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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 71 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.
Robby proposes working the directories backward, searching by suspicious designation to identify abusive priests instead of confirming known ones.
The team fans out cross-referencing hundreds of directory entries, circling priests marked 'sick leave' or 'unassigned' and logging them into a growing spreadsheet late into the night.
Across pizzerias, T-stops, libraries and cafeterias, the whole team keeps grinding through directories, building the growing list of suspect priests.
This scene
Matt sits at a desk at home, hunched over a directory, scanning it with a ruler. He pauses... leans in further.
CLOSE ON a directory entry. O’Sullivan. Treatment Center, 276 Pelton Street, West Roxbury.
MATT
Holy shit.
Matt PALES, then takes off his glasses and leaves the house.