Jesuit High School in New Orleans has reached a confidential settlement worth at least seven figures with a man who alleged he was sexually abused by school janitors in the 1970s, averting a trial scheduled for mid-June.
The plaintiff, identified in court documents as H Doe, sued the prominent Catholic institution decades after the alleged abuse. His attorney, Richard Trahant, confirmed Friday that the case had been resolved but declined to disclose the exact settlement amount. When asked whether the figure exceeded a $2.4 million verdict awarded in a separate Louisiana religious abuse case last summer, Trahant would not deny it.
The settlement comes as another of Trahant's clients pursues a separate lawsuit against the school alleging childhood sexual abuse by one of the same janitors. That case is set for trial in September.
Both lawsuits center on alleged abuse in the 1970s at the hands of two school custodians: Peter Modica, a now-deceased serial child molester, and Gary Sanchez, a convicted child rapist still living. H Doe alleged he was a preteen who played in the school's yard when he was abused there. The other plaintiff, identified as Jayson Doe, said he was 13 when he began attending the school in 1978 and was molested by Modica on campus.
These cases trace back to a longstanding pattern of abuse at the institution. In 2018, a man named Richard Windmann came forward publicly, recounting his own abuse at Jesuit by Modica and a now-deceased priest named Neil Carr. Windmann had settled with the school for $450,000 in 2012 under a confidentiality agreement he said he never requested.
Court records show Jesuit has paid at least eight separate settlements involving Modica abuse claims, with five of those coming after Windmann's public disclosure. The school had previously reached settlements with unspecified values involving Sanchez and Carr as well.
Depositions in the pending cases have revealed damaging admissions from school leadership. Rev. Anthony McGinn, who served as Jesuit's president during two separate periods between 1992 and 2017, acknowledged under oath that nine of his colleagues at the school, mostly clergy, had been credibly accused of child sexual assault. When Trahant's associate Soren Gisleson asked McGinn whether he understood how rare it was to work with nine such individuals, McGinn offered no response.
McGinn also confirmed that Jesuit paid at least seven settlements tied to Modica between 2012 and 2022. When pressed on whether the school should have conducted a background check on Modica before hiring him, McGinn agreed. Records show Modica had pleaded guilty in 1963 to molesting boys at a playground where he was employed as a supervisor before Jesuit hired him decades later.
Current Jesuit President Rev. John Brown, who assumed leadership in 2021, provided perhaps more troubling testimony. When Trahant asked whether he would report abuse allegations to police if a school employee confessed to raping children during confession, Brown refused, citing the Catholic principle of confession confidentiality that priests are bound to maintain under threat of automatic excommunication.
Brown also revealed that his predecessor, Rev. Christopher Fronk, had routinely deleted nearly all of his emails, a practice that may have destroyed evidence after the school knew litigation was pending. Trahant's legal team has requested court sanctions against school attorneys who were allegedly informed of the email deletion in 2020 but did not preserve the evidence as required by law.
The lawsuits against Jesuit are technically separate from the New Orleans Archdiocese's bankruptcy settlement, which concluded with Catholic institutions agreeing to pay $305 million to abuse survivors following a decades-long clergy molestation scandal.
These cases were made possible by a 2021 Louisiana law that eliminated the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims, allowing victims to sue regardless of how many years had passed. Louisiana's supreme court upheld the law as constitutional last June, clearing the way for such cases to proceed. The first case to go to trial under this new provision resulted in a federal jury ordering the Holy Cross Catholic religious order to pay nearly $2.4 million in June 2025.
Jesuit High School, founded in 1847, counts among its notable alumni former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who later served as President Biden's infrastructure czar, as well as jazz musician and actor Harry Connick Jr.
Author James Rodriguez: "This settlement underscores a pattern of institutional negligence that spanned decades, with school leadership repeatedly choosing confidentiality over child safety."
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