UNITED STATES
The Oregonian
By Jeff Baker | The Oregonian/OregonLive
on November 12, 2015
“Spotlight” is a straightforward movie, written, acted and directed in a conventional, old-fashioned way, that tells an extraordinary story: how in 2001-02 a team of investigative reporters and editors from The Boston Globe exposed a pattern of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The Globe articles showed how the church sheltered pedophile priests and transferred them to different parishes where they could commit the same awful crimes on innocent children.
It is not an exaggeration to say the Globe’s reporting changed the world. The problem of pedophiles within the priesthood was not new or unique to Boston and had been written about elsewhere; it was well-known in law enforcement and among networks of abuse survivors. But the Globe’s reporting, particularly the way it showed a systemic coverup within the church, sparked investigations that have led to billions of dollars in settlements and an apology from Pope Francis, who said the church must “weep and make reparation” for what he called the actions of a “sacrilegious cult” of priests. Title cards at the end of “Spotlight” list hundreds of cities around the world, including Portland, where child abuse scandals within the Catholic church have been uncovered.
The Globe’s Spotlight team did not set out to make history. It took an outsider, new editor Marty Baron, to put fresh eyes on what was considered an isolated incident and asked if there was a connection to other cases. The Globe’s staff was uneasy about Baron’s arrival and worried about rumors of layoffs after the paper’s acquisition by The New York Times. Baron saw a reference in a Globe column about sealed files in a case involving a pedophile priest, John Geoghan, and decided the paper would sue to obtain the files, putting it in direct conflict with the church. Baron directed the Spotlight team leader and self-described “player-coach,” Walter Robinson, and his supervisor Ben Bradlee Jr. to pursue the story. The Spotlight staff, reporters Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll, and Mike Rezendes, did so in time-tested ways: Pfeiffer began locating and interviewing abuse victims, Carroll dug into documents, Rezendes worked a source, victims’ attorney Mitchell Garabedian.
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