Joe.My.God. LGBT News
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:
Driving marked police cruisers and dressed in business attire, Louisiana State Police agents arrived at the headquarters of the Archdiocese of New Orleans to serve an unprecedented search warrant that demands officials turn over all records related to a decades-long clergy sex abuse crisis.
Three investigators from the agency’s Special Victims Unit entered the Walmsley Avenue building just before 10 a.m. and spent about 30 minutes inside. Three days earlier, a New Orleans magistrate judge had signed the warrant, which was spawned by the criminal investigation into disgraced priest Lawrence Hecker.
State police have worked with Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams to bring kidnapping and rape charges against Hecker, 92, for allegedly abusing a teenager while serving as a priest in the archdiocese decades ago.
New Orleans NBC affiliate reports:
The search warrant is requesting all documents, letters, emails, transfers, and assignment records linked to the New Orleans Archdiocese sexual abuse investigation. The warrant specifically asked for any and all complaints of sexual abuse received by the Archdiocese.
The warrant also seeks to obtain all personnel files for clergy members, which would include reassignments or transfers from those listed on the Credibly Accused list. The warrant includes documents related to the financial records associated with the investigation.
The Guardian reports:
The clerk at the state criminal courthouse where the warrant was signed released the 11-page document on Tuesday. It makes clear that troopers involved in a pending rape prosecution against one priest came to suspect that that case was part of a broader pattern of “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement.”
In a stunning assertion made under oath, troopers said they had already recovered documents that “back” the notion that “previous archbishops, the highest-ranking official in the archdiocese, not only knew of the sexual abuse and failed to report all the claims to law enforcement, but spent archdiocese funding to support the accused”.
One of the records requested by LSP includes a document described as, “for Archbishop eyes only.” According to the warrant, State Police has received multiple allegations of sexual abuse from members of the Archdiocese of New Orleans dating back to February of 2022.
We’ve been watching the NOLA Archdiocese for years.
In September 2023, the Archdiocese announced it was selling millions in church property to settle abuse lawsuits.
In 2022, it was reported that the FBI was investigating the New Orleans Archdiocese for molestation coverups going back decades.
In 2021, the DOJ announced that the Archdiocese agreed to pay $1 million for falsifying FEMA claims related to Hurricane Katrina.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond first appeared on JMG in 2013 when he ruled that Catholics can eat alligator meat during Lent because alligators quality as fish.
In March 2021, Aymond urged local Catholics to refuse COVID vaccines because they were developed from fetal cells.
In 2020, his archdiocese declared bankruptcy in a move that some say was meant to shield church assets from abuse settlements.
Later in 2020, Aymond sprinkled “holy water” over New Orleans from a World War II biplane in order to protect the city from COVID.
Also in 2020, Aymond held a ceremonial burning of the altar upon which a local priest videotaped his threeway with two hired dominatrices.