AnarchoNinaAnalyzes<p>That awkward moment when *checks notes* the New Orleans Saints NFL team is caught actively working with the New Orleans Archdiocese and the Catholic Church to cover up and minimize a massive sexual assault/abuse scandal involving priests in the region tho:</p><p><a href="https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/43676192/emails-detail-saints-assistance-new-orleans-archdiocese-sexual-abuse-scandal" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/436761</span><span class="invisible">92/emails-detail-saints-assistance-new-orleans-archdiocese-sexual-abuse-scandal</span></a></p><p>"Emails detail Saints' assistance to New Orleans Archdiocese in sexual abuse scandal</p><p>"Among the key moments, as revealed in the Saints' own emails:</p><p>• Saints executives were so involved in the church's damage control that a team spokesman briefed his boss on a 2018 call with the city's top prosecutor hours before the church released a list of clergymen accused of abuse. The call, the spokesman said, "allowed us to take certain people off" the list.</p><p>• Team officials were among the first people outside the church to view that list, a carefully curated, yet undercounted roster of suspected pedophiles. The disclosure of those names invited civil claims against the church and drew attention from federal and state law enforcement.</p><p>• The team's president, Dennis Lauscha, drafted more than a dozen questions that Archbishop Gregory Aymond should be prepared to answer as he faced reporters.</p><p>• The Saints' senior vice president of communications, Greg Bensel, provided fly-on-the-wall updates to Lauscha about local media interviews, suggesting church and team leaders were all on the same team. "He is doing well," Bensel wrote as the archbishop told reporters the church was committed to addressing the crisis. "That is our message," Bensel added, "that we will not stop here today."</p><p>The emails obtained by AP sharply undercut assurances the Saints gave fans about the public relations guidance five years ago when they asserted they had provided only "minimal" assistance to the church. The team went to court to keep its internal emails secret."</p><p>Although the bloodless language this has all be reported in does a good (read: disgusting) job of minimizing how serious this is, the fact of the matter is via the Saints own emails we have evidence that an entire NFL team worked with the local Catholic Church power structure to protect known pedophile priests and the Church's own reputation. Furthermore, their reason for doing so is literally that the billionaire owner of the Saints, is Catholic and has close ties to Church leadership (the same Church leadership actively engaged in covering up sexual assaults against minors by its own priests) - a position shared by numerous other powerful people in New Orleans, including it sounds like a District Attorney's office. Don't sleep on the fact that while the Saints are denying it today, their OWN internal emails (which they fought to keep from seeing public light,) indicate that they successfully pressured local media (who depend on a good relationship with the Saints for their sports coverage) to actively REMOVE the names of multiple offender priests on the list that was going to be published. In other words, the Saints, an NFL team who has no jurisdiction in this matter, actively protected pedophiles on behalf of the Catholic Church, and the NFL itself, an entity that will suspend the shit out of players for using medical marijuana to treat serious injuries, seems to be dragging its ass in terms of doing anything about.</p><p>Of course the sad reality here is that this story is really only major news because an NFL team and its owner are involved. The reality is that rich and powerful people all over the Pig Empire frequently band together and use their outsized influence to cover up for heinous crimes like this, committed by other powerful and influential people in our communities on the regular - and you often don't read about those stories in the newspaper because they don't involve a multi-billion dollar sports team and organization that has no business manipulating media coverage to protect pedophile priests and the Catholic Church in their community. If you want to know why guys like Diddy and Mohamed Al Fayed get away with predatory, criminal sexual behavior for as long as they do, look no further than the network of powerful people who support them and the army of public relations minions they maintain precisely to cover this sort of shit up. In this case, the Saints of all people got caught protecting rapists who harmed minors, red-handed; but they are not alone, and when push comes to shove powerful people will band together to protect their own - no matter how heinous the crimes, and those acts of protection, really are.</p><p><a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/SexualAssault" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SexualAssault</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/CatholicChurch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CatholicChurch</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/NewOrleansSaints" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NewOrleansSaints</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/CoverUp" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CoverUp</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/NFL" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NFL</span></a></p>