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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 68 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.
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.
Ben, stunned by Sipe's estimate, presses Robby and Mike for harder proof than one researcher's metric before he'll believe ninety.
This scene
Robby walks through the newsroom. Mike catches up to him.
MIKE
What do you got?
ROBBY
What if we work backwards?
MIKE
What do you mean? From what?
ROBBY
The directories. We’ve been using
them to confirm bad priests. What
if we do it the other way around?
MIKE
(getting it)
Use the directories to identify bad
priests?
ROBBY
Yeah, exactly. We search by
designation, we look for any priest
on ‘sick leave’ or ‘unnassigned’ --
MIKE
Or for priests who moved around a
lot...
ROBBY
Yeah.
MIKE
That’s gonna take a load of time.
ROBBY
Not if we’re all on it.
MIKE
You too?
ROBBY
Generally, that’s what all means.
MIKE
Yeah, generally.
That’s the plan. Robby looks set. Off Mike, we --