MAINE
Portland Press Herald
Maine reporters heard the accounts of survivors too, and more may speak out in reaction to the film.
BY GREG KESICH
‘Spotlight” is a movie about journalism. If you haven’t seen it, you should.
It tells the true story of how a team of editors and reporters at the Boston Globe connected “isolated incidents” of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests into a 2002 series of stories that exposed an institution more concerned with protecting its reputation than it was in protecting children.
The movie shows reporters who run down leads and pore over documents. Editors have vision and guts. Stories get banged out on deadline, presses roll and the world changes.
It had to be a movie about journalism because movies are stories and stories have an ending.
It’s not that way for the survivors of child sex abuse, who can spend their whole lives trying to get back what had been stolen from them. The rest of us may get smarter and vow not to make the same mistakes, but their pain is forever.
So that’s why, I guess, when the credits filled the screen at the end of the movie, I found myself sobbing.
Back in 2002 and 2003, a big part of my life was interviewing survivors of sexual abuse by priests in Maine.
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