Spotlight, a new film premiering November 6th, will focus attention on the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of the city’s priest abuse scandal. The film, which takes its title from the name of the investigative team at the Boston Globe, will give movie-goers a behind-the-scenes look at the city’s largest newspaper’s decision to delve into the dark world of sexual abuse hidden for years behind the cloak of the Archdiocese of Boston.
Veteran reporter and editor Walter Robinson, who led the Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Spotlight team, tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies: “These crimes were unimaginable, and that they could’ve been countenanced and enabled by such an iconic institution, it gave us so much energy to pursue the story and get the story and make it public.”
In an interview with National Public Radio, Robinson explains the decision for an in-depth investigation:
It got started at the very end of July 2001. The Globe got a new editor, Marty Baron, who came to us from the Miami Herald, and that’s important because in Florida virtually everything is public, and Marty got to Boston and he read a column by Eileen McNamara about a case, lawsuits against a priest allegedly involved in sexual abuse, in which the court records had been sealed by a judge so the personnel records of the priest were not available publicly, and in her column Eileen had written, ‘The truth may never be known.’ And to Marty Baron, that’s like waving a red flag.
The movie will run in select theatres across the country. Watch the trailer below: