NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the New Orleans Saints “are great corporate citizens” despite revelations in unearthed emails detailing how the football team’s owner and other top executives coordinated with the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese in a campaign to soften media coverage of a decades-old clergy-abuse scandal engulfing the church.

Saints owner Gayle Benson and other key lieutenants “are very involved in this community, and they are great corporate citizens”, Goodell said after media outlets provided the most complete accounts yet detailing the team’s decision to help the New Orleans church’s messaging about a scandal that has prompted state police and federal agents to jointly open a child sex-trafficking investigation into the archdiocese.

Goodell’s comments came after being asked about the correspondence between the Saints and the church at a news conference on Monday, just six days before New Orleans hosts the 2025 Super Bowl at the Caesars Superdome.

Alluding to Benson’s reputation as a pious congregant and archdiocesan benefactor, Goodell said: “Mrs Benson takes all these matters seriously, particularly for someone with the Catholic church connections that she does [have].”

“I would say this,” he added as Benson sat a few feet away. “This is a matter of the FBI – I think local law enforcement, nationally and otherwise, are involved with this.

“But I’m confident that they are playing nothing more than a supportive role to help be more transparent in circumstances like this.”

Earlier, the Guardian, WWL Louisiana, the New York Times and the Associated Press had published independent investigations into emails – many emblazoned with the NFL’s famous shield logo – that showed the extent to which Saints executives tried to help the church deal with the clergy abuse scandal’s fallout for about a year beginning in 2018.

The emails mainly show that Saints vice-president of communications Greg Bensel directly lobbied local media outlets to highlight archbishop Gregory Aymond’s courage in releasing a list of local, credibly accused clergy abusers, which was meant as an act of conciliation and transparency after a series of scandals revived the clerical molestation scandals in New Orleans and nationwide.

He also solicited – and frequently received – feedback and moral support on the messaging campaign from Benson, who is a close personal friend of Aymond. Bensel did the same with Saints president Dennis Lauscha, federal judge Jay Zainey and Wendy Vitter, who was then the archdiocese’s general counsel but later became a federal judge.

At one point, using abbreviations commonly used for “conference call” and “with”, Bensel emailed Lauscha to report: “Had a cc w [New Orleans’ then district attorney Leon Cannizzaro] that allowed us to take certain people off the list. The list will get updated, and that is our message that we will not stop here today.”

Cannizzaro has denied ever having a conversation in which he told anyone to “take … people off the list”. The Saints have also denied anyone in their organization participated in a call with Cannizzaro, instead saying Bensel’s email to Lauscha referred to a conversation “that he was told had occurred between a member of the staff of the archdiocese and … Cannizzaro, concerning the list” and how it would be updated.

A lawsuit related to clergy abuse resulted in a subpoena for copies of all communications among Saints and church officials in July 2019. The team fought in court to keep the news media from accessing copies of the communications while insisting its correspondence with the archdiocese amounted to well-intended “public relations assistance” with “pending media attention” in the lead-up to the list of credibly accused abusers.

The outlets who published investigations on the emails on Monday established that the dialogue among the Saints, and the church and their allies began months in advance and continued for months after the list’s publication. That list spurred so many civil lawsuits it drove the archdiocese to file for federal bankruptcy protection as part of a case that remained unresolved.

Furthermore, there was evidence uncovered during the bankruptcy – and first publicly exposed by the media – that helped authorities obtain a guilty plea of a serial child molester clergyman who admitted to raping a child in the 1970s after being shielded by the church for decades. That priest, 93-year-old Lawrence Hecker, received a mandatory life sentence in December and died days later in prison.

But a joint FBI and Louisiana state police investigation being conducted in parallel to the Hecker case remains ongoing, with authorities saying in sworn criminal court documents that they have probable cause to suspect that the church engaged in the sex trafficking of minors while covering up for clergy molesters across decades.

Goodell on Monday said Benson – who also owns the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans basketball team – “first mentioned this back in 2018 in the context of this”. It was unclear if he was referring to statements the team made in 2020 about its correspondence with the archdiocese and again just prior to the publication of the media investigations – or if she told him that her organization was helping the church’s clergy abuse messaging while the effort was ongoing in 2018.

“She’s made multiple comments about this, which you all have seen,” Goodell said. “Her transparency of the emails are out there, so I leave it to them.”

Some in New Orleans were unimpressed with Goodell’s comments Monday. “So there you go,” one user on a local Reddit thread said. “The [NFL] won’t do anything about it.”

The thread containing that comment was directly under a discussion started by a user who accused Benson, Bensel, and Lauscha of “making me ashamed to support my team”.

Meanwhile, Pelicans columnist and New Orleans sports podcast host Scott Kushner said on social media: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the two most visible businesses in the state … felt the need to get involved with the media coverage of a child rape scandal involving the Catholic church.

“It is either painfully stupid, outlandish arrogance or just evil.”