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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 67 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.
At the gala bar, Robby confronts Jim Sullivan about defending abusive priests, and Jim warns him he's talking about the Church, good people who've done a lot for the city.
Matt tells Robby and the team the Church used a slew of coded designations to shuffle abusive priests through parishes far more often than normal, and Mike gets Sipe on the phone.
The team huddles around a speakerphone as Sipe tells them fifty percent of clergy aren't celibate and that a 1985 Church report warning of a billion-dollar pedophile-priest liability was buried, then estimates the true number could be ninety priests in Boston.
This scene
Ben eats lunch, Robby and Mike download him. Ben’s shocked.
BEN
Ninety fucking priests? In Boston?
ROBBY
That’s what he said.
BEN
If there were ninety of these
bastards people would know.
MIKE
Maybe they do.
BEN
And no one said a thing?
MIKE
Good Germans?
BEN
I don’t think that’s a comparison
you want to make publicly.
ROBBY
MacLeish knew and said nothing.
BEN
That’s thirteen priests, big
difference between thirteen and
ninety. Where’s this guy Sipe
getting his numbers?
MIKE
He’s studied this for thirty years,
he’s a trained psychotherapist --
BEN
Okay, but we need something more
than a metric from some hippy ex-
priest who’s shacking up with a nun.
MIKE
So we’ll track down more victims,
we’ll get more priests. Then we can
check them against the directories.
BEN
That’s a shitload of victims.
MIKE
We’ll get them.
BEN
How long’s it gonna take?
Mike shrugs. Robby considers. Then...
ROBBY
Too long.
Robby gets up, moves for the door. Maybe with an idea.
BEN
Meeting over?
ROBBY
For now.