MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe
By Bryan Marquard GLOBE STAFF APRIL 17, 2017
Day after day in 2005, Joe Crowley sat in a courtroom while a jury heard testimony and evidence about Paul Shanley, a defrocked priest who had sexually abused him when he was a teenager.
“I was sitting 10 feet away from the man who’d raped me, pimped me, and stole my innocence,” Mr. Crowley recalled in a 2012 interview with the Globe. “Watching Shanley answer to criminal charges was the real beginning of my recovery.”
In the years after Shanley was convicted, Mr. Crowley publicly revealed details of what had happened to him and he became a prominent voice for victims of clergy sexual abuse. He even was portrayed by name in the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight,” which recounted the Globe’s investigation of the scandal.
His health fragile for years, partly due to the drinking and smoking that had helped him subdue memories, Mr. Crowley died in his sleep and was found in his bed Easter Sunday in his Brookline residence, his family said. He was 58 and had suffered from respiratory and heart ailments.
“Every time somebody speaks up about this, every time one of us speaks up and talks about this, it’s going to be more difficult for someone to rape a child, to rape any person,” Mr. Crowley told the Globe last year, after “Spotlight” won the Oscar for best picture. Mr. Crowley watched the broadcast from a Brookline rehabilitation hospital because of ill health.
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