abuse – alleged that he was a preteen at the time of his molestation in the mid-1970s.

H Doe said he didn’t attend Jesuit but lived nearby and would play in the school’s yard. That’s when Modica and another Jesuit janitor, a still-living convicted child rapist named Gary Sanchez, exploited their access to the school’s campus and subjected him to abuse there.

Meanwhile, the plaintiff in the other Trahant case pending against Jesuit – who sued under the pseudonym Jayson Doe – recounted having just been admitted to the school at age 13 in 1978 when Modica began molesting him there.

Both H Doe and Jayson Doe came forward after another man named Richard Windmann spoke out in September 2018 about how – while growing up near Jesuit – he was abused at the school in the late 1970s by Modica and a now-deceased priest, Neil Carr.

Jesuit paid Windmann $450,000 in 2012 to quietly settle claims against Modica and Carr, the two men being among a number of authority figures in Windmann’s life who molested him in his youth. The settlement included a confidentiality clause that Windmann maintains he never asked for.

The Jesuit order ultimately acknowledged that Carr was among a number of priests, teachers studying to become clergymen or religious brothers who were credibly accused of child molestation while working at the school.

Filings in Jayson Doe’s lawsuit assert, without dispute, that Carr was also at the center of two of the six other previously known settlements involving Modica beside Windmann’s. Sanchez was involved in one of those half-dozen other settlements, whose values are not specified in the lawsuit filings.

Five of the now eight Jesuit settlements related to Modica abuse cases were reached after Windmann went public, according to the court filings.

An attorney for Jesuit high school deposed Windmann in April in the course of H Doe’s lawsuit – and bluntly asked him if he had initially approached the school “to try to reach a settlement”.

Windmann, who provided the Guardian with a deposition of the transcript and gave the outlet permission to report on it, said he had actually gone to the school prior to his settlement seeking “spiritual guidance and … psychiatric and psychological care”.

The school’s lawyer also established how some of Windmann’s various abusers overlapped. Then the attorney said some of Windmann’s story “doesn’t even make sense” to him and believed “nothing happened” to the deponent because of Modica, even though Jesuit high school had determined him credible enough to pay what it did.

“Is that a question?” Windmann’s attorney, Kristi Schubert, said at that point. “Or are you just harassing him?”

For decades, Louisiana law generally prohibited plaintiffs from seeking civil court damages over claims from long ago. Nonetheless, in matters that still might generate negative publicity, defendants could resolve such cases with relatively cheap out-of-court settlements.

But that shifted when the Louisiana’s legislature eliminated that prohibition in 2021 and temporarily allowed plaintiffs to pursue childhood sexual abuse claims in civil court no matter how many years earlier the alleged molestation had occurred.

The state’s supreme court upheld that law as constitutional in June 2024, despite Catholic institutions’ efforts to have it struck down. And in the first case allowed under that law which went to trial, a federal jury in New Orleans ordered the Holy Cross Catholic religious order in June 2025 to pay nearly $2.4m in damages to a client of Schubert who reported childhood sexual abuse by one of its members in the late 1960s.

Jesuit high school in New Orleans was founded in 1847, about 14 years before the US civil war. Notable alumni – none of whom are involved in the Jayson or H Doe litigation – include former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, who also served as the White House’s infrastructure czar during Joe Biden’s presidency; jazz singer and actor Harry Connick Jr; and the late chief US supreme court justice Edward Douglass “ED” White Jr.

In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International