http://people.com/movies/the-incredible-story-of-spotlights-phil-saviano/
The Incredible Story of Spotlight’s Phil Saviano: The Child Sex Abuse Survivor Who Refused to Be Silenced by the Catholic Church
He no longer belongs to any sort of organized religion, but Phil Saviano, whose pivotal role in exposing the child sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church is showcased in the Oscar-nominated film Spotlight, appears to have had something almost like divine intervention on his side.
For instance, if he hadn’t been flipping through The Boston Globe looking for last minute Christmas presents in December of 1992, he might have never stumbled across a report that the priest who raped him as a child was arrested for doing the same thing to two boys in New Mexico.
“That was my big life-changing moment because I was very much surprised and just stunned,” Saviano, 63, tells PEOPLE. “It was just sort of a one shot, fairly short story in the Globe, not even in the front section, I could’ve easily missed it. But I didn’t.”
The news of his abuser’s arrest could not have come at a more pivotal point in his life. At the time, Saviano had been diagnosed with AIDS and was not given long to live. But living so close to the edge of death finally gave him the courage to speak out about his abuse.
“The truth of the matter is that AIDS freed me up to do some things that I might not have had the courage otherwise to do, and going public about my abuse at the age of 40 is one of them,” he admits.
And if it weren’t for his seemingly fatal illness, Saviano believes the church would never have allowed him to take his settlement money – a measly $15,500 – without signing their customary nondisclosure agreement.
“I became the first person that I know of to settle one of these sex abuse lawsuits and maintain my ability to talk about the case and what my experiences were,” Saviano says, explaining, “I think the only reason they agreed to forgo the NDA is because they figured I wasn’t going to be around much longer to talk anyway.”
But he survived. Not long after doctors advised him to prepare his will and buy his burial plot, Saviano was introduced to new medication and began to recover.
“The next year I decided to formalize my outreach to other survivors and I contacted S.N.A.P. (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) out in Chicago and I asked them if I could open up a New England chapter. We had our first meeting in May of 1997.”
Over the next several years, Saviano met with other survivors and began compiling information and statistics on abuse. After uncovering dozens of active pedophile priests in the Boston area, and unearthing evidence of a larger cover-up scandal at the highest levels, he turned to the press for help breaking the news.
“I had approached the Globe years ago and they weren’t too interested in what I had to say in 1998,” Saviano says. “My big gripe with them was that they were very willing to write about what a particular priest did but they were very reluctant to take it to the next level, and ask what the bishops knew and ask why the priests moved from one place to another.”
In 2001, the Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team finally began asking the right questions and brought Saviano into their offices for an interview. The scene depicted in the film – which he says “is just a snippet” of what was actually a three-hour long conversation – became the turning point in their investigation. With help from Saviano’s research, Spotlight was able to confirm 13 abusive priests, and eventually proved a much larger cover-up within the Church.
When the report hit stands in 2002, the news shook the world, and after years of being called crazy – at first even by members of Spotlight – Saviano and hundreds of his fellow survivors finally received their vindication. Even if statutes of limitation made prosecuting every priest impossible, the world finally knew the truth.
The Spotlight team discovered that more than 70 priests in Boston had molested children over decades (the number would eventually reach almost 250). Furthermore, they were able to prove the archdiocese covered up their crimes by reassigning priests and making secret settlements with victims. Cardinal Law, the archbishop of Boston, resigned in late 2002.
Thirteen years later, Spotlight the film is nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and has brought the scandal back into the public eye. Michael Keaton stars as Spotlight leader Walter “Robbie” Robinson and Neal Huff portrays Saviano.
Recognizing Saviano’s crucial role in the case, Spotlight reporter Mike Rezendes (played by Mark Ruffalo) recommended screenwriter Josh Singer meet with Saviano during the writing process. After hearing his story over a 3-hour dinner in Boston, Singer sent Saviano the script and asked for his notes. He replied with a three-page list of suggestions, some of which, like the concept of grooming, made it into the final script.
“I wanted them explain the process of grooming – a priest doesn’t just zero in on a kid and then all of sudden he’s moving in for the assault. Really it’s a long process, in which the priest will sort of ingratiate himself to the child or to the child’s family.”
It’s a predatory stratagem Saviano remembers well. “I was a good target because there were some problems in my family and my mother was very sick, she had a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis and it caused a lot of tension within the family,” he remembers.
Saviano has now seen the film six times, and was only able to hold back his tears during the most recent screening. “I feel immensely grateful, although I don’t know who to direct my gratitude towards, that I lived long enough to see such a fantastic thing happen,” he says.
“Just the fact that the film is made, never mind that it’s gotten great reviews, and that these fantastic actors have wanted to be a part of it, just the fact that the film is out there is so important and so validating to survivors.”
For Saviano, making a movie about the scandal is almost “an extension of what survivors do when they come forward.” He explains, “I think the main reason why we go public, all of us, is so we can see this issue dealt with properly, so others don’t have to undergo the same horrible experiences we went through when we were kids. And that’s another thing that this movie is helping to accomplish. It gets the word out, it gets the discussions going, and ultimately it can only serve to further put a stop to these instances of child abuse.”
While Saviano has dialed back his involvement in S.N.A.P. over the years, he’s recently compiled a collection of news reports and interviews pertaining to the scandal on a personal website he recently launched. He continues to live in Boston and enjoys working on another passion project: bringing Mexican folk-art to the world on his other website, Viva Oaxaca Folk Art.
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EveOxford 07/11/2015 at 15:29
“We are all diminished by what we are being told,” – actually, no. But we are diminished by the Church, in our name, presuming to judge, to apologise and then to pay compensation. If George Bell were still alive then perhaps we would have been treated to BBC film of a dawn raid of his palace (before the police admitted they shouldn’t have done that). Perhaps we’d have had a policeman standing in front of the Bishop’s Palace inviting “people who will be believed” to step forward. Perhaps his career would have been ruined and after a year of investigations the police would say they had nothing on him after all (as with Paul Gambaccini). Who on earth was selected by the diocese of Chichester to sit in judgment on the reputation of this bravest of Christians?
Tony Foreman 07/11/2015 at 15:40
In a wicked world we cannot, unfortunately, do without suspicion. But that suspicion has to be equally apportioned – to Bishop Bell, to the complainant and in regard to the competence of the C of E committee that saw fit to take the matter into its own hands and tacitly admit Bishop Bell’s guilt by issuing an apology. This is not justice: open and honest. It is an illegitimate, anonymous, unaccountable exercise of power. It is wholly against everything the C of E ought to stand for.
Fr David Lawrence-March 07/11/2015 at 21:50
Well doe, CofE Newspaper for a measured, Christian response.
Fr David Lawrence-March 07/11/2015 at 21:52
Whoops, ‘done’ !
Richard 08/11/2015 at 07:35
In 1995 Bishop Bell had been dead for 37 years. Dead people are beyond the reach of civil justice so how could the bishop at that time have gone to the police? And why, if they could have done, didn’t the acuser. Something stinks about this whole witch hunt.
The Church of England’s shameful betrayal of bishop George Bell
This fair, just, brave man deserves the simple justice of the presumption of innocence.
7 November 2015
The Church of England has produced a lot of good men and women, but very few great ones. It is in its modest, cautious nature that it should be so. Greatness requires a lonely, single-minded strength that does not sit easily with Anglicanism’s gentle compromise.
And I suspect the Church has always been hesitant and embarrassed about the one undeniably great figure it produced in the 20th century. To this day, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, is an uncomfortable, disturbing person, like a grim obelisk set in a bleak landscape. Many British people still disapprove of his lonely public denunciation of Winston Churchill’s deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes. Some still defend the bombing and seek to reconcile it with Christian teaching, which is hard. Others simply refuse to believe, against all evidence, that this is what we did. It is often said, though it cannot be proved, that George Bell would have become Archbishop of Canterbury — a post for which he was well qualified — had he kept his mouth shut.
And perhaps this is why he found so few defenders when, 57 years after his death, Bishop Bell was numbered among the transgressors by his old church, and said to have been a paedophilic abuser.
The church itself issued a public statement which correctly referred to the anonymous accusations against the late Bishop Bell as ‘allegations’, but in all other respects treated the claim as if it were a proven fact. Money had been paid in compensation. The current Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner, was said to have written to ‘the survivor’, apologising. He explained, ‘I am committed to ensuring that the past is handled with honesty and transparency.’ There were ‘expert independent reports’ (which have not been published). None ‘found any reason to doubt the veracity of the claim’.
The Sussex police, meanwhile, ‘confirmed’ that the information obtained from their inquiries would have led to Bishop Bell’s arrest, had he not been dead. Who can doubt this, given modern police forces’ strong interest in investigating such allegations against prominent people? But it merely draws attention to the long delay between the alleged offence and accusation. Had the bishop survived until the first allegation was made in 1995, he would have been 112 years old. As it turned out, he had been dead for 37 years, which is perhaps why the church did little at the time, and the police were not called to arrest and interrogate the bishop’s bones. The charges go even further back, and refer to alleged events in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The church’s document on the affair was available online and quickly found its way to the desks of several newspaper correspondents. Unqualified headlines resulted, and stories which proclaimed without reservation that the late bishop ‘was’ a paedophile, and ‘committed’ sexual abuse. ‘Eminent bishop was paedophile, admits church,’ said one. ‘Church’s “deep sorrow” over abuse by bishop,’ said another. ‘C of E admits “saintly” bishop abused child,’ said a third. There were plenty of inverted commas on display but none were placed around the accusation. No doubt this did not distress the Church of England, which has suffered several undoubted (and poorly handled) cases of proven abuse and which is anxious to show that it is now sound and rigorous on this subject.
All this is completely understandable. And yet it fills me with a powerless sense of outrage and injustice. It is perfectly possible that the allegations are true. But this is not some Jimmy Savile affair in which a great cloud of witnesses testify against a person, recently dead, whose life and works do not do very much to undermine the charges against him.
George Bell, among much else to his credit, was one of the first in Britain to see the National Socialist menace. He was the dauntless ally and reliable friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He opened his beautiful palace to exiles and handed it over to evacuees during the war. Against the tide of opinion, he pleaded the cause of anti-Nazi refugees in this country who were foolishly rounded up during the invasion panic of 1940.
Such a person may conceivably have been a secret abuser of children. But didn’t this fair, just, brave man (these things are proven) deserve the simple justice of the presumption of innocence, and those protections so majestically summed up in the sixth amendment to the US constitution — to be given speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, to be confronted with witnesses against him, to have compulsory process to obtain witnesses in his favour, and to have the assistance of counsel in his defence?
Well, he cannot have any of these things because he is dead. And he left no descendants to defend his honour. In which case it is surely up to us, not least to those in the church (whose main duty is to uphold the good even if they are reviled for it) to try to provide some sort of justice.
By all means comfort and assuage the accuser, and compensate him or her (we are not even allowed to know the sex of the person involved). But in the absence of a timely, fair trial, did it serve the purposes of justice and goodness to make the matter public? To a secular mind, there is no difficulty in sacrificing the reputation of a dead man for what you think is a good cause. To those who believe in the immortal soul, or say they do, it is surely not quite so simple. As for those journals of record who presented allegations as proven fact, would they have dared treat any living person of such reputation in this way? Surely one of the things my trade most needs to prove is that it can and will act fairly without a judge or a regulator breathing down its neck.
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.