US supreme court rejects appeal from lawyer punished over effort to remove abusive priest

Richard Trahant fined $400,000 over apparent violation of order in case of priest who admitted sexual misconduct

The US supreme court has rejected an appeal from an attorney who was fined $400,000 after taking steps to get an abusive Roman Catholic priest removed as chaplain of a high school campus.

In a notice on Monday, the supreme court’s justices indicated without explanation that they would not take up the case of Richard Trahant, whose clients include dozens of people victimized by a clergy abuse scandal that drove New Orleans’ Catholic archdiocese into federal bankruptcy court.

Monday’s ruling all but closed the book on one of the most contentious chapters of that bankruptcy protection case, which the New Orleans archdiocese filed in 2020.

Trahant’s work on the archdiocesan bankruptcy positioned him to learn that a New Orleans priest named Paul Hart had secretly admitted to his religious superiors that he had sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl in the early 1990s after meeting her through his duties as a clergyman.

Hart was reported in 2012 to the church for that behavior and confessed to it during a confidential internal investigation, according to hundreds of legal documents previously reviewed by the Guardian.

State law applicable in New Orleans sets the legal age of sexual consent at 17. The US’s Catholic bishops, nonetheless, had made 18 the age of consent under canon – or church – law in 2002.

A board advising then New Orleans archbishop Gregory Aymond recommended removing Hart from public ministry, saying the case involved someone who was now considered a minor under canon law.

But Aymond let Hart continue in ministry because the age of consent under canon law in the early 1990s was 16.

Aymond then assigned Hart to a New Orleans Catholic high school – Brother Martin – when it asked for a chaplain in 2017. And Hart was still in that role when Trahant became aware of his past in late 2021 through his representation of clergy abuse claimants involved in the archdiocesan bankruptcy.

Trahant was alarmed at the realization. Brother Martin is all-boys school, but girls participate in activities there, including on its dance team. He notified the principal of Brother Martin – who, coincidentally, was Trahant’s cousin – and informed him that Hart had “a credible allegation from [the] past that involved a minor”. The principal, Ryan Gallagher, later said in a deposition that Trahant would not elaborate, saying a protective order in bankruptcy court prevented him from giving specifics.

Separately, Trahant emailed this journalist to keep Hart on his “radar” – but again, would not elaborate on what that meant, according to legal documents stemming from the case.

Aymond and the archdiocese in short order provided Brother Martin with the details about Hart’s misconduct with the 17-year-old girl. Hart retired as the school’s chaplain in January 2022 after Brother Martin requested that Aymond remove him from its campus, claiming he was taking time off because of brain cancer.

This journalist, meanwhile, published an article in New Orleans’s Times-Picayune newspaper about many of the circumstances surrounding Hart’s departure, using methods and sources other than Trahant.

After that article, the federal judge in charge of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy, Meredith Grabill, ordered an investigation into what she characterized as “a violation of the protective order” in the case. It soon homed in on Trahant, who contended that he never revealed any confidential information about Hart in his communications with Gallagher or this journalist.

Depositions from Gallagher and his Brother Martin colleagues, reviewed by the Guardian, showed the school got the specifics about what Hart had done from the archdiocese. And, in a report obtained by the Guardian, court investigators conceded there was evidence supporting Trahant’s denial that he provided any confidential information to this journalist.

Yet Grabill effectively ruled that what Trahant had done was enough to constitute a protective order violation. She fined him $400,000, a figure that by Monday’s supreme court decision had grown by about $60,000 because of interest.

And she expelled four of Trahant’s clients from a committee of clergy abuse survivors negotiating a settlement to resolve the bankruptcy protection filing that the archdiocese made in 2020.

Trahant later asked New Orleans’s federal court and the US fifth circuit to overturn his punishment. But they left the sanction in place.

He then asked the US supreme court at the beginning of May to provide him relief, arguing – among other things – that his due process rights were violated in the course of being punished.

Attorneys for the New Orleans archdiocese waived their right to respond to Trahant’s petition before the supreme court denied his petition on Monday.

Trahant on Tuesday issued a statement challenging the archdiocese to direct the fine he was left owing toward clergy abuse survivors.

Adding that “this entire saga hurt my clients, my wife, my kids and my co-counsel,” Trahant also said: “I maintain I did what I did to protect children.”

One of Trahant’s clients who was expelled from the survivors committee, James Adams, said Monday’s supreme court ruling essentially “affirmed the protection of sexual predators over the safety of children”.

“The courts have clearly stated [that] if you try to expose sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic church, you will be punished,” Adams said.

Another Trahant client and expelled committee member, Jackie Berthelot, echoed Adams, saying: “It seems that if you speak up against predators who roam our schools, … you would be punished severely.

“It’s a shame that somebody who spoke up against abusers and always has supported victims’ rights would be penalized in such a harsh manner as Richard has.”

Hart died at 70 about nine months after his removal from Brother Martin. Aymond retired from the New Orleans archdiocese in February, about two months after the organization and its insured agreed to pay approximately $305m to hundreds of clergy abuse survivors to resolve the bankruptcy.

Survivors initially were told they could begin receiving payments in April. But a later bankruptcy filing pushed that back potentially to the fall.