LAFAYETTE (LA)
WWL-TV [New Orleans LA]
February 5, 2026
By as / The Guardian (The Guardian)
Lafayette lawyer went from defending pedophile priest Gilbert Gauthe to crusading to expose breadth of US church’s coverup
Ray Mouton, a Lafayette attorney whose work helped crack open the Catholic Church’s long-hidden clergy sexual abuse crisis, died Thursday morning at Ochsner Medical Center in Jefferson after a yearlong battle with cancer. He was 78.
Mouton’s path to becoming one of the earliest and most influential figures in exposing systemic abuse inside the Church was deeply personal — and professionally paradoxical. In the 1980s, he was hired by the Diocese of Lafayette to defend Gilbert Gauthe, a priest charged with raping children.
Mouton successfully negotiated a plea deal for Gauthe to serve a 20-year prison sentence. The case effectively started the US’s reckoning with the worldwide Catholic clergy molestation scandal, though Gauthe was released from prison after just a decade.
And in the course of that work, Mouton became privy to secret information that changed the direction of his life: The same diocese paying his legal fees was quietly protecting other abusive priests.
“That realization outraged him,” said investigative journalist Jason Berry, who was the first reporter to expose the wider coverup of pedophile priests. Berry said Mouton became one of his best sources and the driving force of the journalist’s groundbreaking 1992 book Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
“Ray Mouton was by far the most mercurial, colorful, radically dramatic source I have ever had,” Berry said.
Berry’s reporting in the 1980s laid the groundwork for later investigations into the abuse crisis – including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe series in 2002, the 2015 Oscar-winning film “Spotlight” that the series inspired, through to the ongoing Emmy-winning WWL Louisiana and Guardian series Losing Faith.
Berry said none of it would have been possible without Mouton.
After the Gauthe case, Mouton joined forces with Vatican canon lawyer Thomas Doyle – a former priest – and psychologist Michael Peterson, who had been treating abusive clergy, to write a 95-page internal warning to church leadership in 1985.
The document is a complicated relic. It warned the church was facing billions in abuse claims – even back then – and offered strategies for meeting the crisis head-on while still protecting the hierarchy from the stench of individual priests’ crimes.
At the same time, it cautioned bishops that continued secrecy and denial would only deepen the crisis and expose the Church to catastrophic moral and legal consequences.
“In this sophisticated society,” the report warned, “a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or cover-up.”
But most church leaders failed to respond, said Cecile Mouton, who was Cecile Cook when she worked as Mouton’s legal assistant from 1977 to 1989.
“People stopped listening as he got deeper and deeper and deeper into it,” she said. “And I think he was like, ‘This is as high as I can go.'”
She said it created a searing personal crisis of faith for her boss, whose family had helped found and build Lafayette’s intensely Catholic community. He questioned her as she kept going to daily Mass at the Cathedral just a block from his office.
“And he asked me how I could continue: ‘How can you do that knowing what’s happening?’ And I said to him, ‘It’s not about the priest, it’s about your faith and what you believe,'” she said.
Mouton would later tell the CBS News program “60 Minutes II” about his journey.
“It was a feeling of horror,” Mouton told the program.
He said the experience permanently changed him.
“I have no belief in the Catholic Church – none,” he remarked. “It’s all gone. I went too many places. I saw too many things.”
For the last two decades of his life, Mouton lived with his wife, Melony, in a small mountain village in France near the Spanish border. There, he wrote the novel “In God’s House,” a fictionalized account drawn from his own efforts to expose institutional abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church.
Despite living halfway around the world, Mouton closely followed continuing investigations into clergy abuse, a crisis which has since driven more than 40 Catholic organizations in the U.S. into federal bankruptcy court, where they have collectively agreed to pay more than $2.6 billion in settlements, according to information compiled by Penn State University’s law school.
Among those organizations is the Archdiocese of New Orleans, about 135 miles east of Lafayette, which – along with its insurers – recently agreed to pay $305 million to roughly 600 clergy abuse survivors.
Mouton’s younger brother Henry would send messages from Ray reacting to WWL Louisiana’s and The Guardian’s Losing Faith series, which has captured abuse survivors’ renewed anger that many of the same patterns of concealment have persisted.He also provided quiet but vital support to a successful effort in Louisiana to eliminate filing deadlines for lawsuits seeking damages over childhood sexual abuse, which exponentially increased the size of the settlement that the New Orleans archdiocese ultimately offered survivors.
“I don’t think he wanted a lot of credit,” Mouton’s son, Todd, said. “If anything, he died upset that we still have these challenges 40 years later.”
Todd Mouton said his father loved rock ’n’ roll and attending the Running of the Bulls at the annual San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain, just across the Pyrenees from where he lived. But above all, he wanted to celebrate his dad’s legacy fighting for the voiceless victims.
“He was a crusader in a very unlikely effort,” Todd said. “It all unfolded in real time for him. He learned things he didn’t want to learn, but that can be any of us at any time where you have to stand up and do the right thing.”
After being diagnosed with cancer more than a year ago, Ray Mouton returned to Louisiana for treatment.
“He made an enormous contribution to human justice,” Berry said. “And I think history will treat him well.”
Author: David Hammer / WWL Louisiana Investigator, Ramon Antonio Vargas / The Guardian (The Guardian)