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…