Marty Baron Discusses The Story Behind Spotlight

“I didn’t decide to take on the Catholic Church. I decided to pursue a story"

By Stephen Applebaum, January 29, 2016

One of the hottest contenders for the Best Picture Oscar, Spotlight tells the powerful true story of how the eponymous team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe exposed a decades-long cover-up by the Catholic Church to protect priests guilty of sexually abusing children.

That the investigation took place at all is credited to the Globe's first Jewish editor, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the film), who, on his first day at the paper, saw a story that he felt needed to be pursued.

Baron had come from the Miami Herald and was an unusual appointment. “The newspaper had been accustomed to having people who have a strong connection to Boston be in charge of it,” he tells me from his office at the Washington Post, where he is Executive Editor, “and I think the entire community was accustomed to that as well. I had spent almost no time in the city and so I was labelled an outsider; and made to feel like an outsider.”

While being “somewhat the object of wariness” created discomfort, he had the advantage of being able to “see things through fresh eyes”, he suggests. “I didn't have any attachments to the community at all. I had no allegiances, no obligations as a result of friendship, nothing like that. So I think that allowed me to approach things with some level of distance and objectivity.”

Miami had been somewhere “all kinds of crazy things happen” and he didn't know if Boston would be “as wild and woolly”. However, that quickly changed.

The day before he started work, the Globe ran a story by columnist Eileen McNamara about a priest, John Geoghan, who'd been accused of abusing 80 children. In it, a lawyer for the plaintiff claimed that Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew of the abuse, and yet had allowed the priest to be reassigned to different parishes.

“The response from the Church, via its lawyer, was that these were irresponsible, baseless charges,” says Baron. “So you had duelling commentaries about these serious allegations.”

What intrigued him most was that McNamara said the truth may never be known, because the internal Church documents that might reveal it were under seal and subject to a confidentiality order.

At his first editorial meeting the following day, Baron proposed trying to get the seal lifted through legal channels. He then asked the paper's Spotlight team of investigative journalists to explore whether Geoghan represented a bigger problem.

The probe would bring the reporters and the paper up against the Catholic Church, whose buildings dominate the Boston skyline in the working-class areas where most victims came from, physically illustrating its influence over the life of the city. Baron, however, is not a man to be cowed.

As the editor of his high school newspaper in Florida, he refused to back down over a story that upset the administration. Since then, as well as the Catholic Church, he has stood up to the White House over stories about lapses in Secret Service coverage for the president, and resisted pressure to not publish confidential National Security Agency memos leaked by Edward Snowden.

Neither of his parents, who emigrated from Israel to the United States in the mid 50s, was in journalism. But they had a keen interest in news about the public affairs of their adopted home - “As a matter of routine in our household we'd read a local newspaper and watch the television news” - and this rubbed off on him.

At school he was aware of “people of a certain status in life who felt that they were entitled and privileged”, and says: “I think I've always been conscious of elites in society, and very leery of elites, frankly.”

Today, he sees it as a “special obligation of the news media to hold powerful individuals, powerful institutions, accountable. Because my view is if we don't do it, nobody else will.”

As a result of the movie, people have asked him why he went after the Catholic Church. The question irritates him. “I didn't decide to take on the Catholic Church,” he says firmly. “I decided to pursue a story that was in front of us. It was a journalistic impulse . . . It became apparent to me, fairly quickly, that we had not pursued every possible channel for getting at the truth. And that's my job.”

However, he did insist that they wouldn't publish until they had evidence of institutional malpractice. Simply reporting how many priests were involved would have struck people as sensational, he insists. For him the more powerful questions concerned why they had been allowed to get away with the abuse for so long.

The facts uncovered were so damaging and so shocking that they didn't need to be sensationalised or conveyed with emotive language.

Baron and his team were expecting “blowback” when the first part of their (ultimately Pulitzer-winning) series of reports ran on January 6^th, 2002. “We actually stepped up on the switchboard because we were expecting a lot of criticism, and people to call and complain and accuse us of being anti-Catholic.” Instead, as portrayed in the film, “there was an eerie silence”.

“I think there was a strong feeling of betrayal amongst Catholics in Boston,” offers Baron, “and they were able to feel that sense of betrayal especially acutely because we were able to put in front of them the actual internal Church documents that showed how the Church had deceived, had obstructed, and had ignored this problem for such a long period of time.”

The pain that had been inflicted on children over many years was finally laid bare. Survivors now came forward in huge numbers to relate their stories, achieving what Baron sees as another key part of the “journalistic mission”: breaking the silence.

“I do think that we have to be especially attentive to people who are at the margins of our society, who don't have power, and who have not been given a voice,” he says.

“One of the great lessons of this movie is that people who have been left voiceless can have very powerful things to say, and it's important that we listen to what they have to say. And at times act on it.”

The message could hardly be more timely.

Spotlight is on general release

This story first appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, January 29, 2016

The Long Road Home

How Yaacov Weksler-Waszkinel reconciled his Polish upbringing with his Jewish roots

 

What makes a Jew? This was one of the questions at the heart of Israeli filmmaker Ronit Kerstner's documentary Torn, which screened as part of the 10th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in partnership with UK Jewish Film last week.

A moving and thought-provoking study of a man struggling for recognition as a Jew, the film follows Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel (now known as Yaacov Weksler-Waszkinel) - a Polish Catholic priest who, 12 years after his ordination, discovered that he was the son of Jews killed in the Holocaust - as he tries to settle in Israel under the Law of Return.

The statute doesn't recognise Jews practicing other religions, however, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs rejects his application for citizenship. Instead, he is granted temporary residency on a religious worker's visa. He tries to join Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu to study Hebrew and Judaism, but has a request that initially dumbfounds its leaders: he wants to be able to leave on Sundays to observe Mass at a nearby monastary.

A compromise is found allowing him to worship privately in his room. But one kibbutznik still wants to know: “Who are you, Yaacov? Are you a Jew? Are you a Christian?”

Although the question has haunted him for most of his life, sitting in a small screening room at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead it seems clear that the gentle 69 year old is a man at peace with himself, having reconciled his seemingly irreconcilable Christian and Jewish identities through the love of his adoptive and murdered parents.

“The only reason I cannot say no to my Polish parents is their love for me,” he says. “The only reason that, for the rest of my days, I am going to shout that I am Jewish, is my love for my Jewish parents. The rest is the Holocaust. My only fault is to be born at the wrong time, and to survive.”

Circumstance has made him a Jew who cannot deny Jesus, the Jew he believes plucked him to safety, but he doesn't feel torn. It is the world that wants to tear him apart, he insists, “because people like to have clear and strong divisions . . . I simply want to be both. My life has formed me in this way and I believe I can't be otherwise. Without my Jewish parents I would have no life. Without my Polish parents, my life would have perished.”

The latter were devout Catholics who showered him with love. He had no reason to think he wasn't their offspring, although he did sometimes wonder why he didn't share their Slavic features. So did other people. “I had black curly hair and on the street they called me 'Yid',” he says. “Children would say, 'Who are your parents?' It was a big problem.”

He asked his doting mother, Emilia, what a Jew was because he had never met one (and wouldn't until the anti-Zionist purges in 1968, the same year he found out about the Holocaust), but waited decades before asking her if he was one himself. “I was afraid,” he says candidly. “When I went to church all I heard was bad things about Jews, like Jews murdered Christ. And when I went to my religion lessons, the sister who was teaching us showed us pictures by Bosch with all kinds of frightening types that Hitler, apparently, had used to portray Jews. I didn't want to be somebody like that.”

He would often search for evidence of his father in his face in the mirror. One day he thought he'd spotted something. “I shouted, 'Mum, look, I am similar to Dad, aren't I?'” His mother didn't reply. “Because of that silence I said, 'If I am a Jew, you will see what I am going to do to myself.' When I looked in the mirror, I saw tears in my mother's eyes.”

It was a profound moment that years later, on 23rd February, 1978, when he finally confronted the ailing Emilia about his origins, she said was the reason why she'd kept the truth from him for so long. “She told me, 'What, do you think that we don't love you? How could we tell you if we knew that you could take your life?'” Yaacov understands: “I really believe that if I had been told earlier, today I would be in a psychiatric ward, because it was too strong an experience for me.”

Emilia could only tell him that he was born in the ghetto in Swieciany and that his father was a tailor; she didn't know his biological parents' names. These were revealed in 1992, when Klara Jaroszynska, a Polish nun who had helped Jews during the war, went to Israel and met survivors from Swieciany who knew that the town's only tailor was called Jacob Weksler (he died in the Stutthoff concentration camp). He then discovered that his mother was Batia, a Zionist, and that he had an older brother, Samuel – they both died at or on the transport to Sobibor. When he was shown a photograph of Batia, “I found the first person who I was similar to,” he says tearfully.

There were living relatives too – an uncle and an aunt - who'd escaped through Russia and were living in Israel. They knew nothing about him. When they met, his uncle wanted to know how, as a priest, Yaacov could “cope with carrying the hatred of 2000 years”? “I burst out crying,” he says, “because there is no answer to that. No words can express the hurt that Christianity has caused Jews for 2000 years. But one answer sprang into my head: 'But, darling Uncle, I am not 2000 years old, I am only 49, and I love you. And it's me who has found you, not you who has found me.'”

Returning to Poland, Yaacov became more and more aware of the antisemitism that was still being preached from pulpits by Catholic priests. He felt isolated and lonely, and as his retirement as a philosophy professor at the Catholic University of Lublin approached, he decided to move to Israel.

Today he is a permanent resident and works at Yad Vashem, who've named his Polish parents Righteous Gentiles.

"Yad Vashem is not my place of work it's my home,” he says, “because I am both an exhibit and a researcher. I belong in that time and everything that I find there is not about the fate of some nation or something, it is the fate of me and my parents.”
 
A shorter version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, 23rd March, 2012