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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 119 of 143 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act two
The Boston Globe's Spotlight team pries open the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up of child abuse — one sealed record, one silenced victim at a time.
Robby's Spotlight team operates comfortably inside its own routine, prospecting a modest police-corruption story under a departing editor's cover.
Baron's outsider question exposes what the paper has never done: investigate whether Cardinal Law knowingly protected an abusive priest.
The team sets aside its own project and enters unfamiliar territory: survivor networks, a hostile plaintiff's lawyer, and a legal fight to unseal church records.
The team pays the cost of the work — hearing survivor testimony, chasing MacLeish's stonewalling, and combing church directories for a hidden pattern of reassigned priests.
The directory search and Sipe's estimate deliver what they set out for: confirmation that the abuse spans dozens, then eighty-seven, priests across Boston.
The cab crosses the West 4th Street Bridge into Dorchester as Mike continues reading the mother's letter describing the family's pressured silence.
Stuck in traffic on Old Colony Road, Mike keeps reading a second letter to Law about Geoghan's reassignment.
The cab pulls up to the Globe and Mike jumps out, still reading the letter about Geoghan's history of abuse.
This scene
Mike races in through the glass doors, then hustles up the escalator...
MIKE (V.O.)
“...has a history of homosexual
involvement with young boys. I
understand his recent departure from
Saint Brendan's may be related to
this problem...”