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Spotlight · written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy · 2015
Scene 88 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.
Judge Sweeney corrects the Church's lawyer for conflating the Cardinal with the Archdiocese as Garabedian bristles at being accused of smearing Law's name.
On the courthouse steps, Garabedian tells Mike off the record about ex-priest Benzevich's buried 1962 warning about Geoghan, and reveals fourteen damning sealed documents he attached to a public motion Wilson Rogers unknowingly forced him to file.
Mike sprints from his car across the street toward the courthouse.
This scene
A mousy looking CLERK #2 (O’BRIAN) pushes a BINDER across a help desk to... Mike. Who starts going through the file.
CLERK #2 (O’BRIAN)
Docket entry #49 in the Geoghan
case.
(then)
We’re closing in ten minutes.
CLOSE ON DOCKET ENTRY #49: Plaintiff’s opposition to Reverend Anthony Benzevich’s Motion for Protective Order. Dated APR 2, 2001. And a list of 14 exhibits.
Mike, excited, opens the file, finds the motion and a FOLDER, EXHIBITS A - N. Mike opens it. It’s empty. HOLY SHIT.