EXCLUSIVE: We interviewed the Boston Globe journalist from Spotlight

“Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning movie, tells the chilling story of how a team of investigative journalists from The Boston Globe exposed the disturbing cover-up of child molestation within the Boston Catholic Church system. The groundbreaking reporting earned the journalists a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service by casting a light on the corruption within the Church hierarchy.

Not only was the Church complicit in covering up these scandals, but the movie shows a scene in which a handful of alumni and Board of Trustees members from Boston College High are questioned by two key investigators, Sacha Pfeiffer and  Walter Robinson, on whether the past administration was aware of the abuses by the school’s Priests.

The youngest and only female journalist from the Spotlight team, Sacha Pfeiffer, sat down with The Tab to talk about what it was like to be one of the four unsung heroes who brought these devastating stories to light.

The Boston University graduate said she “felt completely treated as an equal” and “never felt conscious of being a woman” amid her male colleagues. In fact, she believes her gender actually gave her an advantage in connecting with the victims.

Pfeiffer said: “It seemed easier for those men to talk to a woman than it would be to talk to a male voice on the telephone.

“And I think as a result, I ended up talking to most of the survivors, and probably eliciting some of the most powerful stories. And I think that was probably the one advantage my gender gave me.”

The months and months of digging and researching that the journalist conducted couldn’t have prepared them for how excruciatingly difficult it was to listen to these wounded adults talk about how they were stripped of their innocence and childhoods by priests.

You said you talked to most of the victims – what was it like to hear these stories, and take it in as a journalist, a human, and a Catholic? 

“Walter Robinson, his wife is a former nurse, and she had said at one point not entirely jokingly she felt we had PTSD in a sense. We had spent so much time talking to these terribly wounded, damaged people, and that takes a real emotional toll. So we commented that we felt like grief counselors, not formally trained to be grief counselors.

“But I do think the saddest thing about this project was, again, speaking to adult men who were so basically profoundly damaged at this really formative time in their development. I mean if you’re a kid or a teenager and your first introduction to sex is with a priest, it’s incredibly confusing and it can be incredibly shameful. Ultimately that made me very angry to see people so harmed and so stuck in time. And I think anger becomes a motivator – it makes you want to work harder. And I think that’s what that did.”

There is a scene in the film in which a victim is describing his past abuses. Could you please speak to why you thought the “six-letter word molest” wasn’t enough to explain what happened to these boys?

“I was really glad they included that in the movie because I felt very strongly about that. We were very careful not to do anything in our reporting or writing that could let us be accused of sensationalizing or being overly graphic. It was also important to remember that molest could range – a whole range of horrors. It could be a priest who slipped his hand down a kid’s pants in the front seat of a car or it could be a kid that got raped. And we needed enough detail from the victim to essentially determine what level of crime had happened.

“In some cases, based on the details we got, the priest went to jail. And so we had to very compassionately and tastefully push the victims a little to share detail, and we explained why. We tried to be as tasteful and careful as we could when relaying their details in our story.”

In another scene in the film, you are speaking with a priest and he is very open and confesses to you, or tells you that what he was doing. The priest thought it was essentially fine, or something he should be ashamed of or not tell. What was it like to hear a priest say things like that, and not really understand the consequences?

“In real life, two of us interviewed that priest separately and it probably happened in mid-late January in 2002. After the movie ends – because the movie ends when we publish our first story – by the time we published, we hadn’t actually had an interaction with a priest yet. But the filmmakers wanted to include a priest interaction. So they took a little creative license to pull that scene back in time a few weeks. The other reporter hadn’t yet joined us – our team – so they basically just gave me the whole scene.

“Basically, a lot of people had asked me if I thought the priest was senile. And I really don’t think so. I just think it was a perspective into kind of the warped rationalization that some of these priests had for why they did what they did. I had another priest tell me that they thought if they were fooling around with little boys, and not little girls, they were still observing their celibacy vow. And again I think that’s kind of a warped rationalization for abusing a child, and why they seemed to think it was a sin that had to be forgiven, rather than a crime, which had to be dealt with in the criminal justice system.

“I think somehow the church minimized the gravity of what they were doing – they thought it was a harmless outlet for frustrated priests, sometimes. There are many theories for why the priests did what they did, and I don’t think any of us understand for sure. Some people think celibacy being an unnatural way to ask people to live, some think that when these young men were put into the priesthood so early they were stunted on their sexual development, but yeah – I think what you saw was basically someone who was mentally not well.”

Can you speak to me about the cover-up of these abuses? 

“There was a legal aspect to what we did and while we did the reporting, our lawyers went to court to get try to get the files unsealed. When the court documents got unsealed, we got all the personnel files. And it was very clear that any time an allegation was made, for some reason, it was the priest who got the sympathy from the church. Like it was an emotional toll of them being accused, and there were these very sympathetic letters like ‘Oh, I’m sorry you’re going through this.’

“For some reason, the church saw the priests as the victims, more than the actual victims themselves. And it also was very clear in the files that the church’s goal was to avoid scandal by any means necessary. The church did not want to be embarrassed, and they would do whatever they could not to be embarrassed. They would take secret settlements, they would sign confidentiality clauses, they would quietly remove priests and move them elsewhere. But there was definitely, for quite a long period of time, the instinct was to protect the priest more than it was to help the victim.”

Jack Dunn, current spokesperson for Boston College, who was one of the BC High trustees portrayed in the scene went on to hire a lawyer and request that the filmmakers remove the scene immediately. Dunn claimed he was physically sickened after seeing his on screen character.

In a follow-up interview with The Boston Globe, Dunn said: “The things they have me saying in the movie, I never said.

“But worse is the way they have me saying those things, like I didn’t care about the victims, that I tried to make the story go away. The dialogue assigned to me is completely fabricated and represents the opposite of who I am and what I did on behalf of victims.”

Dunn went on to allege that since the movie’s release his reputation has been forever tainted by his false and inaccurate portrayal. Pfeiffer and Robinson defended the film’s authenticity in a joint statement:

“Despite Jack Dunn’s complaint, the single scene in Spotlight he objects to captures his spirited public relations defense of BC High during our first sit-down interview at the school in early 2002.

“Both of us were there for the interview, and we consider the scene faithful to what happened. The scene depicts a fairly common exchange involving reporters who have unpleasant questions to ask and a skilled public relations person doing his best to frame a story in the most favorable way possible for the institution he is representing.

“That’s what Jack did that day.”

In 2012, Reverend Bradley M. Schaeffer, a Board of Trustees member from Boston College, Georgetown University, and Loyola University Chicago, came under extreme scrutiny as the Globe disclosed that he had been overseeing an abusive priest, despite being made aware of countless molestation allegations against the priest.

Schaeffer had knowledge that one of his Jesuit priests was abusing children for over 40 years, yet turned a blind eye to the crimes and allowed the Jesuit to continue his work.

When the story came to light, Father Leahy, the current President of Boston College, took no action to remove Schaeffer from his Trustee position and “cited a reluctance ‘to rely on sensationalist press’ for information.” Jack Dunn went on to justify the university’s decision by praising Schaeffer’s contributions to Boston College and his “expertise in Catholic education.”

The students of Boston College’s on campus newspaper, The Heights, took matters into their own hands as they published an article calling for the termination of Schaeffer from the university’s Board: “it feels that inaction in this case would endanger the school’s reputation as one of the most prestigious Catholic institutions in the country.”

Schaeffer later resigned following the escalating demand that he step down.

Do you think this film shows that there is a need for investigative journalism?

“I don’t think there is any question that investigative journalism is a threat to media – it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of resources. And you need publishers with the patience to let you be out of the paper for months, or maybe more than a year, in the hopes that you’ll deliver something powerful. So we’re really hoping this movie reminds people how important that is – both newspapers, so they won’t cut their investigative teams, and readers, so they buy their newspapers because that revenue supports investigative work.”

Do you hope the film will inspire young journalists to report more boldly?

“100 percent yes. But I equally hope it will make young people realize they have to buy their newspaper, they should have a digital subscription to whatever paper is important to them. I just think they need to remember that it’s fine if you want to be a reporter, but if you’re not buying your local newspaper, then the papers don’t have the resources they need to survive.”

The famous Spotlight storyline casts a light not only on the Church’s desperation to avoid scandals and disgrace, but also illustrates how prestigious Jesuit universities and school administrations actively continue this pattern of unaccountability and injustice.