UNITED STATES
The Armenian Weekly
By Katie Vanadzin on December 3, 2015
Special for the Armenian Weekly
It’s no secret by now that Boston has been Hollywood’s darling for the past few years. Just this fall, two Boston-themed movies have been released. For once, one of them wasn’t about Whitey Bulger. Released to rave reviews on Nov. 6, “Spotlight” stood out as a very different sort of “Boston movie.” Part of what sets it apart is that the story it portrays likely would never have been known had it not been for the tireless work of two Boston-area Armenians: veteran reporter Stephen Kurkjian and attorney Mitchell Garabedian.
Set in 2001, the film centers on the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, the investigative team that has broken many of the city’s most defining stories. At that time, the team, made up of Walter “Robby” Robinson, Sacha Pfeiffer, Michael Rezendes, Ben Bradlee Jr., and Matt Carroll, was investigating the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery of which would ricochet around the world. But in early 2001, no one knew that the problem extended beyond Boston, and the reporters were as shocked as the public when the extent of the abuse within Boston alone was brought to light.
The cracks in the surface of the church’s reputation had begun to emerge in 1992, when Kurkjian investigated the case of James Porter, a priest in Fall River, Mass., who was convicted in 1993 of molesting 28 children and sentenced to 18-20 years in prison. Though Kurkjian discovered a handful of other priests between 1992 and 1993, who followed the same pattern of repeat abuse and quiet reassignments to new parishes, he had no inkling of the scope of the church’s cover-up.
Kurkjian, portrayed in the film by Gene Amoroso, worked as a reporter for the Boston Globe for 40 years and was a founding member of the Spotlight team in 1970 before relocating to Washington, D.C., to become chief of the paper’s Washington bureau. He returned to the Spotlight team shortly after the story on the sex abuse scandal broke and the team was flooded with calls from former victims. In the film version, this is right about when the credits begin to roll, but as Kurkjian can attest, there’s quite an epilogue.
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