Estranged family of late New Orleans Saints owner opt not to challenge will

Gayle Benson inherited control of New Orleans’s NFL and NBA teams when her husband and the multibillion-dollar organizations’ owner, Tom Benson, died five years ago. Ever since then, her ownership of the NFL’s Saints and the NBA’s Pelicans had been under threat from Tom’s daughter and grandchildren from a previous marriage. Until Thursday they had the option of filing a lawsuit challenging the validity of the will that cut them out of his succession plans and installed Gayle as the inheritor of the sports teams.

That deadline passed without Tom Benson’s daughter Renee or her children Rita and Ryan LeBlanc apparently havingtaking any such action, however. The time limit’s lapse would mean Gayle Benson has officially consolidated her ownership of the teams, which she has promised will be sold only after her death on the condition that they remain in New Orleans.

Neither Renee Benson nor the LeBlanc siblings could be reached for comment about Thursday’s deadline, and a New Orleans attorney who has previously represented them, Randy Smith, declined comment. Meanwhile, Saints and Pelicans spokesperson Greg Bensel didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though the teams have previously said that they believed the plan which left Gayle Benson in control of the teams was unassailable.

For her part, in reports published in 2021 by the New Orleans news outlets NOLA.com and WVUE-TV, the 76-year-old Benson had outlined her intent to launch a foundation which would donate the proceeds of the teams’ eventual sale to charitable causes in southeast Louisiana and the surrounding region.

A heated, complex legal battle that pitted the twice-widowed Tom Benson and Gayle – his wife of nearly 14 years – against the relatives