Alum and Spotlight team member Mike Rezendes spoke at BU last night

Tuesday night, Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center’s ‘Friends Speaking Series’ hosted Michael Rezendes at Metcalf Ballroom.

For anyone who watched the movie Spotlight, you’ll know why this is a big deal.

Michael Rezendes graduated from Boston University, sum laude, with an English degree from CAS in 1978.

 

With this English degree, he said he, “Learned how to write, how to think critically, learned how to make judgments, all skills that would serve anyone well in any number of professions.”

He took journalism classes at BU as well. In his junior year, Rezendes was part of an assignment. He volunteered to write an actual story in the East Boston Community News, walked in the front door and never looked back.

After volunteering for two years, Rezendes was offered a job as an editor for the newspaper.

In about two years, Rezendes took a job with the Boston Phoenix, and soon after, the San Jose Mercury News, the Washington Post, and finally, the Boston Globe.

A newly acquired position on the Globe’s Spotlight team was, “the highest honor in journalism” for Rezendes, and rightfully so.

This past Sunday, Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy, received two Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture. In the film, Rezendes was portrayed by Mark Ruffalo.

Rezendes wanted to talk about the work that led to the Spotlight team’s investigation, which he says was very accurately depicted in the film. He also wanted to talk about how the movie got big, and an important topic for him, the state of crisis journalism faces today, and how we might go about fixing it.

Starting with how the whole thing came about, Rezendes attributes Martin Baron, the then-editor of the Boston Globe.

Talking to countless sources in the Boston area, and meeting with attorneys based on a column he read about lawyer Mitchell Garabedian’s statement that Cardinal Law knew Father John Geoghan was sexually abusing children and did nothing to stop it, led to the conclusion that this was a big story and it needed to be investigated.

Thus the Spotlight team assembled in 2001, Mike Rezendes was one of them.

Rezendes did not claim that the Globe was the first team to discover there was sexual abuse going on in the clergy, as there were abuses happening in places like Louisiana, Texas, and Fall River, Massachusetts, but he said they were the first to report and prove there was an actual cover up.

Going forward, the team published four stories. The first was about the cover up, the second was about the psychiatric records of Father John Geoghan, the third was about the 10,000 page document recovered from court about all of Geoghan’s accusations, and the last was about nearly 70 priests in the Boston archdiocese accused of sexual abuse.

This investigation went on another five months, and no one on the Spotlight team ever thought their story could be turned into a movie.

But they were wrong.

A couple of producers pitched a movie to the team,”This would be a movie about the importance of journalism, at a time when journalism is in crisis. When journalism is financially challenged,” and they thought it was an exceptional idea, according to Rezendes.

Tom McCarthy and Josht Singer rose to the challenge of directing and screenwriting this film to be.

Rezendes went on to talk about his experience with the screenwriting process, being interviewed for the authenticity of the film, and even getting to work with Mark Ruffalo,who he describes as, “Wonderful, generous and a lot fun to be around,” and the rest of the amazing Spotlight cast.

Rezendes maintained, “The value of journalism in a time when journalism is under siege, and I have to say I do believe that journalism is in a period of crisis,” in the final part of his presentation.

“It’s really only journalists who hold powerful institutions and powerful people accountable for what they do, and what they say. And I think without journalism, democracy really won’t work.”

“Journalism has to survive. It has to survive for the victims of clergy sex abuse, and it has to survive for everyone in our democracy.”

Rezendes ended the night with a long-awaited Q&A portion. The crowed was ready with some hard hitting questions for Rezendes, and he was ready with answers.