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 quietly 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 amid the financial fallout of the church’s worldwide clergy molestation scandal, including nearly 30 such groups that have settled. 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 which 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. 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, 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’re left to guess why they didn’t receive what they expected.
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