The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team broke its first story on clergy abuse in January 2002, naming a pattern of reassignment rather than removal. Eighteen months later, the Massachusetts Attorney General's office turned that reporting into an official state finding.
Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly's investigators reviewed more than 30,000 pages of the Archdiocese of Boston's own personnel and legal files, and heard roughly 100 hours of testimony gathered through a legal mechanism, a single justice grand jury, that let the office make its findings public despite ordinary grand jury secrecy. Released in July 2003, the resulting report identified 789 alleged victims and 237 accused priests in the archdiocese's own records, spanning six decades from 1940 onward, and stated that the true number of victims likely exceeded 1,000.
Its most consequential finding was not the count but the mechanism behind it: archdiocese leadership had known of specific allegations against specific priests and had responded by moving them to new parishes rather than removing them from ministry, a pattern the report documented in granular, file by file detail. And in a conclusion that surprised many readers at the time, the report stated outright that no criminal charges could be filed against any archdiocese official, not because the evidence was thin but because the Massachusetts child protection statutes on the books during the decades of documented abuse were too narrow to reach what the investigation had actually found. The finding became a template: the same subpoena driven, records based method would be used fifteen years later by the Pennsylvania grand jury, whose own report the atlas already carries.