In fact, the investigative staff of the Boston Globe has done the Catholic Church an enormous favor…. They were the good guys, the guys in the white hats as opposed to the bad guys in the red hats.
—FATHER ANDREW M. GREELEY
Every new editor likes to make a splash the first day on the job. But Marty Baron’s inaugural Monday morning story meeting at the Boston Globe on July 30, 2001, would hit with all the force of one of those rare summer hurricanes that sweeps up the Atlantic Coast to hammer New England.
The Florida-born Baron—forty-six at the time and a twenty-five-year newspaper veteran—had held senior editing posts at the
Los Angeles Times and the
New York Times before returning to his native state to serve the last eighteen months as the executive editor of the
Miami Herald. There he had been on a fantastic roll. The
Herald had won national praise for its aggressive handling of the Florida vote count debacle in which the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore teetered on a review of “hanging chads” and other ballot peculiarities. In pursuit of the story, the
Herald sponsored its own recount and launched legal challenges, running up a bill of $850,000 for its owner, Knight Ridder. Then, in April, the
Herald had received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for “balanced and gripping on-the-scene coverage” of the Elian Gonzalez affair.
1 Young Elian’s story had riveted the nation twelve months before when federal agents seized the boy from his Miami relatives to reunite him with his Cuban father.
Despite Baron’s own impressive press clippings, the new editor tended to be the type of manager who makes a low-key first impression, asking questions rather than calling shots. At sessions like this editorial meeting—which Matthew Storin, his predecessor, had established as the standard day-starter—the main order of business was a critique of the morning’s paper and a review of what stories were in the works. And Baron was content to use his first meeting for that purpose.
While the Geoghan stories were not particularly prominent, two consecutive Sunday pieces by the
Globe columnist Eileen McNamara caught Baron’s eye in the week before the meeting.
3 They piqued his curiosity both about his new paper and about the Massachusetts court system. McNamara had noted that a Church-requested seal on the Geoghan case prevented the public from peering “into corners of the Church that the cardinal would prefer to keep forever in shadow.” Baron was somewhat surprised by the response of the assembled editors as he ran down a list of possible stories and got to the Geoghan case. There wasn’t any follow-up planned, they said. The paper seemed stumped by the court’s confidentiality order.
He could certainly see why his new subordinates might be reluctant to pursue a major Geoghan article that lacked documentary support from court filings or interviews with the parties involved. Such coverage would be nearly devoid of the detail necessary to make the case come alive. “Of course I was looking for interesting stories,” says Baron. “But I find people just arguing with each other to be pretty dissatisfying. It’s important to get beyond the ‘he-said, she-said’ quality of news reports, to what actually happened, to what the underlying truth is.” To do the Geoghan case that kind of journalistic justice would mean detailing the actions of the abusers, how their crimes had impacted the victims, and how the Church hierarchy had responded, for starters.
The Globe owned two gold medals among the sixteen Pulitzers on its trophy wall. The 1966 prize had honored its service through a campaign that kept a politically connected jurist from being appointed as a federal judge. Then, in 1975, the paper’s coverage of Boston school desegregation had been cited.
The “Prospecting” Begins
Baron’s idea about trying to get the court records unsealed and investigating Geoghan’s life as a sexual predator struck Bradlee and Robinson as particularly courageous because of its potential to embarrass the most powerful institution in their heavily Catholic city. Also, the decisiveness and speed with which the new editor had called such a critical meeting with his investigative leaders were a gust of fresh air blowing from the editor’s office. While such snap sessions might seem normal in many newsrooms, in previous Globe administrations such a Baron-Bradlee-Robinson session probably would not have taken place without a half-dozen other editors being marshaled as well, and possibly even with publisher Richard Gilman being consulted. It was the Globe’s culture.
If the unit itself had a long history, the 2001 edition was relatively new. Only Matt Carroll, the team’s computer-assisted reporting specialist, had been there more than a year. Robinson had taken the team leader job just after the 2000 elections, drawn to the job partly by the prospect of being able to hand-pick two reporters to fill vacancies on a squad of four members, including himself.
Looking for complementary skills and personalities—and steering clear of the “substantial egos” that he had seen infect the investigative ranks at some papers—he had selected state house reporter Michael Rezendes and legal affairs writer Sacha Pfeiffer. As it turned out, that meant that the new Spotlight was made up of four native Bostonians, all of whom happened to have Roman Catholic upbringings. (Robinson, though still having some Church-related associations, jokes that he is more of a “collapsed Catholic.”)
7Spotlight typically came up with its own ideas. Says Robinson: “We go to the editors and we say we want to look into ‘A.’ We don’t actually launch a project on ‘A’ until we’ve done enough of what I call prospecting to determine that we can get ‘A.’ Can we get documents? Can we get people to talk to us? Is it worth Spotlight’s effort?” Working this way, Spotlight rolled out three or four major projects a year along with a few shorter-term stories. A Geoghan investigation would hardly be typical, of course. For one thing, Spotlight had been asked to check things out by the paper’s new editor. That gave it special weight. For another, all the team members were clear—even without having done any reporting—that the story had the potential to dwarf any previous Spotlight project.
Rezendes had never known anyone personally who claimed to have been abused. Still, he says, “I remember having the thought, long before I got on the Spotlight Team, that clergy sexual abuse was an epidemic.” And Pfeiffer had a particular professional interest in the subject. In her coverage of the courts, she had written occasional spot stories about suits that had been filed by lawyer Mitchell Garabedian on behalf of Geoghan’s victims. In those stories, though, the detail was extremely thin, leaving to the imagination what awful specifics of child abuse were sealed away in the court filings.
The team members also were aware that stories about Geoghan and a Church cover-up of clergy sexual abuse were hardly new. Indeed, along with the story the Herald had broken about Cardinal Law’s awareness of Geoghan’s history, reporter Kristen Lombardi of Boston’s weekly Phoenix had focused on the priest and some of his victims earlier in the year. No documentation at that point had backed up the suggestion that the Church was coddling Geoghan or other accused priests, however. Mostly Spotlight was curious about how far Geoghan’s sexual abuse had extended and whether the problem went much beyond the case of one bad apple.
A Green Light for Spotlight
“After several days of rummaging around we came upon people who told us that Geoghan was the tip of the iceberg,” Robinson says. “I remember at the time saying to my wife, ‘What if it was ten or twelve priests? What an extraordinary story that would be.’” The Church’s own studies showed that pedophilia was a problem among no more than 0.5 percent of priests, or one of every two hundred, about the same as the population as a whole. But what Spotlight was hearing suggested a problem more insidious among the 650 priests in the archdiocese than the occasional bad apple infecting the clergy’s barrel. Perhaps far more insidious.
Robinson reported first to Bradlee, then to Baron: “We hadn’t advanced the ball much on Geoghan,” he told them, but the team had heard reliably that Geoghan was one of many. And Geoghan was unusual not for the number of his victims, but “because his case had actually gotten to the lawsuit stage in court, whereas a large number of other cases had been quietly settled in chancery court.”
Baron immediately gave the green light to Spotlight. Albano, the leader of the Globe legal team, provided arguments for and against trying to unseal the documents, calling the chance of success about fifty-fifty. “Those are actually pretty good odds for newspapers,” says Baron, “so we decided to go to court.” He had called publisher Richard Gilman before the decision to pursue the reporting and the court documents and had gotten the go-ahead. Says Baron: “I doubt he expected his new editor, as his first act—or ever, for that matter—to be confronting the Catholic Church in court.” It was the start of many months of encouragement from the top.
On the Spotlight Team, Rezendes was “the Geoghan guy,” which meant getting to know Mitchell Garabedian, who as attorney for the eighty-six victims had filed a total of eighty-four separate lawsuits. Rezendes’s approach involved a lot of schmoozing with the lawyer, something he considered himself quite good at. “But mostly I got close to his clients,” he says. He spent weeks interviewing victims, many of them lower-middle-class young adults who had been abused years before. Rezendes’s experience in East Boston was valuable. “Some victim would be telling me his story, but be embarrassed and untrusting, and I’d say, ‘Where do you live?’ And he’d say over on Hyde Park Avenue. And I’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, over by the Hi-Top Liquor Store.’ Because I knew the neighborhoods, I could shoot the breeze.”
The task of building a database of priests fell to Carroll, who had grown up in suburban Dedham and had started in journalism on the staff of the rival Boston Herald. Carroll had trained in CAR, as computer-assisted reporting is known, and had taught its techniques to other Globe staffers. Somewhere he had heard in class that CAR had played a critical role in every Pulitzer Prize for Public Service since 1980. In the early days investigating the Geoghan story, the database was kept on a simple, even primitive spreadsheet.
Thanks to Robinson, though, the database got its first big infusion. “Robby had this bright idea, which was to look at the annual reports issued by the diocese—their Yellow Pages for priests, basically,” says Carroll.9 Stacking two decades of directories in the office, and scanning them name by name, team members found some bland-looking yet suspicious notations. For a large number of priests, the directories used terms like “awaiting assignment,” “sick leave,” “clergy personnel office,” or simply “unassigned”—this in a Church with a severe priest shortage. Sometimes, of course, the priest would really be sick, as checks by Spotlight would show. But in many cases the team’s investigations turned up a background of sordid abuse allegations that correlated with the bland annotations. Eventually the team’s file would expand to include nearly two hundred names of suspect priests.
Carroll, like the rest of the team, found Robinson to be an inspiring—and untiring—boss. “Nothing fazes him. He’s done every job at the paper, and he is a madman for work,” says Carroll. As the Geoghan story developed, Robinson’s day in the office started at five-thirty in the morning, ninety minutes before his normal start time.
The team did not publish any stories based on its database or initial interviews, which were sometimes off the record. Instead it built a critical mass of material that the team expected would help Robinson and Bradlee determine the story theme. Even without writing, though, there was plenty to do in the office. Looking through the Church directories for “red flags”—those “sick leave” or “awaiting assignment” designations—led to a grueling but productive team ritual, says Sacha Pfeiffer. “One person would be typing, one person would be calling out information, and we would be divvying up this tedious task of typing and reading,” she says.
Reporters contacted more attorneys who had filed cases against the Church. And Spotlight studied every lawsuit it could find that named the institution to see what was alleged and what documents might be available. “Obviously, a lot of cases were slip-and-fall cases,” Pfeiffer says, “but there were plenty that weren’t.”
10Reporters as Counselors
For one thing, she attuned herself to the earlier eras in which much of the abuse had occurred. Beyond the sense of being betrayed by someone in a position of trust, she says, “people were afraid of being labeled as gay, with all the terrible consequences that came with that,” she says. Sometimes Pfeiffer got dramatic results when she was able to get an interviewee to move past that fear. “This wall broke down, and people just told their stories. Before, there had been this stigma, and people were embarrassed and afraid and ashamed, with all the self-blame that comes with sexual abuse—multiplied, because it was priests who were doing it,” she says. “Then all of a sudden the stigma was gone, and they had this waterfall of stories.” Occasionally victims decided to tell her their stories of abuse before communicating with their own families. Pfeiffer wouldn’t let them. “In some ways, we ended up protecting the victims from themselves,” she says.
As they compared notes, discussing among themselves the terrors that young Catholics were being put through by Geoghan and others, the four reporters related to each other on a personal level—something unfamiliar to them from previous Spotlight work. It was then that they realized for the first time that each had been raised Catholic, although none was personally acquainted with victims of accused priests, at least as far as they knew. Each had a visceral reaction to the idea of priests violating the trust of families by preying on their children though. That Church officials would protect the priests rather than their young victims seemed almost inconceivable.
Reporting on school busing had won the Globe its second Pulitzer Public Service Gold Medal in 1975. Back then, the Pulitzer board had cited the Globe’s “massive and balanced coverage of the Boston school desegregation crisis.” Robinson, who had been among the staffers covering the busing crisis, shared Paulson’s view that many blue-collar conservative Catholics had soured on the paper during the controversy. For a quarter-century, the Globe had lived with it. Neither journalist had any idea how another challenge to the Church from the paper might affect the way these disaffected Catholics viewed the Globe. They did know, however, that if the Church story developed into a huge project, bringing Paulson onto Spotlight was an option that would help the Globe explain some of these deeper issues.
Robinson describes the early progress on the team’s research as “chipping away at a thick wall with the dull edge of a knife.” As August wound down, though, prospects for a good story, and maybe several, seemed better each day. Not only was progress being made on the Geoghan case, but the number of priests in the database was swelling.
Wait ’Til Next Year
The Globe was nearing a decision about whether to go forward with legally challenging the confidentiality order in the Geoghan case. It was a sensitive internal issue in the Boston newsroom because the New York Times Company policy calls for corporate lawyers in New York to review all legal actions by units, including the Globe.
On September 6, with Rezendes the only reporter present, the Globe attorney Albano argued the case in the Springfield courtroom of Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Constance M. Sweeney, a graduate of Springfield’s Cathedral High School and of Newton College of the Sacred Heart, since absorbed by Boston College. The parties prepared for a ruling that might take two months or so.
The next day, Robinson had a reporting breakthrough. He met in downtown Boston with two sources. They provided a list of priests who had been accused of sexual abuse but whose accusers had been paid so that they would not sue. There were about thirty-five names on the list—three times the number that Robinson had considered worthy of a major story just a month earlier.
How to proceed now seemed clear: with the Geoghan angle becoming more competitive—if court documents were unsealed, they would go to the Herald and the Phoenix, too, of course—Spotlight would attack the story on two fronts. It would explore the Geoghan case in depth, no matter what the decision was on court-imposed confidentiality. Meanwhile, it would capitalize on the team’s exclusive information about the shockingly high number of priests accused of being child molesters—and information suggesting that Cardinal Law and others were allowing accused priests to keep working with children in parishes.
The Globe will never know.
After departing from Boston’s Logan Airport on a warm, sunny Tuesday morning, two Boeing 767 jetliners operated by American and United, loaded with fuel for their transcontinental flights, were hijacked by terrorists. Three hundred miles down the coast, they were flown into the upper stories of New York’s World Trade Center. A third 767, originating that morning in Washington, D.C., smashed into the outer E- and D-Rings of the five-ringed Pentagon. A fourth jetliner crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania without hitting a target, likely after passengers overpowered the terrorists.
In the heart-stopping shock of September 11, 2001, only one thing was clear in the Globe newsroom as editors and reporters watched the Twin Towers collapse: the paper’s best people needed to be thrown immediately into a story with such global, national, regional, and local impact. Work on the Church stories was stopped. “The whole paper was mobilized to work on the 9/11 attacks,” says Marty Baron. “If that meant Church reporting was on hold, so be it.” The four Spotlight members, the elite of the paper’s investigators, were reassigned to the toughest of the endless stream of story ideas that emanated from the actions of the terrorists.
It wasn’t until mid-October that team members would return to the Church project. Nothing of their work on the topic would be published by the end of 2001, and thus nothing would be eligible for the 2002 Pulitzer Prizes. Those prizes, awarded that April, would overwhelmingly recognize 9/11 coverage—including the work of the New York Times for public service.
He Knew!
Along the first of Spotlight’s two tracks, the long list of priests hit with abuse allegations began development again as reporters explored how and why the Church allowed accused priests to stay in parish work—even as parents of victims were being paid so that they would not pursue lawsuits. The second track followed Geoghan.
Matt Carroll’s database continued to provide good leads. A priest listed on sick leave in the Church directories “became a person of interest to us and we went through every directory for every year to chart his entire career,” says Robinson. “We did it with every priest, and it was extremely time-consuming. It took us several weeks, and at the end of that we had a list of well over a hundred priests, including almost all of the thirty-some for whom we knew there had been secret settlements.”
Bradlee was encouraged about the interviews and the backlog of data coming together along the two tracks. He had been Metro editor in 1992 when the last big Church sexual abuse case had broken involving Fall River’s Father James Porter. Bradlee had felt that there was a lot more to the Porter story than the Globe had been able to report. He wanted the Geoghan story to say more about the prevalence of pedophilia in the Church, if possible, and how the hierarchy was dealing with it. The Porter story “hit the wall” because there was little evidence to support the claims of victims, Bradlee felt. In that case, too, the lawsuits had been sealed at the Church’s request. “What was missing there was the paper,” Bradlee says. “There were a bunch of plaintiffs who had gotten together and threatened to sue, but no suits.”
The lawyer reminded the Globe reporter of the slovenly Paul Newman character in the movie The Verdict. “You would go into his crappy little office and there’d be no receptionist, and cardboard boxes overflowing with documents and empty Styrofoam coffee cups. The place was a mess,” Rezendes says. He believed that Garabedian appreciated the sensitivity Rezendes showed when talking with clients who were abuse victims. But the reporter was working the lawyer, too. “I tried to romance him and be the best friend he ever had,” Rezendes says. “It’s kind of an art form, getting people to tell you things. And it’s as important as finding documents.”
It was working. To get Rezendes the critical documents that both men wanted public, the lawyer attached them to a formal response that he was making to a filing by Church lawyers. In a sealed case, attorneys are allowed to file unsealed attachments in specific instances. A document to support such a formal response is one such case.
As Rezendes sat in the Spotlight office looking through this windfall, one of Garabedian’s attachments “just exploded in my mind.” It was a 1984 letter from Bishop John d’Arcy to Archbishop Bernard Law—still a few months from being elevated to cardinal—warning him about Geoghan’s “history of homosexual involvement with young boys” and noting that the parish to which he was being assigned was already “divided and troubled” by other matters. “If something happens,” Bishop d’Arcy wrote, parishioners might be “convinced that the archdiocese has no concern for their welfare and simply sends them priests with problems.”
Rezendes was stunned. “All Law’s public statements to that date were that we didn’t know that much about pedophilia. It was that kind of response.” Sitting upright in the Spotlight office as he read the letter, “I said to myself—I think out loud—He knew!” Rezendes also noted in one of the Church directories that in 1984 Geoghan had been reassigned to a parish in Weston, where one of his duties was working with altar boys. “At that point I knew this was a monumental evil that we were dealing with,” Rezendes says. “As a story, it was going to be huge.”
Meanwhile, the effort by Albano to unseal the entire Geoghan file also was advancing without the competition taking much note. On November 20, Judge Sweeney delivered a bombshell to the archdiocese—she ruled in favor of the newspaper. The Church appealed, but a month later, on December 21, it lost the appeal as well. The release of ten thousand pages associated with all those Geoghan suits was scheduled for late January, roughly two weeks after the trial’s projected start date. The next strategy of Church lawyers was to write a letter threatening the Globe with legal action if it published material taken from records that were still confidential. Indeed, the letter said, sanctions would be sought even for asking questions of the priests involved.
The Spotlight Team proceeded undeterred, following the pedophile priest story along its two tracks: the Geoghan path and the trail of the secret settlements. In mid-December, Bradlee aimed Spotlight’s primary resources at preparing a curtain-raiser. The story would spell out what Spotlight knew about the Geoghan case and the role played by Cardinal Law in keeping the priest in circulation. Envisioned originally as a single 3,000-word piece, the Geoghan coverage soon took on a life of its own. Certainly there was too much powerful material for a single pre-trial story. The paper set January 6 and 7 as target dates for a two-part series. As Matt Carroll’s database continued to burgeon, it was about to become a hot January for Spotlight.
A Clerk, a Court, and a Clicking Clock
The timing seemed to work, though just barely. The Sunday story on January 6 would concentrate on the question of why it had taken thirty-four years and a succession of three cardinals and many bishops to place children out of Geoghan’s reach. The Monday story would liberally use the documents that Garabedian was to file on Friday. It would offer a timeline of Geoghan’s abuses and provide shocking details of just how he turned the children in his care into his victims.
Incorporating notes from his teammates, Rezendes started drafting the Sunday story in advance for Spotlight editor Robinson to edit. It would run with all four team members identified in a byline box and Rezendes listed as writer. “Our plan,” Rezendes says, “was to get these documents, go over them, and work all weekend.” Sacha Pfeiffer would write the Monday piece. To get the promised copies of the documents Garabedian filed on Friday, Rezendes and Carroll would show up at the court clerk’s office at 4:15 p.m., forty-five minutes short of closing time. The reporters planned to get them from the clerk, quickly copy them, and head back to Morrissey Boulevard to help crash out the two-parter. These would be the first Spotlight stories to appear since the Church project was authorized five months earlier.
“I believe in pampering clerks, so I very politely asked if there was someone else I could speak to,” Rezendes recalls. “Yes there was, but it took a while to get her supervisor to the counter, and the clock was clicking very loudly here.” The supervisor, also unaware that the filings should be open, had a suggestion: tell it to the judge.
Off the two Spotlight reporters went to the chambers of the Honorable Vierra Volterra—“whose name I will never forget,” Rezendes says—cooling their heels briefly in the jury box of an adjacent courtroom while he became available. “It was getting close to 5 o’clock. Matt and I went in to talk to him, and he had the documents on his desk. He said, ‘These are very sensitive documents.’ And I said, Yes, judge, they are. And he said to me, ‘Where is the editorial responsibility in publishing these documents?’”
Rezendes tried not to sigh too noticeably. “I didn’t believe I was going to have to get into a philosophical conversation with this judge.” But by then word had gotten to Robinson to rush a fax of the appeals court order to the courthouse. As Rezendes explained how responsible the Globe intended to be, the court clerk reappeared, fax in hand. “To his credit, the judge glanced at the appeals court ruling and just said, ‘Yep, that’s it. You can have it.’” Their long weekend was just beginning.
At the chancery, Cardinal Law had been asked weeks before to provide the Church’s side of the Geoghan story to the Globe, beyond the position it had taken in court. The cardinal had been silent. Now, told that a story was within a day or two of running, he called Baron directly to tell him that there would be no comment. He didn’t even care to see the questions the Globe offered to fax him.
Down in the Spotlight office, the focus was on writing and editing stories over a nonstop weekend. Drafts went from Robinson to Bradlee and then across the newsroom to Baron’s office. Robinson was impressed with what Baron sent back down to Spotlight. “Marty is a very quick, astute editor,” he says. “I have a memory on that first story that it was three or four thousand words, and Marty came back in about a half-hour’s time with a dozen fairly critical questions, including things that had not been addressed.”
On Sunday, the Feast of the Epiphany in the Church calendar, Globe readers had an epiphany of their own. The story that morning ran on page one under the headline “Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years; Aware of Geoghan Record, Archdiocese Still Shuttled Him from Parish to Parish”:
The front-page article jumped to two pages inside the paper, quoting from Bishop D’Arcy’s 1984 challenge to Law’s decision to move Geoghan to another parish. There was also one woman’s “poignant and prophetic” 1982 letter to Cardinal Law’s predecessor “expressing incredulity that the church to which she was devoted would give Geoghan another chance” after he had molested seven children in her family. A powerful interview with a victim, twenty-six-year-old Patrick McSorley, vividly detailed Geoghan’s abuse of him at twelve years old and said that to “find out later that the Catholic Church knew he was a child molester—every day it bothers me more and more.”
FIGURE 4.1 The Boston Globe began its series with an article across the top of the front page on January 6, 2002. Source: Used by permission.
Both stories carried a “Contact the Globe” box with the Spotlight telephone number, a separate confidential hotline, and an e-mail address. The hotline was to get a lot of use—and almost none of it the carping about an “anti-Catholic” bias that many staffers had expected.
Indeed, Mike Rezendes feared that he would come into work to a demonstration at the door. “This is, after all, the most Catholic city in America,” he says. Instead he encountered “an eerie quiet—no protestors, nothing.” Then all at once, it seemed, the lines clogged with calls of an unexpected kind: “People were incredibly angry, yes. But not at us. It was at this institution that they loved.” Or they called to report new cases of abuse. Checking the names of priests the callers named, Spotlight found that nearly all were mentioned already in its now-bulging database.
“Looking back, I believe the reason for not blaming the messenger was that we had the goods,” Rezendes says. “We did not use anonymous sources. It was irrefutable. It was completely locked tight. There wasn’t a fact in it that was wrong.” And the documents, either quoted in the article or put online in their entirety, “were riveting and appalling.”
As the new editor who was ultimately responsible, Marty Baron breathed a sigh of relief. Another followed when the usually combative Cardinal Law held a press conference a few days later. Far from attacking the Globe, the cardinal actually apologized to his flock. “It was clear that our stories were uncontestable, because he didn’t contest anything,” the editor says. “There was no fact that he challenged. And that alone added enormous weight to our coverage.” Other newspapers around the country, seeing the Church’s apologetic response, not only carried stories of the Boston paper’s disclosures but also slowly began launching investigations of their own local parishes.
“This Is Different”
The Globe investigative specialist Steven Kurkjian, a former Spotlight Team member, had recently been more of a “lone wolf” engaged in one-man projects for projects editor Bradlee. In preparation for the flood of Geoghan documents, Robinson managed to get Kurkjian assigned as the first of four additional Spotlight reporters for the Church stories. Eventually, one of his specialties would become the serious financial threat to the Church posed by the tens of millions of dollars of suits and by the waning support for Cardinal Law among the wealthy Catholic laity—which was not unrelated to the money crisis. By next December 1, Robinson and Kurkjian would be writing a page-one story headlined “Archdiocese Weighs Bankruptcy Filing.”
But first, there was the crunch on the Geoghan case. A January 24 front-page story, written by Robinson and Matt Carroll with Kurkjian joining the team names in the credit box, contained a penetrating analysis of the volumes of documents in the Geoghan case. The story was an exclusive; the paper had gotten documents a day ahead of the general release. Robinson says the team talked Garabedian into providing material early. That “beat” on its rivals reinforced the sense that the paper was invincible on the Church coverage.
The next Globe blockbuster—on Thursday, January 31—was the long-awaited piece on the secret settlements that the Church had signed, covering an estimated seventy or more priests. Headlined “Scores of Priests Involved in Sex Abuse Cases; Settlements Kept Scope of Issue Out of Public Eye,” the article was accompanied by thumbnails on twenty-three accused priests. The paper described the database that the Globe had assembled and how the Church’s own directories had tipped the paper to suspected molesters.
In a way, she helped make it harder for herself and her teammates, she acknowledges, by pushing for strong language to describe what had gone on between priests and their victims. “You couldn’t just continually use the word molest, because this meant a world of things. And it was important for readers to understand in more detail what had happened,” she says. That put Pfeiffer in the position of pressing victims to detail the sex acts that the priest forced on them—an uncomfortable position for interviewee and interviewer alike. “You’re dealing with a very delicate issue with very fragile people, but sometimes you would need to be firm with them,” she says. “You need very specific kinds of information about what happened to them sexually, because you need to figure out if this was a rape case, or touching—if you’re talking about criminal allegations.”
She took to spending extra time explaining why she was asking such detailed questions. “It’s invasive,” she says. “So I would be very open and say, I’m sorry to have to ask this; I know it’s very personal, but I need to understand what exactly happened, because I need to understand if it’s a criminal act. Sometimes you’d have to hold your breath a little bit as you asked the questions.” The answers often knocked her over.
Pfeiffer also was worried that readers would simply disbelieve such sordid truths. “Some people were resistant to the idea that a kid could be repeatedly molested by a priest. They thought that if something happened repeatedly, that meant it was consensual,” she says. “We needed to explain to them how it was possible, how the psychology works, how a friendship can be very carefully turned into a sexual relationship.” A manipulative power figure could do it, and it was important for readers to understand how even a child who sensed that something was not right could be persuaded to keep doing it.
If Robinson had one complaint about the way the Globe dealt with this multidimensional story, he says, it was the slowness with which reporters were added to Spotlight. “We were working sixteen-hour days and weekends. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.” And the newly public Geoghan papers were an avalanche. “We went through that first month, and certainly through the huge Geoghan ‘document dump,’ with just the four of us.” Kurkjian had reported for duty on the day the ten thousand pages of records arrived. Reporters Kevin Cullen and Thomas Farragher joined at the end of January. They hit the ground running. Among Farragher’s contributions was a February 3 study of the Church’s “culture of silence” in dealing with sexual abuse among priests. Cullen’s contributions included a May 12 analysis of how the scandal was eroding the traditional deference that many Catholics had for their Church.
At times, pure pathos flowed from the Globe’s pages. Take the February 3 story by Robinson. It began:
Like other victims of pedophile priests, Tom remembers vividly what happened just after he was molested in a dark corridor at Immaculate Conception School in Revere by the Rev. James R. Porter. It was 1960. He was 12. But he still recalls running.
He ran, and then he hid. Under a desk in a second-floor classroom, frozen in terror as Porter called out for him. And then he ran again, out of the school and home.
“It was such a tragic story,” the team leader says. “To sit with the father and listen to what happened to him, and how he had gradually come to trust the Church again. And then to hear what the mother had gone through when the family almost came apart again. It was a story you couldn’t over-write.”
Enter the Beat Reporter
The final addition to the Spotlight crew—and a vital one as the story expanded to require more analysis about the impact on the Church—was religion reporter Michael Paulson, who had been left out of the first wave of articles. Paulson, too, had been consumed with special projects after September 11. That had also been a major story for religion reporters.
Just after the first Spotlight Church stories ran, Paulson contributed occasional stories for the scandal coverage, although his chain of command remained through the Metro desk in the upstairs newsroom. But soon it became difficult answering to two masters, as he describes the arrangement. “I was trying to juggle regular religion reporting and my role in the unfolding crisis,” he says. So he approached Bradlee about becoming Spotlight’s eighth member and was added to the team.
16FIGURE 4.2 The Globe’s Spotlight team on the deck of editor Martin Baron’s home. From left, Thomas Farragher, Michael Rezendes, Kevin Cullen, Michael Paulson, Ben Bradlee Jr., Walter Robinson, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll, Baron, and Stephen Kurkjian. In the background is the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Cardinal Bernard Law’s home church in the Boston diocese. Photo by Essdras M. Suarez, Globe staff. Source: Used by permission.
For the Pulitzer board members who convened at Columbia, too, the Church scandal “was obviously the big news of the year,” says the Oregonian editor Sandra Mims Rowe, who was on the board. “You knew the Globe was going to end up being a contender long before you got to the meeting.” But under the board’s analysis, it was anything but automatic. In her term as a board member from 1996 to 2004, Rowe says, coverage of major stories was often faulted for flaws that turned up under intense review. “You’d see things and say, Boy, in the right hands, this could be wonderful, but the quality of the work just is not there,” she says. In the Globe’s case, though, “the caliber of the journalism and the execution were something rare.”19
FIGURES 4.3 AND 4.4 The Globe’s 2003 Pulitzer Gold Medal, front and reverse. Photos by Essdras M. Suarez, Globe staff. Source: Used by permission.
That opinion extended far beyond the board. “In some ways, the clerical abuse scandal has become a journalism textbook. Consider the elements: power, corruption, intrigue, tragedy, sex, betrayal, money—and an institution that dates back 2,000 years,” the
Los Angeles Times New England correspondent Elizabeth Mehren wrote in a study of the crisis for Nieman Reports. “The villains are despicable. Meanwhile, the proverbial quest for truth and justice—what brought us all into this line of endeavor, after all—is always at the forefront.”
20The scandal, of course, continues to have national and global repercussions far beyond journalism—remaining a major issue in the Church since the March 2013 election of Pope Francis. The pope went as far as to initiate in June 2015 a tribunal aimed at bishops suspected of enabling abusive priests.
21 And it continues to be felt most deeply in Boston, considered the nation’s most Catholic city.
22 Spotlight, a motion picture account of how the
Globe covered the Church story, was being prepared for release in late 2015.
23“There’s No Harder Target”
Just when did the Globe team members first sense that the story had the potential to be a blockbuster and perhaps a recipient of the Public Service Pulitzer? Matt Carroll admits to acknowledging the prospect of a prize during the April 2002 Pulitzer announcements when the New York Times and its staffers walked off with its seven awards, including the gold medal. “I remember thinking, Gee, I wonder if they’ll be announcing our names next year,” he says. “It’s one of the things you dismiss, and then move ahead.”
From Bob Woodward comes high praise for the
Globe, along with a warning for the media about how few other papers assume the same kinds of risks that the
Globe and the
Post did. “It takes a particular kind of energy and courage on the part of editors and publishers to support daily incremental coverage,” Woodward says. Too many projects today involve “low-hanging fruit,” subjects that reporters and readers already know are tinged with scandal. “I worry sometimes that we don’t pick the really hard, important targets that have much broader implications,” he adds. “That’s where I take my hat off to the
Globe, because there’s no harder target than the Catholic Church.”
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2003—The
Boston Globe for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national and international reaction and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.
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