NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
Multi-Oscar nominated movie Spotlight brings the Boston Globe’s shocking expose of the Catholic Church’s abuse cover-up to the big screen. Susan Griffin talks to the film’s director, cast and the real-life journalists they portray, about tackling such sensitive subject matter.
In the summer of 2001, Marty Baron began his first day in charge of the Boston Globe. Within hours, he’d asked the boss of the paper’s investigative team, Spotlight, to look closer into a column about a local priest accused of sexually abusing dozens of young parishioners over a three-decade period.
Cut to January 2002, and despite staunch resistance from church officials, the journalists, including editor Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson, reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Michael Rezendes and researcher Matt Carroll, shook the world by exposing the Catholic Church’s systematic cover-up of paedophilia perpetrated by more than 70 local priests in the city.
Now a film, entitled Spotlight – which has been nominated for six Oscars, three Golden Globes and three Baftas – tells how the team conferred with the victims’ lawyer Mitchell Garabedian, interviewed the adult survivors and pursued the release of sealed court records to uncover the truth.
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