A counselor at Louisiana's premier pediatric hospital accessed the medical records of a girl whose parents reported that she was sexually abused by a classmate at her preschool – and then was fired after it was discovered that she shared information from the child's file with the school's principal, her sister-in-law, a Guardian investigation can reveal.
The details of the breach and resulting employee termination at the Manning Family children's hospital in New Orleans came to light in a sworn deposition taken in August during civil litigation being pursued by the girl's parents.
The deposition also preceded an unexpected 4 September announcement that the counselor's sister-in-law “would no longer serve in the role of preschool principal” at Kehoe-France, the respected private suburban New Orleans school which her family founded in 1950 but has been owned by the International Schools Partnership (ISP) in London, England, since 2018.
Deposition reveals texts
During the deposition in question, the fired hospital employee, Claire Beaumont Poché, was asked about texts that she received from former Kehoe-France preschool principal Emily France Poché in which the latter woman called the father of the alleged abuse victim a “narcissist” – and said, without evidence, “my head of school thinks the dad is abusing” his daughter.
All of those developments came after the child's father – Roger Williams, who earned a bronze star medal for “exceptionally meritorious wartime service” with the US army in Iraq – and her mother, Jana, successfully championed a new early-childhood education safety law in Louisiana amid the litigation centering on the couple's daughter. Private preschools across the state staunchly opposed the law, arguing that it would be unfairly financially burdensome for them to comply.
The Williams family's case illustrates the kind of tangled circumstances those who report abuse at well-heeled institutions in the US – which potentially have connections to other influential organizations – may have to grapple with.
And it remains to be seen whether there may be an investigation by authorities into whether what happened with the medical chart of Jana and Roger Williams' daughter constituted a violation of medical privacy laws under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Hipaa), certain violations of which can carry criminal penalties.
Legal responses
“The thanks [for] a bronze star medal recipient and literal war hero was to accuse him in secret of sexually abusing his own daughter without a scintilla of evidence, and to trounce all over his baby daughter's Hipaa privacy rights,” one of the Williamses' attorneys, Richard Trahant, said in a statement. “Vile and repugnant don't begin to describe this.”
Neither Claire Poché nor Emily France Poché are named defendants in the lawsuit. When offered the chance to comment, their lawyers contended that Claire's deposition and her texts with Emily which she was confronted about under oath were subject to a protective order.
Trahant countered that the protective order provided 20 days for the deposition to be designated confidential, which no one did. Portions of that deposition are also accessible in the public court record after attorneys for Kehoe-France entered them without any confidentiality designation.
A filing on Monday from Claire Poché's attorney, Michael Nolan, said she had turned over “additional text messages, under seal, between [her] and Emily France Poche”. Those texts were redacted at the time of Claire's deposition – she was not asked about them at that session, and the Guardian has not seen them.
Emily's attorney, Renee Culotta, on Monday issued a statement attributed to her client which said she “care[s] deeply about the well-being of [Roger and Jana's daughter] and all children at Kehoe-France” – and that “the best interests of my students have always been my highest priority”.
The statement, citing the protective order, said Emily would not comment on either the deposition or the texts, which she characterized as being “between family members and close friends” while asserting that they were “intended to be private”. Her statement also accused the plaintiffs' attorneys of “utilizing … personal messages to deflect attention from the actual matters at hand” and said that the Guardian's reporting on them would “serve their purposes very neatly”.
Kehoe-France, for its part, said in a statement that it “disagrees with the allegations made against the school” in the Williams family's lawsuit “and will continue to defend itself through the legal process”. The statement also said “the appropriate forum for resolving these claims is the court” and that the school would not “litigate the case through the media”.
The ISP issued its own statement echoing that sentiment.
“The safety and well-being of our students are Kehoe-France's highest priorities,” the school's statement said. “The school maintains and follows policies and procedures designed to protect student safety and address concerns when they arise.”
The Manning Family children's hospital did not respond to requests for comment.
Alleged abuse and records access
Setting the stage for Claire Poché's 31 August deposition as a fact witness was a suburban New Orleans state court lawsuit alleging that Jana and Roger Williams' daughter was fondled in a sexually abusive manner by another three-year-old student at Kehoe-France's preschool in March 2024 while in its care. The lawsuit, broadly, seeks damages contending that the school was negligent in its supervision of the couple's daughter, which Kehoe-France denies.
In any event, after the alleged abuse, Jana and Roger Williams took their daughter to the children's hospital to be examined.
Claire Poché was a licensed professional counselor at the hospital – recently named the No 1 pediatric hospital in Louisiana, and among the top 15 regionally, by the US News & World Report. But she acknowledged in her deposition that she was not a member of the plaintiffs' daughter's treatment team.
Furthermore, Trahant said at Claire Poché's deposition that Roger was concerned about “a familial connection” that his daughter's then principal had at the hospital. And, Trahant said during Claire's deposition, when Emily France Poché remarked to him that she was going to call the hospital to discuss his daughter's case, Roger “asked her not to do this because he wanted the evaluation to be unbiased”.
Nonetheless, Claire Poché testified during her deposition that she learned of the situation involving Jana and Roger Williams' daughter from Emily France Poché. And Claire acknowledged that she accessed the girl's medical chart, using an emergency – or “break the glass” – protocol to overcome a restriction otherwise prohibiting her from doing so.
Claire Poché was asked at her deposition about a series of text messages with Emily France Poché which emerged as part of the discovery process in the Williams family's lawsuit. Collectively, the messages made clear that the two discussed information from the plaintiffs' daughter's chart.
“You wanna know the [doctor] who is seeing her”? Claire Poché asked, before providing the physician's name to which the girl had been referred.
A reply from Emily to Claire read: “I hope she tells [the girl's parents] that she's lying.”
Claire went on to text Emily that the emergency room visit which the girl had already undergone involved the taking of vital signs, a brief physical examination and a discussion with ER doctors who “aren't specially trained in child abuse”. She said the “visit” with the hospital child advocacy center where Claire worked – and to which the girl had been referred – is “more invasive”, so she didn't know “why [the parents] are pushing for this”.
“My head of school thinks the dad is abusing her,” read a later text from Emily to Claire which alluded to Tanya Price, Kehoe-France's top official. Claire's reply to Emily said, “I mean it would make sense if he's being so insane about this. To deflect.”
Trahant more recently said his client wanted to address that insinuation directly, on his terms, and dismissed it as “totally false” and “defamatory”.
At her deposition, he asked Claire Poché about an email to a colleague in which she indicated that she was not notifying Louisiana department of children and family services (DCFS) authorities about Jana and Roger's daughter's case – despite Trahant arguing that Claire had a duty to report such matters.
Claire's email mentioned “the age of culpability”, alluding to the fact that children younger than 10 in Louisiana cannot be criminally charged. During Claire's deposition, Trahant remarked: “Age of culpability … has absolutely nothing to do with the duty to report.”
Jana and Roger Williams ultimately filed reports with local law enforcement, the DCFS and state education authorities. Kehoe-France also made its own reports, and the couple sued in August 2024.
During the ensuing litigation, there surfaced documents and texts which established that Claire Poché had accessed the couple's daughter's chart and then discussed aspects of it with Emily France Poché.
An attorney for Claire Poché produced redacted copies of some of her texts with Emily France Poché after Trahant and his co-counsel, Bobby Truitt, sent a subpoena.
Roger separately alerted the Manning Family children's hospital's operator, LCMC, to his belief that his daughter's medical records had been impermissibly accessed as well as disclosed.
Five days before Claire Poché's deposition, LCMC issued a letter to Roger telling him “an investigation … determined that an impermissible disclosure (as opposed to an impermissible access) occurred in violation of Children's express training, policies and procedures”.
“Specifically, the fact that your daughter had a medical appointment at the [hospital], and the identity of the specific provider during that appointment, was disclosed to a third party,” the letter to Williams said. “This disclosure was in violation of Children's express training and instructions provided by it to the … employee who disclosed such information to the third party.”
The letter also said the fact that Roger's daughter had been seen “in the emergency department … along with general information about what occurs in [such an] encounter was disclosed to a third party by a Children's employee, again contrary to [the hospital's] instructions and training to that employee.”
The children's hospital missive made it a point to say “specific clinical information was not included in the disclosure”. But, the letter added, “the individual involved no longer has access” to any LCMC health system, including the one for electronic medical records.
The letter said, “Children's deeply regrets that this situation occurred” – yet did not specify whether it disciplined “the individual involved”.
But when asked at her deposition to name her workplace, Claire Poché replied: “I am not currently employed.”
She then said she had been “terminated by children's hospital”.
Trahant asked Claire Poché if she was terminated because of violations of Hipaa, which mandates the protection of medical patients' sensitive information. She replied that she had been told she was terminated because of code of conduct violations. She also said at the deposition: “I don't believe that I accessed the chart inappropriately.”
Asked if she conceded that her texts with Emily France Poché “are sneaky and sleazy”, Claire replied: “Um, I agree that they could come off that way.”
Trahant had summoned Emily France Poché to her own deposition on 8 September. But four days before that scheduled session, members of the Kehoe-France community received an email informing them that Emily was leaving her post as preschool principal and would “no longer be part of [the] administrative team” there. The email did not provide a reason for her departure.
Alluding to how her grandparents had founded Kehoe-France in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, the email – from head of school Price – wished Emily “all the best in her future endeavors” while also thanking her for her work with the institution.
Emily's deposition as a fact witness was postponed to 15 October. Her statement said she would “remain fully cooperative with the legal process”, looked forward to providing “truthful testimony when the time comes” and “was entirely confident that the facts will speak for themselves”.
The departures of Claire Poché and Emily France Poché from their jobs have been not the only consequences from the civil case pressed by Jana and Roger Williams, which remained unresolved as of Friday and was tentatively set for trial on the week of 26 October.
Charlie's Law
The couple spent more than a year advocating for Louisiana state legislators to pass a measure aiming to strengthen the safety of preschool programs. For instance, it set maximum child-to-staff ratios and effectively required those programs to obtain daycare licenses, therefore forcing them to adhere to a number of additional regulations.
Louisiana's legislature in the end passed that measure, which came to be known as Charlie's Law – and it took effect on 1 August 2025. Yet groups supporting private preschools similar to Kehoe-France lobbied heavily against the law, saying it would result in steep compliance costs.
And in June, Louisiana's Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed legislative changes that exempted “nonpublic prekindergarten programs” affiliated with private schools – such as Kehoe-France – from Charlie's Law's daycare licensing requirements, among other amendments.
Two entities, meanwhile, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law's constitutionality. The plaintiffs argued that Charlie's Law disproportionately affects religious schools, though a federal judge dismissed their lawsuit, saying the extra anticipated costs did not amount to either irreparable or imminent harm. An appellate court later upheld that decision, according to case records.
Emily France Poché's texts with Claire Poché commented on Roger's advocacy for Charlie's Law, which drew media attention.
She wrote that Roger, in the course of championing Charlie's Law, “only attends things that get him seen”. And Emily also called Claire's attention to a quote attributed to Roger at a website with Charlie's Law information that recounted how his daughter's plight affected his mental health “equivalent to, if not worse than, my combat deployment to Iraq”.
“This is all about him,” Emily France Poché said. “Like he is a narcissist.”
Roger Williams had received US army approval in 2023 for a bronze star medal in part because of his role in defeating a pair of enemy unmanned drones sent in to attack Al-Asad airbase in Iraq two years earlier, when American troops were stationed there. The army said Williams' actions “preserved military civilian lives, critical assets and vital infrastructure” at the base.
He more recently said that he and Jana dedicated most of their free time to fighting for Charlie's Law to protect their daughter as well “as everyone and their child in Louisiana” as much as possible.
“If not me, then who?” Roger said.
A statement from Jana – a certified registered nurse anesthetist – said, “I hope my family's effort with Charlie's Law helped someone, even if only one child.” And, referring to her and Roger's daughter, the statement concluded: “If she ever finds this … in the future, I hope she knows how much she is loved, and we tried our best.”
