‘This whole thing’s a farce’: New Orleans Catholic church sex abuse settlement brings anger and shock

Survivors of child rape and other sexual abuse within New Orleans’s Roman Catholic archdiocese learned that $641,000 or so is the most they can individually get under a settlement approved in December to resolve a years-long bankruptcy protection case.

Those amounts were communicated in letters that hundreds of clergy abuse survivors participating in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy began receiving on Tuesday. The figures are well below a $2.4m jury verdict awarded to an unrelated Louisiana religious sexual abuse claimant in June 2025 after the state’s legislature temporarily eliminated filing deadlines for such cases.

The amounts cited in the recent letters were also substantially below out-of-court settlements that a handful of clergy abuse survivors in the New Orleans area have reached in the verdict’s aftermath with Catholic institutions not affected by the bankruptcy, which evidently have been more or less comparable to the jury award.

Survivors say the amounts in the letters aren’t just insulting – but also the latest evidence of the disproportionate advantage enjoyed by the more than 40 Catholic institutions that have gone to federal court to declare bankruptcy amid the financial fallout of the church’s worldwide clergy molestation scandal, including nearly 30 such groups that have settled.

“This whole thing’s a farce,” Aaron Hebert, who was abused by Lawrence Hecker, a late, convicted child rapist and longtime archdiocesan priest, said on Thursday. Richard Coon, who has testified to being molested by three men with links to the archdiocese, added: “There’s a lot of survivors that are hurting right now.”

Driving the despair that Coon and Hebert described are two elements: the $305m settlement that the archdiocese as well as its insurers on 8 December agreed to pay to clergy abuse survivors to resolve a bankruptcy protection case opened in 2020; and a zero- to 100-point system determining each individual victim’s payment.

Settlement disclosure documents that disgusted victims virtually from the outset detail how points would be assigned based on the nature of the abuse, among other elements. Rape, for instance, equated to 75 points within the system; oral or digital abuse was 56 units; and grooming behavior was five.

Additionally, the archdiocese and others made comments in open court promising payments by the end of spring 2026. The process instead dragged, with settlement trustee Don Massey filing motions in court to get the church to turn over records needed to make payment determinations.

“Any promises made by the debtor (the archdiocese and its affiliates) were not made by the settlement trust,” Massey said when asked about payments not yet having been doled out. “The settlement trust was not consulted by the debtor prior to making this uninformed promise.”

By Thursday, days after the abuse claims valuations concluded, the Guardian and reporting partner WWL Louisiana had confirmed the maximum 100-point payout equated to an “estimated distribution” from the settlement of $641,425.64. That meant each allocated point was worth $6,414.26.

Hebert shared his letter with the outlets. He had been awarded 56 points – or an estimated settlement distribution of $359,198.

Meanwhile, having endured rape and oral sexual abuse by multiple clergy predators, Coon was allocated 98 points. He said it was “shocking” that he did not get maximum points given the circumstances surrounding his claim.

Coon, Hebert and bankruptcy claimant Brian Manix all expressed disbelief that allocation letters given to survivors failed to break down precisely how the claims evaluator, the personal injury attorney Richard Arsenault, arrived at their points total. The missives just contained the final sum, the estimated settlement distribution and an acknowledgment that the bankruptcy may have required them “to revisit deeply personal and difficult experience”.

Survivors have 30 days to ask for reconsideration, but without the basis for the points total, they are left to guess why they didn’t receive what they expected.

“We asked … for that,” Manix said on Thursday. While he declined to publicly disclose his allocation, he confirmed he was not awarded maximum points, saying, “I was raped. I was made to give oral sex, and I was groomed … I need somebody to tell me … what’s missing.”

After pressing a case which led to a child rape conviction and sentence of life imprisonment for Hecker, Neil Duhon was allocated just 75 points – or $481,069.50. He got no additional points for his role in Hecker’s successful prosecution, which the system called for.

“Now we know how much it cost a priest to rape a … boy,” said Duhon, who was 15 when Hecker preyed on him.

Arsenault did not respond to a request for comment.

Sources familiar with the process say more than 800 abuse claims were given points allocations. Among them were more than 100 that got scores of zero – such as for claiming abuse by a predator or entity not affiliated with the archdiocese.

Furthermore, the sources said that about $56m from the settlement was being temporarily held back to account for successful appeals. And any remaining money held back would then be redistributed to survivors based off their points allocations.

Still, that provided little comfort to Coon, Hebert, Manix and other survivors with whom they said they spoke in recent days. Perhaps most frustratingly for them, survivors who challenge their allocations must pay $1,000 out of pocket, according to a protocol established in December and which the vast majority of claimants approved.

Attorney Richard Trahant, who is part of a legal team representing Coon, Hebert, Manix and roughly 80 other abuse claimants in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy, said a number of his clients would appeal their points and dollar amounts.

“The $1,000 fee for reconsideration of the point total is obnoxious,” Trahant also said. “And we will figure out how to address that in the coming days.”

Coon, Hebert and Manix said such factors convinced them that bankruptcy court was the wrong venue to be fairly compensated for their abuse – despite assertions by the archdiocese that it was the venue providing the most equitable solution.

As Coon put it: “The bankruptcy was all about protecting the church.”