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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 81 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.
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.
MacLeish's emailed list confirms forty-five priests, and Marty, realizing Law's outsized reaction to the Porter story means he already knew about others, pushes the team to focus on the institution rather than individual predators.
A Dorchester victim tells Sacha his mother served the visiting Bishop cookies rather than press charges after learning about the abuse, and Maryetta Dussourd separately describes the pressure to stay silent.
Sacha pins fifteen priests' names to the growing corkboard while Sipe describes over the phone how abusers are emotionally arrested at a child's level.
This scene
Sacha sits with the a COP, 40s, African-American.
COP
Sure, the chief knew, everybody
knew. But nobody wants to cuff a
priest.
SACHA
What about the prosecutor?
COP
I shouldn’t talk about this shit.
SACHA
I think you should actually.
Sacha waits, stares him down.
103a EXT. JAMAICA PLAIN - DAY 103a
Sacha talks to a painter on a ladder.
SACHA
Do you know a Father Hurley or a
Father Gale?
MAN
I do.
103aa EXT. TWO DECKER, DORCHESTER - DAY 103aa
A man yells at Matt from his porch.
MAN
You get out of here before I MATT kick the shit out of you, Sorry to bother you. Sorry alright? to bother you....
MAN
You leave me alone, leave my brother
alone, you hear me goddammit?