The Keepers is a complex documentary series about a group of senior women trying to solve a crime — the 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a teacher at a Catholic high school in Baltimore that many of the documentary subjects attended decades ago. The series and the women at its heart suggest that the murder was related to the alleged crimes of Father Joseph Maskell, a chaplain at Archbishop Keough High School who was accused of sexually abusing students there. Cesnik, who went by Sister Cathy, knew about the allegations of abuse, and she was going to report it, her former students say on camera. One of them, Jean Wehner, who brought a lawsuit against Maskell in the 1990s, says Maskell led her to Cesnik’s body before the nun’s remains were reported to police. Furthermore, some of the series' subjects say people affiliated with the church worked to suppress criminal prosecution of Maskell.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore has been railing against The Keepers online since its May 19 release, trying out hashtags like #TheKeepersUntold and #TheKeepersTruth in an attempt to discredit the documentary. At one point, its Twitter account retweeted a user who described the documentary as “fiction”; The Keepers’ director, Ryan White, took a screenshot of a tweet from the archdiocese’s account that said a recently completed test of Maskell’s DNA did not match DNA found with Cesnik’s remains. The church used emojis and the term “SPOILER ALERT.”

“You would have to ask them what that PR strategy is, but to me, it's sickening,” White told BuzzFeed News. The archdiocese’s dismissive tweets, he said, “led to me [being] on the phone with Maskell survivors in tears wondering why this institution continues to put them through the wringer in this type of way. Having spent three years with these survivors, who I believe ... it makes me angry.”

The church did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday, but Sean Caine, the director of communications at the archdiocese, spoke with BuzzFeed News Monday. “Obviously, as complex of a story as this is, it's not really ideal to play out on social media,” Caine said. The tweets, particularly the “fiction” tweet, suggested the church didn’t believe the abuse allegations. “In retrospect, it was a bad judgment,” he said. “That’s why we deleted it.”

On the day The Keepers launched, the church tweeted, “We don't dispute the abuse committed by Fr. Maskell, but The Keepers premise & conclusion are wrong,” with a picture of a pen checking off a checklist. White was mystified.

“I think if you ask anybody who's watched The Keepers, the premise is that girls were being abused and confided in Sister Cathy. The conclusion is that no one's ever been held accountable for the murder or the abuse,” he said. “I don't know what they mean when they say ‘the premise and the conclusion.’ They seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouth. ... What they're actually doing there is continuing to call certain survivors liars.”

In addition to Wehner, Charles Franz is another Maskell accuser who makes a claim disputed by the church; in the docuseries, he says that his mother told the archdiocese in 1967 that Maskell was abusing him. Franz’s account is directly contradicted by the archdiocese, which told White it had never heard any reports of abuse by Maskell until Wehner came forward as an adult in the 1990s. According to Caine, during settlement negotiations with the archdiocese last June, Franz said that he never told his mother about the abuse. The church was not asked directly about the comments Franz made in the documentary, Caine told BuzzFeed News. “We certainly would have responded to that,” he said.

