UNITED STATES
The New Yorker
BY SARAH LARSON
Since seeing the movie “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe investigation of sexual abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it and the questions it raises—about how far institutions will go to protect themselves, about who we listen to and protect, about who and what we ignore, about the power of disclosure and even conversation. It begins with a portrait of institutionalized secrecy—at a police station in Boston in 1976, where cops, a bishop, and an A.D.A. are keeping a molestation accusation quiet—and shows us the process of how the truth came to be revealed. Spotlight, the Globe’s investigative team, published its first story in its series, “Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years,” on January 6, 2002; in the next year, it published over six hundred more, using the Church’s own documents to document extensive and almost systemic abuse by clergy.
Recently, I went to the Globe offices and talked to three of the team’s journalists, Walter (Robby) Robinson (Michael Keaton in “Spotlight”), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and I called their former editor, Martin (Marty) Baron, now the editor of the Washington Post, to ask about their experiences with the story. It begins with Baron’s arrival at the Globe from his previous job at the Miami Herald. He was an outsider—“an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball,” as a character in the movie puts it—whose perspective helped him confront what others could not or would not.
Baron told me that before he got to the Globe, he knew little about the clergy sexual-abuse story. He also knew little about Boston. “I knew virtually nobody at the paper and virtually nobody in town,” he said. Copies of the Globe were shipped to him in Miami before his move. While reading them, he saw an article about Father John Geoghan, who had been accused of abusing as many as eighty-four kids. “That was in the Metro section,” he told me. “And I was struck that I hadn’t heard about the case.” The Sunday before his first day, Eileen McNamara published a column in which she noted that the plaintiffs’ attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, had accused Cardinal Bernard F. Law, of the Boston archdiocese, of knowing about Geoghan’s behavior, “and yet reassigning him, notwithstanding the serial abuse,” Baron said. The archdiocese’s lawyers denied it. “And at the end of the column, she said something to the effect of ‘The truth may never be known, because the documents are sealed.’ I was really struck by that.”
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