MICHAEL REZENDES IN THE SPOTLIGHT IN A SESSION PRESENTED BY THE TELEGRAPH, AT ZEE JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL

As a journalist you couldn’t help but be invigorated by  Spotlight, the Tom McCarthy movie chronicling The Boston Globe’s investigation of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that went on to win an Oscar for Best Film in 2016. And it is even better when you get to hear one of the key members of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team member — played by Mark Ruffalo in the film — talk about the actual investigation and what happened after that first story was published. 
The spotlight was on The Boston Globe journalist Michael Rezendes at the session ‘Spotlight’, presented by The Telegraph, at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival 2018 on January 26. “Spotlight did to investigative journalism what Top Gun did for the US Air Force,” said Sreenivasan Jain, who hosted the conversation, setting the tone for the session. Excerpts from Rezendes speak...

THE STORY WITH LEGS

This experience — uncovering the cover-up of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church (in 2002) — was something like experiencing a series of big revelations, like a series of earthquakes. It’s been said that cover-up is worse than crime, and as horrible as child sexual abuse is, I think it’s true in this case. The thing that blew everybody’s mind was that the highest church officials in the Boston Archdiocese, including the senior Catholic official in the United States, was fully aware of the extent of child sexual abuse within the church and nevertheless allowed it to continue. 

Our investigation started with one priest. There was a priest who had sexually molested more than 150 children over 30 years in six different parishes. And the discovery we made and the proof that we obtained show that Cardinal Bernard Law, the number one Catholic in the United States, knew that this was happening and allowed it to continue. His predecessor, Cardinal Medeiros, also knew about the abuse by the same priest and allowed it to continue. Now we had no idea at that time that there were several other priests like this particular priest, John Geoghan, in Boston Archdiocese. We came to believe that there might be as many as half-a-dozen serial child abusers in the Boston Archdiocese, and we thought that would be an incredible story. 

But now we know that there are more than 200 priests who were credibly accused of sexually abusing children in the Boston Archdiocese alone. At the end of nearly a year and a half of reporting, we had counted up about a 150. Now it’s 250 just in the Boston Archdiocese. And I think it is pretty obvious that there is nothing strange about the drinking water in Boston. It is not a problem particular to Boston. The scandal of the cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests of course spread all over America and I went to New York City and revealed a similar cover-up and I went to a place called Tucson, Arizona, in the American west and revealed another cover-up.

So we started to get the sense that maybe this was happening all over America. And now we know that indeed it was. What we didn’t expect was that the scandal would spread all over the world. And over the last 16 years since we published our story (in 2002), that’s what happened. 

The scandal of the cover-up of child sexual abuse continues to unfold all over the world, most recently in Argentina, in France and in Australia, where the government has set up a special commission to investigate child sexual abuse and it has discovered rampant abuse within the Catholic Church in Australia. 

QUESTIONING AUTHORITY

That is the job of a journalist, to always question authority. Boston is the most Catholic city in the United States and, of course, the Catholic Church presents itself as a paragon of morality. This is an institution that portrays itself as holy and as good.... And what we found out was that was not the case at all. Now this had been going on for decades, why did it take for us so long to question the authority of the Catholic Church? Well, that’s because who would question the Catholic Church? It was the centre of morality and goodness in our society. 

Catholic priests controlled the political process, the political establishment. They were a great power in the state legislature. They had great power in the City Hall. Most of the readers of The Boston Globe were Catholics, so to question the Catholic Church was a real risk and, of course, we failed in our responsibility to question the authority for decades. 
So, that was the number one lesson. Don’t take anyone’s word for it. Your job as a journalist is to question authority, question your elected officials, question your government officials, question the military, question the Catholic Church. That’s what journalists are supposed to do. 

CUTTING CLOSE TO HOME

I was raised Catholic. I am half-Portuguese and French Canadian and both sides of my family were very devout Catholics. I grew up going to Catholic Church every Sunday and not eating meat on Fridays and observing all of the sacraments. I cannot say I’m a Catholic today, I’m certainly not, but I grew up that way. 

By the time we started investigating the Catholic Church, I had already become sceptical about the Catholic Church for a variety of reasons. As a matter of fact, the Spotlight Team did not discover the clergy’s sexual abuse. 

There had been scandals about priests who’d molested children in several parts of the United States by the time the Spotlight Team came on. In fact there was a big scandal in a city called Fall River, Massachusetts, which is not very far from Boston. So I began to feel that there was something going on and it almost felt like an epidemic to me. So by the time our new editor, on his first day at work at The Boston Globe, suggested we take a look at the Catholic Church, I was
pretty ready to do that.

 

MARTY BARON AND THE BEGINNING OF SPOTLIGHT

Marty Baron showing up at The Boston Globe was key. I don’t think we would have taken up the investigation of the Catholic Church if Marty Baron had not arrived on the scene.... Marty Baron was not raised Catholic, he is Jewish, but I think the most important aspect of Marty Baron’s influence on us was the fact that he was coming from outside Boston and he was specifically coming from Florida, a part of United States that has very, very strong  open records laws. 

So when Marty came to The Boston Globe his first day of work, just as you see in the movie, he read a story about how there were some lawsuits against Cardinal Law and some other top officials of the Boston Archdiocese but the judge had impounded all the records and none of the records could be seen by the public. In Florida this would be very unusual. 

Our system of justice in America is predicated on openness. Anyone can go in and review the evidence in any case. That’s the only guarantee we have that it’s not corrupt and that it’s fair. So here we had a situation where the Catholic Church was being sued by victims of a priest by the name of John Geoghan... and somehow the court had sealed all the records and no one was challenging that. So Marty just thought that didn’t make any sense. And it wasn’t good journalism to allow that to happen.

So I think if Marty hadn’t come along and asked that fundamental question ‘hey, how does that make any sense and why don’t we do something about it?’, maybe we wouldn’t have started the investigation and things would be a lot different today. 

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IS EXPENSIVE

What you see in the movie Spotlight is a five-month investigation that’s conflated into two hours. But we will take up to a year to investigate a story if we think it is big enough. 

When it started, the Spotlight Team had four full-time reporters. The movie ends on the morning of the first story. After that the story exploded and we added four more reporters. Four of the best at The Boston Globe. So we had eight reporters working full-time nearly a year. We had some high-priced lawyers helping us in our quest to attain documents from the Church. Taken together it probably cost a million dollars to complete the investigation. So investigative journalism is expensive.

RUNNING WITH THE RECORDS

I did get the records that proved that there was a cover-up and that was the key to the whole thing. I was a runner in college and I was on the cross-country running team (laughs) and it is kind of in my blood and I do kind of tend to get a little bit excited as the movie also shows. 

Mark Ruffalo spent a lot of time with me and he kind of figured it out that when I got my hands on records like that, that I’d probably want to run back to the office as quickly as possible.

THE MAKING OF THE FILM

We were shocked that someone wanted to make a movie about our work! I mean our story was published in 2002. It wasn’t until 2008 when two very young, inexperienced producers approached us about this idea. And then it wasn’t until 2015 that the movie came out. I remember I had a conversation where I said to the guy who first had this idea, how can this be a good movie, where all the big moments happen when I am sitting at my desk reading documents? It just didn’t seem very cinematic. But boy, I guess I was wrong about that.

I found out that Mark Ruffalo wanted to make this movie — which I think is really a big reason why it happened — I guess a year before they started filming. Mark called me one day and said, ‘I want to make this movie and I want to meet you and I want to hang out’ and I said, ‘well, fine’ (laughs). 

Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer wrote a great script and that’s the first thing that happened. When I read the script it was the first time I thought well, maybe this movie is going to happen.The script actually got kicked around. The subject was very, very controversial and people found it hard to believe that folks wanted to see a movie about child sexual abuse and confronting the Catholic Church was a big deal. But once Mark Ruffalo decided he wanted to make it, things started to roll, things started to happen. 

?LOSS OF ANONYMITY, A HAZARD OR BOON?

Well, previously we always tried to keep our work secret until we were just about to publish, and we did kind of operate in the shadows, but now our cover is blown and my cover is blown. But I think there is a real, super beneficial effect, which is I get a lot more tips than I used to. In fact, I am deluged with tips. I mean at this point I could never do all the stories that have come my way through phone calls and emails and text.

THE OTHER STORIES FROM SPOTLIGHT

The Spotlight scoop on the Catholic Church was 15 years ago, and I’ve done a lot of investigations since then. Most recently, I put a lot of time into exposing the deficiency in the mental health care system in the State of Massachusetts. In United States we’ve really stopped taking care of people with serious mental illness and so instead of being in hospitals where they can be cared for, they are on the street, in jail, in prisons and they are being treated often in very barbaric ways. So I’ve spent most of the last three or four years writing about the appaling conditions that exist in the United States for people with mental illness.

ANOTHER MOVIE IN THE MAKING?

I’ve had a long-standing interest in film. So I am hoping that we can make another film about the terrible tragedy of mental illness and the lack of care for people living with mental illness. It will probably be years before it happens, if it happens, but I’ve started to work on this project. I hope there are some wonderful actors who want to play the various roles in this project, because it is the actors who make these movies come alive and draw big audiences and raise consciousness about very important issues.

TIPS FOR WOULD-BE JOURNALISTS

Number one, always remember, your fundamental job is to question authority. My other tips would be to find a place where you can start working right away and just get as much experience as you can. Write as often as you can. If you are working for a radio station or a television station, then produce stories as often as you can. Develop a body of work. Get experience. This is a profession where you can study it, and there are a lot of excellent journalism schools out there, but I think fundamentally you become a good journalist through experience. Work hard and never forget what your real mission is.