‘Crisis communications’: emails show how NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans helped New Orleans church spin abuse scandal

Unearthed emails detail how the sports franchises' owner and PR team counseled archdiocese on how to respond to unfolding clergy-abuse case

• Here are prominent people named in the Saints clergy-abuse emails
• What Saints and church officials said, and what their emails say
• The Saints clergy-abuse emails: five takeaways from our investigation

High-level executives with the NFL's New Orleans Saints football team and the NBA's Pelicans basketball team had a deeper role than previously known in connection with a list of priests and deacons faced with credible allegations of child molestation while the clergymen worked with their city's Roman Catholic archdiocese, the Guardian and reporting partner WWL Louisiana can reveal.

According to highly sensitive emails that were obtained by the outlets, one top executive even described a conversation with the New Orleans district attorney at the time that allowed them to remove clergy names from the list - though the clubs deny their official participated in that discussion, and the prosecutor back then vehemently denies he would ever have weighed in on the list's content.