Spotlight

In Irish Catholic Boston, priests were molesting young boys. It was going on for a long time, and it was ignored. Then four people who worked for The Boston Globe did something about it.

In 2001, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) joined The Boston Globe as a new editor. He discovered a small mention about a pedophile priest, John Geoghan, and a lawyer who said that the Archbishop of Boston, ironically named Cardinal Law, knew the priest was sexually abusing boys and doing nothing about it.

Baron met with Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), in charge of the “Spotlight” team, investigative reporters, along with him a total of four: Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and researcher Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James). This was a story for the team.

But they were cautious. This looked like taking on the Boston Archdiocese. Their deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) also was skeptical. (His father, Ben Bradlee, had gone pretty far out on a limb at the Washington Post on the Watergate coverage.)

Starting out following one priest who moved from parish to parish, the team discovered sexual abuse of children by priests in Massachusetts and a Boston cover-up. The search grew to thirteen priests. Then ninety. They continued researching, finding people who would actually talk, and came up with a list of 87 names. Then September 11, 2001 happened. The story lost priority.

They later found documents that proved Cardinal Law (Len Cariou) knew about the growing situation and ignored it. They began to publish the story in early 2002.

When a story was printed with a telephone number requesting victims to come forward, phone calls flooded in.

The series of stories won a Pulitzer Prize for civil service. The film ends with a list of cities all over the world where sexual abuse was made public.

Cardinal Bernard Law was reassigned to a senior position of honor in Rome.