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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 128 of 143 · ≈ 1 min on screen
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 cost comes due: 9/11 steals six weeks, Saviano accuses them of abandoning survivors, sources go quiet, and even finding Law's damning letters isn't enough to end the fight over when to publish.
Albano briefs Marty, Ben, and Robby that the unsealed documents likely won't be public until mid-January, and Robby moves to keep Metro's Canellos from running big on the ruling.
Marty and Ben are stunned to learn Robby has been sitting on the D'Arcy and Gallant letters for weeks, and press him to explain why he wants to hold the story until they can confirm seventy priests using a source inside the Church.
Ben tells Robby to get a draft to Mike before Christmas and press the Cardinal's office for comment through new PR contact Donna Morrisey, as a deadline countdown montage of the team's grinding writing and editing process begins.
This scene
The door of a pretty colonial, a wreath still up. A hand knocks. The door opens. A pretty woman (JIM’S WIFE) smiles.
JIM’S WIFE
Robby. What a nice surprise.
REVEAL Robby at the door. He walks into --