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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 73 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.
Sipe's phone call reframes the scope: his 6% estimate implies ninety abusive priests in Boston, not thirteen, and Robby proposes working the directories backwards to find them.
Across pizzerias, T-stops, libraries and cafeterias, the whole team keeps grinding through directories, building the growing list of suspect priests.
Matt finds a directory entry placing a treatment center just steps from his own house, and pales before leaving to check it in person.
Matt walks the two blocks to confirm the treatment center's address, stunned to find it's a real house on his own street.
This scene
Matt sits on the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator, taping a note to the door. We push in over his shoulder...
“Kids. Stay away from this house at 276 Pelton Street. And stay away from the men who live inside it.”
Beside the note is a B&W photo of the house down the street.