August 15, 2019
By Ramon Antonio Vargas
The daughter of a former Saints football player is one of two people who filed new lawsuits Thursday in Civil District Court seeking compensation from the Archdiocese of New Orleans over allegations of clergy abuse dating back decades.
In her suit, Linda Lee Stonebreaker, whose father was Saints linebacker Steve Stonebreaker, says she was 4½ years old when a River Ridge priest named Louis LeBourgeois molested her while driving her home in 1968.
Stonebreaker’s suit says she reported her ordeal in 2014 to archdiocesan officials, who agreed to cover her therapy bills, suggesting they believed her. But then the archdiocese omitted LeBourgeois — who died in 2015 — from a Nov. 2 list of 57 clergymen who were considered credibly accused of child abuse.
The suit argues that omission violates transparency policies that the Catholic Church has adopted in its ongoing clergy molestation scandal.
The plaintiff in the second suit is an unidentified man who says he was a 10- or 11-year-old altar boy in 1982 when a Gentilly priest named Michael Fraser started molesting him, abuse he says continued for a decade. Fraser, who is still living, has tried to keep in touch with the plaintiff, attempting to contact him as recently as four years ago, the suit says.
Fraser is on the list of credibly accused priests released by the church.
Generally, statutes of limitation prevent plaintiffs from going to court to pursue damages for long-ago misdeeds.
But in her suit, Stonebreaker, 55, argues that the archdiocese’s decision to pay her therapy bills essentially invalidated any such limitation from applying in her case, because it was an acknowledgment that she had a right to pursue her claim in court.
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