Walter Robinson leads the Boston Globe’s investigative team, “Spotlight”. The “Spotlight” team won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for uncovering the Catholic church sexual abuse scandal. Its efforts were the basis of the 2015 film “Spotlight”, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. I spoke with Mr. Robinson by phone about the investigation of the Catholic church. A transcript of the interview is below. (I am “B” and he is “W”.)

B: I’m with Walter Robinson. He’s a journalist for the Boston Globe. Thanks for talking with me.

W: Nice to talk to you.

B: The investigation began when it came to light that Cardinal Law, who was a top priest in Boston, transferred one of his reverends to a different district even though he knew the reverend had molested hundreds of children. Were you guys skeptical of investigating this story further?

W: I don’t think we were skeptical. The newspaper had written about the case of this one priest and we had a new editor, Marty Baron, who came in at the end of July of 2001. He almost immediately said, well, we should investigate this priest. He asked the Spotlight team, which I edit, if we would do it. And that’s what we set out to do. Within a week we discovered that this one priest, whose name is John Geoghan, was really the tip of a much larger iceberg. The church had hidden the crimes of some large number of other priests.

B: Can you talk a bit more about the influence of the Catholic Church in 90s era Boston? How powerful was it as an institution and how important was it culturally?

W: Very powerful and very important culturally. Boston is the most catholic of all the major cities in the United States. About half of the population in Eastern Massachusetts, which is the Boston archdiocese essentially, is atleast nominally Catholic. And the church, because of the large number of immigrants who came into Boston starting in the 1800s (there was, for instance, a large number of Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans who were Catholic), the archbishop in Boston was the most powerful political person in Massachusetts for a long time. He was seldom questioned. Whatever he wanted done was done.

B: Like you said earlier, you eventually discovered that the problem is not just with one priest – it is with many priests. Did you get to speak with any of the priests who were accused of abuse? According to the movie, one of the priests who was discovered to be a sexual abuser was a priest at your high school?

W: That is correct. I never talked to him but I did seem him in a courtroom when he plead guilty to the rape of a child. He was eventually sent to prison. My colleagues and I talked to, I believe, a half a dozen priests who were credibly accused. Many priests we tried to talk to, for obvious reasons, did not want to say anything publicly. But we did talk to some of them.

B: Why was this such a widespread problem across the Catholic church? Do you think the celibacy rule played a role?

W: Well it’s certainly a complicated subject. Psychologists, psychiatrists, victims of priests – they’ve been arguing over it for decades. A large part of it can be attributed to the culture of the church. The church had become a very clerical society. That is, the church existed for the benefit of the clergy. That was number one. Number two, there was a celibacy requirement that was sort a dark cloud overhanging everything. That’s an unrealistic requirement in any society. Well over half of priests violated their oath of celibacy. There’s good data on this. And of course the majority of those people broke their oaths with other consenting adults but they all had a secret to keep. And within that sort of closed society, it was easy for priests who preyed on children, especially on post-pubescent boys and girls (just over 12 and 13 years old), to go relatively undetected. One thing we discovered in our reporting is that there had been a lot of whispers and inside knowledge about some of these priests but nobody said anything because everyone had an interest in keeping sexual activity quiet.

B: Lawyers helped keep the activity quiet. Many lawyers secretly settled these sexual abuse cases behind closed doors. How did those lawyers rationalize their actions? Did they feel remorseful eventually or did they just say “this is my job”?

W: That’s a good question. As a leadup to that, I should add that another reason for keeping sexual abuse a secret was the overwhelming impulse to protect the reputation of the church. So the cardinals, instead of rooting out the bad priests, simply moved them from one parish to another. As for the lawyers – there were many plaintiff lawyers who took on cases of victims of the priests in good conscience. They were interested, for each individual client, in getting that client the best possible settlement. In this case, that involved going directly to the church and not going to the courthouse and filing a lawsuit. Because if you file a lawsuit, it becomes public and the lawyers for the church didn’t want it public. Lawyers knew that if they went straight to the church and bypassed the courts, they would get a bigger settlement for their client. They could rationalize, for good reason, each individual settlement as being in the best interest of their client. And in those cases, every party to the agreement signed a nondisclosure agreement that prevented them from saying what happened. But collectively that kept the extent of the problem hidden from public view for decades and decades. And I think when we began reporting in January 2002, one of our first stories was that the church had secretly settled cases for 70 priests. That kept all of those cases private.

B: So far, we’ve mainly spoken about the side of the church. I want to talk a bit about the victims. I’m sure getting the victims to open up was the most difficult part of your investigation. How did you go about doing that? How do you go about asking someone about events in their life that are so sensitive and traumatic, they probably haven’t even told their family members about it?

W: Yeah. That’s a good question. Initially, when we were still uncovering the extent of the corruption, it was very difficult to get victims to talk to us. We spent a lot of time talking to victims off the record to begin with, where they would share their stories with us. The argument we made was that, if you are willing to speak out about this, even if we don’t use your name, it will help bring this kind of behavior to an end. I think that was a reason many of victims came forward. And then when we began to publish, we posted a notice saying: “if you have information, contact us”. What happened was, over the next couple of weeks, just in Boston, 300 victims of priests called us to tell us their stories. Many of these victims had never told anyone because they felt all this shame and guilt as children when it happened to them. And many of them blamed themselves, even though they were 10 or 11 or 12 when it happened.

B: How did abuse affect these children in the long run?



W: I have to say, in the majority of cases, the abuse caused lifelong problems. The rate of substance abuse, the rate of suicide, the rate of depression, the almost inability to keep open relationships with spouses – all of those things were and continue to be, for many victims (or “survivors”, as they call themselves) lifelong problems.

B: What resistance did you guys face from the church during your investigation? Did it threaten you in any way?

W: No, we didn’t receive any threats. The church resisted in a sense. At the beginning of the investigation, the Cardinal found out about the investigation. He called us, not to put pressure on us – although maybe a little pressure was intended – to ask what we were doing. We said: if we need help from you, we will call you – which we eventually did. We were under lots of internal pressure because we knew that, if we got it wrong, it could ruin the newspaper. The stakes were so high. So we were all very careful about our reporting. We documented everything we did. We assumed that when we began our reporting, even if we crossed every t and dotted every i, the church would still come after us. In fact, while there was some initial criticism, we had the church’s documents and there was very little “blame the messenger” effect in the end.

B: Has the church changed significantly since your reports came out?

W: I think the church thinks it’s changed significantly. And in many dioceses and archdioceses, there has been significant change. But, generally, if you speak to advocates for survivors of abuse, if you speak to law enforcement officials, I think most of them would conclude, fairly, that the church has not gone far enough. Particularly, the church has not been transparent enough about what happened. It is still the case that nearly half or more of the American dioceses have not been willing to admit the extent of the abuse that occured within them. And until that happens, I don’t think the church can heal.

B: It seems to me that, while the church itself was obviously a big issue, an equally important issue was a culture that blindly revered the church. Would you agree with that?

W: I would agree with that. One lesson we learned from this, and it doesn’t apply just to the Catholic church: in our society, all of us tend to put our iconic institutions on a pedestal where they don’t belong. Because of the mission they serve, we can forget sometimes that they are institutions run by fallible human beings who can make serious mistakes. Just like all other institutions. We know in our society that a good dose of sunlight is always good. It is the role of the press to hold institutions accountable. We used to think that only applied to political and governmental institutions. But really our mandate should extend to institutions we care most about. Our museums, our churches – these institutions often do better when they get the same kind of scrutiny that other institutions receive.

B: I think that’s a good note to end on. Thanks for talking with me.