Roman Catholic priest Paul Hart admitted to sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl he met through priestly duties in the early 1990s, was accused of rape by another woman in 1993 or 1994, and faced rumors of sexually harassing a young female teacher at a parochial school. Despite all three incidents being known to the New Orleans archdiocese, Archbishop Gregory Aymond assigned Hart to serve as chaplain at Brother Martin high school in 2017 — an all-boys institution whose dance team draws members from a girls-only college preparatory school. A church advisory board had recommended Hart's removal from ministry. Aymond overruled it. Attorney Richard Trahant, who represented clergy abuse survivors in the archdiocese's bankruptcy proceedings, discovered Hart's record and alerted Brother Martin's principal, his cousin Ryan Gallagher, on New Year's Eve 2021. Trahant told Gallagher of a credible allegation involving a minor but said a protective order prevented him from sharing specifics. Gallagher met with school leaders, who then spoke with Aymond. In depositions, multiple Brother Martin officials said Aymond and lay adviser Lee Eagan disclosed specifics of the 2012 complaint against Hart — including, one official suggested, the complainant's confidential name. Every school official deposed stated that had they known Hart's history, they would never have accepted him as chaplain. Aymond apologized for the original assignment. Hart was forced to retire in January 2022. He lied publicly, claiming he left because of brain cancer. The archdiocese echoed him. Brother Martin issued a carefully vague letter referencing an issue from Hart's "distant past." In a sworn deposition four months later, Hart called himself "a victim" and dismissed his admitted misconduct with a teenager as "so bogus that it looked like it was almost made up." Church attorney Dirk Wegmann characterized the conduct as "inappropriate" but "consensual" — the teenager was 17 and Hart was 37. The archdiocese's fury focused not on Hart's record but on its exposure. Eagan recalled Aymond declaring: "This is BS. Someone leaked information. The leaks have to stop." Federal bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill imposed a sanction exceeding $400,000 on Trahant for disclosing information about Hart. Two higher courts upheld the fine. Grabill then placed virtually the entire record under seal — an extraordinary measure that prevented public scrutiny of the institutional mechanics behind the punishment. The Guardian obtained the full case file — thousands of pages — through a public records request to New Orleans state prosecutors, who had collected it while securing the guilty plea of another priest charged with rape and kidnapping. The newly reviewed records reveal that Hart's history was worse than previously known: the church-hired private investigator's notes document Hart's own account of the rape accusation, his dismissive characterization of the accuser as "angry, angry," and his claim that the young teacher who accused him of harassment "was on drugs" — offered without evidence. Hart blamed his contact with the 17-year-old on her being "bouncy" and "vivacious." The structural picture is stark. Aymond ignored his own advisory board's recommendation to remove Hart from ministry. He omitted Hart from a 2018 public list of clergymen with credible child molestation accusations. He assigned Hart to a high school. When the assignment blew up, the institutional apparatus punished the person who raised the alarm — not the person who created the danger. Trahant has now petitioned the US Supreme Court for relief, arguing he was denied due process. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a graduate of the girls' preparatory school connected to Brother Martin. The case distills the Catholic clergy abuse crisis to its institutional essence: information asymmetry weaponized through legal process. The archdiocese possessed all the relevant facts. It chose which to suppress, which to disclose selectively, and which to deploy against the person who disrupted the arrangement. The bankruptcy court's confidentiality apparatus — designed to manage financial restructuring — became a tool for managing reputational exposure. The $400,000 fine functions as a deterrent signal to every future attorney who might consider prioritizing child safety over procedural compliance.
