Saints content creator Jonathan Barnes, on one of his recent podcast episodes, asked whether losing Demario Davis, Cameron Jordan, Alvin Kamara, and Taysom Hill in one offseason could break the New Orleans Saints. Two of those players are already elsewhere. Davis is in New York, and Hill is exploring free agency – so, it’s a fair question. But when Barnes shared it on X, he couldn’t resist adding an afterthought – a jab at former Saints linebacker Junior Galette.

“[Sean] Payton always laments how we let too much leadership at once, and then we were stuck with Junior Galette as a team captain,” Barnes wrote.

Barnes didn’t tag anybody on his post, but Galette still saw it and didn’t let it slide. He took to X and penned a sharp response:

“People act like I was Darren Sharper because I went on a Rant about my former Employer lol if someone doesn’t like me personally they’re more than likely a HATER…”

For context, Darren Sharper, the former Saints safety, ended up in federal prison after pleading guilty to multiple s*x offenses against women. The allegations against Sharper marred New Orleans’ reputation badly. Now, by comparing himself to Sharper, Galette clarified that criticizing your employer, which in the former LB’s case meant false allegations against the head coach and being a convicted offender, is not the same.

Alongside his tweet, Galette also posted a TikTok video featuring an article snippet from The Advocate, with an AI voiceover voicing the quotes from his old teammates.

The first quote belonged to defensive end Cam Jordan: “Junior doesn’t know how good he can be. He’s had to fight for everything, and now he’s shining the light. I don’t know if he has a ceiling, but he hasn’t found that yet.”

The other quote, from former Saints nose tackle Brodrick Bunkley, went: “You’ll never meet a harder worker or a more dedicated player. He fires everybody else up. Everybody hears the talk. But he walks the walk. He’s a great teammate. I’ll go to war with that guy.”

These words land differently when you look at Galette’s contribution in black and gold. In five seasons with the Saints, he logged 31.5 sacks 5 five forced fumbles before the Saints cut him in July 2015 – less than a year after handing him a four-year, $41.5M deal. The off-field narratives became too much to handle, and Sean Payton, after releasing him, admitted that he’d failed Galette as a head coach.

“Too many times there were some inconsistencies, some things that took place where we didn’t feel comfortable as a club,” Payton had said at the time. “Obviously, when you write a check like that and make a commitment like that, you have a long-term vision. Certainly, we did.”

Meanwhile, some sources also noted that the locker room had reportedly turned sour as Gallete was not leading the way he was supposed to. Many also noted that Junior’s main focus was getting paid, and once that happened, everything in the New Orleans Saints went downhill.

“He stayed focused long enough to get paid, then the real Junior came out,” said a source.

Galette became a defensive captain in 2014, the same year he got his extension, but he didn’t carry that with grace. He took jabs at the veterans and even got into a fight with former DE Brandon Deaderick. Meanwhile, the domestic violence allegations against him only made things worse.

When the release came, Junior Galette fired back hard through his girlfriend’s Twitter account (having deleted his own). The tweets alleged that Coach Payton showed up to team meetings drunk and was using drugs. Galette later denied making those claims, but the accusations were already out there, and the damage was done.

Now, Barnes’ offhand dig is what brought all of this back to the surface. Someone took a swing first, and Galette swung back – the same way he did before.

But a decade removed from New Orleans, Junior Galette is still defending his time there. The teammate quotes he posted were a rebuttal – not to Barnes specifically, but to the version of him that gets invoked whenever people want to dredge up the Saints’ struggles. After all this time, he is done with that old label.