Judges naturally get mad at attorneys who leak privileged information, but it cannot be often that a media source gets fined as much as $400,000.
Bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill has just given Jefferson Parish attorney Richard Trahant 30 days to pay that amount to the Archdiocese of New Orleans. If her order withstands the appeal that Trahant promises, there is no telling how many of our favorite anonymous blabbermouths will lose their nerve. Judges will welcome such a development, but confidentiality rules have too often served to protect malefactors, most spectacularly the child rapists and molesters of the Catholic priesthood.
Trahant is among the attorneys who have made a specialty of finally holding the church accountable in court for its sins. That made him privy to information the church wanted to keep secret, and enabled him to reveal that Paul Hart, the chaplain at Brother Martin High School since 2017, had lascivious dealings with a 17-year-old girl back in the 1990s.
The archdiocese nowadays maintains a list of priests “credibly accused” of molesting minors, but Hart's name never made it, thanks to a technicality. He did not qualify, because at the time he indulged in “dry sex” with the girl at a Metairie church, a minor by the church definition had to be under 16. That was not changed to 18 until 2002, but no doubt parents of children in his pastoral care would have preferred to know the truth about Hart's background.
When the object of his attentions, now grown, learned that Hart was being reassigned to the Metairie church, she complained to the archdiocese, which declined to intervene in 2012. Thus, Hart, though he was clearly in violation of the celibacy rule for priests and would meet any common sense definition of a child molester, was handed the Brother Martin assignment by Archbishop Gregory Aymond.
Although Hart's long-ago victim was female and Brother Martin is a boys' school, the public surely had a right to know the details of his transgressions. That was certainly how Trahant saw it, so he tipped off the Brother Martin principal in January. Hart promptly retired to battle brain cancer.
Trahant found the dope about Hart in documents provided by the archdiocese during discovery in connection with its bankruptcy proceedings. He knew he was in hot water with Grabill, because she had cited a breach of confidentiality a few months ago when removing four of his clients from a plaintiffs' committee that was supposed to parley with the church about damages. The size of the fine might have taken his breath away, however.
As a high-profile plaintiffs' attorney, Trahant is unlikely to be seriously incommoded by the fine, which Grabill said was partly due to the cost of investigating the leak. Trahant's failure to 'fess up at the outset drove the price up, she said.
For his part, Trahant offers no apology, but casts himself as a martyr with the noblest motives. “I did what I did to protect children. I provided no documents. I read documents to no one.”
Trahant, as befits a plaintiffs' attorney, has a nice line in moral indignation, professing himself outraged to be the whipping boy when a bunch of pedophiles have escaped all retribution. He has a point, for it was the church that dummied up for years rather than admit the awful truth.
Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.