MASSACHUSETTS
Boston.com
A no-spoilers guide to understanding the new film.
By Eric Levenson @ejleven and Bryanna Cappadona @brycappa
Boston.com Staff | 11.05.15
The new film Spotlight, out Friday, works at a rapid pace, speeding along with The Boston Globe reporters through their investigation into Boston’s Catholic Church. The movie throws out a number of names quickly — “Geoghan.” “Porter.” “Law.” — so it can be a bit hard to follow in all its details.
Here’s a guide to the basics of the story that will help you understand what the heck’s going on.
Why is the movie called Spotlight?
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team is an award-winning ensemble of investigative reporters who take many months to largely research, prospect, and uncover large-scale stories. By that very nature, their stories usually pertain to fraud or corruption or abuse. Spotlight is also “the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States,” according to the Globe .
Spotlight is noted for exposing child molestations at the hands of many priests in Massachusetts, as well as the intentional coverup within the Catholic Church in 2002—coverage that earned them the Pulitzer’s public service medal in 2003.
What you might not know is that Spotlight, under the leadership of Gerard O’Neill, exposed Whitey Bulger as an FBI informant in 1988. O’Neill and fellow Spotlighter Dick Lehr went on to co-author the ever-popular book about Bulger, Black Mass. (Sound familiar?)
As for their most recent work, Spotlight delved into concurrent surgeries at area hospitals in October.
OK, I remember the basics of the sexual abuse scandal. Was the Spotlight team the first to investigate that?
The core of the team’s reporting and interviewing took place in late 2001, and the Globe published their first story on the case in January 2002.
They weren’t the only outlet on the story. An article in March of 2001 in the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix detailed similar accusations against Father John Geoghan, who eventually faced accusations of abusing over 130 children. Written by Kristen Lombardi, that story quoted assault survivors who accused Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, of ignoring previous warnings. The piece laid out a compelling case that Law knew about the allegations against Geoghan.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.