Boston Globe Spotlight Investigation

On January 6, 2002, the Boston Globe published "Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years," the opening story of what became known as the Spotlight investigation. Its subject was John Geoghan, a priest the Archdiocese of Boston had moved between six parishes over three decades despite repeated internal reports that he was molesting children. Geoghan was convicted in January 2002 of indecent assault and battery for abusing a ten year old boy and sentenced to nine to ten years; he had already been laicized in 1998. He was killed by a fellow inmate in prison in August 2003.

The Globe's Spotlight Team, reporters Walter Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll, spent months working through sealed court records and internal archdiocese personnel files to establish what church leaders had known and when. What they found was not one priest but a pattern: known abusers quietly reassigned rather than removed, victims' families settled with and silenced, and a diocese that treated abuse as a personnel problem to be managed rather than a crime to be reported. The Globe published roughly 600 stories on the subject over the following year and won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

The reporting's significance was not that it invented a new fact pattern but that it proved one existed, with primary documents, at a scale that could no longer be dismissed as isolated incidents. The transfer-and-conceal pattern it documented in Boston is the same pattern the John Jay Report would quantify nationally two years later, and that grand juries and royal commissions would go on to find independently in Pennsylvania, Ireland and Australia.