MASSCHUSETTS
Harvard Law Today
By LEWIS RICE, December 1, 2015
The movie “Spotlight” focuses on the dogged pursuit by Boston Globe reporters to expose the Catholic Church’s cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by Boston priests. But there is much more to the story, as evidenced by a wide-ranging panel discussion of the movie last week at Harvard Law School that touched on legal issues, secrets and shame, and even a potential lawsuit against the filmmakers.
Sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Dean of Students Office, the panel featured Josh Singer ’01, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Tom McCarthy; Mitchell Garabedian, who represented dozens of plaintiffs in suits against the church (and was depicted by Stanley Tucci in a prominent role in the movie); and HLS professors Jeannie Suk ’02 and Lawrence Lessig, with Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 moderating. In the audience were Ben Bradlee Jr. and Michael Rezendes, journalists from the Globe who were also depicted in the film, and who participated in the discussion.
Singer, whose previous credits include the television series “The West Wing” and the movie “The Fifth Estate,” described the process of creating “Spotlight,” which he began writing in 2012, and the copious research involved, including interviews with victims and Globe reporters. “We wanted to present reporting and the newsroom in a way that really hadn’t been done in many years, as accurately as possible,” he said. “We were pretty extreme in terms of hard work in trying to get the story right.”
After several clips from the movie were shown to the audience in Wasserstein Hall, Garabedian spoke of his interactions with the victims and how the cases helped validate their stories and heal some of the pain they continued to live with in adulthood. Before the victims spoke out and the Globe coverage galvanized attention around the issue, he said, “It was the worst-kept secret in Boston that these priests were molesting children. Everybody seemed to know but no one seemed to do anything about it.”
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