NEW ORLEANS (LA)
The Guardian [London, England]
August 9, 2026
By Ramon Antonio Vargas
Jesuit high school deal resolves lawsuit stemming from allegations of molestation by school janitor decades prior
For the second time in as many months, a prominent Catholic high school in New Orleans recently agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement to resolve a lawsuit claiming child molestation decades earlier by a janitor at the institution.
Both the plaintiff and Jesuit high school struck the agreement ahead of a late September trial date in the city’s civil district courthouse, according to 27 July legal filings reviewed by the Guardian.
That pact came after Jesuit and another plaintiff alleging child molestation by the same school janitor – as well as one of his custodian colleagues – served notice in court on 4 June that they had agreed to an out-of-court settlement.
An attorney for both of those plaintiffs, Richard Trahant, in June would not deny that the settlement in that case was worth more than a $2.4m verdict awarded to an unrelated Louisiana sexual abuse claimant in the summer of 2025. When asked about the more recent settlement’s terms, neither Trahant, his co-counsel – Soren Giselson and John Denenea – nor attorneys for Jesuit immediately commented.
The lawsuit that was settled in late July, like the previous one, stems from the same longstanding clergy molestation scandal that drove the archdiocese in New Orleans – one of the US’s most Catholic communities – to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.
But neither case is directly involved in that bankruptcy, which the archdiocese and its insurers in December moved to resolve in large part by agreeing to pay $305m to hundreds of abuse survivors.
Clergy abuse claimants whose cases were involved in the archdiocese’s bankruptcy were still awaiting their payments as of Sunday, and it was not clear exactly when they could expect to be paid.
In any event, the lawsuit settled in late July was pursued by a plaintiff who identified himself under the pseudonym Jayson Doe. Doe recounted during the case that he had just been admitted to Jesuit at age 13 in 1978 when janitor Pete Modica began molesting him there.
The plaintiff, while giving a deposition in February, explained how his father looked up to Modica because the latter man had been a professional baseball player, according to a transcript excerpt filed in court. Doe had also been led to believe that Modica somehow helped get him into Jesuit, an elite private school which was founded before the US civil war and whose alumni have included mayors of New Orleans and all-star professional athletes.
“He [said] that I really should be appreciative of what he did for me,” Doe, while being deposed, remarked of one abusive encounter that he endured. “And eventually he told me to drop my pants. And he began a sexual assault.”
Doe first sued Jesuit, which is run by the international religious order whose official name is the Society of Jesus, in 2019. Aspects of his case echoed parts of the lawsuit pursued by the plaintiff who settled in June.
The other plaintiff alleged that Modica, who has since died, and his still-living fellow janitor Gary Sanchez abused him on Jesuit’s campus when he was a preteen in the mid-1970s. The plaintiff in that case said he was not a student of Jesuit but lived nearby and would play in the school’s yard.
Modica secured a job at Jesuit even though he had previously pleaded guilty to molesting boys at a suburban New Orleans playground that employed him as supervisor. Meanwhile, in 2002, Sanchez pleaded guilty to attempted rape of a boy, age five, and received a 30-year prison sentence, criminal court records show.
The lawsuits that Jesuit settled in June and July unfolded after another man named Richard Windmann spoke out in September 2018 about how – during his childhood while growing up near the school – he was abused at Jesuit in the late 1970s by Modica and a since-deceased priest, Neil Carr.
Jesuit paid Windmann $450,000 in 2012 to quietly settle claims against Modica and Carr, who were among a number of authority figures in Windmann’s life who molested him in his youth.
The Society of Jesus ultimately acknowledged that Carr was among several priests, teachers studying to become clergymen or religious brothers who were members of the order and credibly accused of child molestation while working at the school.
Court filings establish that, as of Sunday, Jesuit has paid a total of at least nine settlements related to abuse by Modica at the school. Six of those settlements were reached after Windmann went public. The values of most of those agreements have not been made public.
An unrelated and unresolved lawsuit alleged that another priest who worked at Jesuit and was confirmed by his order to be credibly accused of child molestation, the late Claude Boudreaux, sexually abused one of the school’s students on campus in the early 1980s.
That case – pursued by another client of Trahant, Denenea and Gisleson – was tentatively set for trial on 2 November.