Phil Saviano, Survivor of Clergy Sex Abuse, Dies at 69 - The New York Times

He played a pivotal role in helping The Boston Globe uncover the widespread scandal in the Catholic Church and was portrayed in the movie “Spotlight.”.

Nearly 30 years later, suffering from AIDS and believing he would soon die, he decided to go public about the abuse and disclosed his experience to The Boston Globe.

Saviano lived, and he went on to play a pivotal role in bringing to light the widespread pedophile priest scandal coursing through the Roman Catholic Church.

He provided key information and guidance for a series of articles by The Globe’s Spotlight team, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003.

And his role was dramatized in the Academy Award-winning 2015 movie “Spotlight,” which showed how the church had hidden its crimes and how The Globe had uncovered them.

A relentless and determined activist, Phil Saviano documented the actions of dozens of pedophile priests in the Boston area and coaxed other survivors to go public with their stories.

He helped educate the Spotlight team about how priests had groomed their victims for eventual seduction and how the church had knowingly shuttled rogue priests to different parishes, where they often went on to abuse other children.

Robinson, the former editor of the Spotlight team, said in an interview for this obituary in September.

Denis Church in Douglas, Mass., in the Diocese of Worcester, west of Boston.

Saviano saw a newspaper article saying that Father Holley had been sued in New Mexico for sexually molesting other boys.

Saviano told The Globe that the priest had forced him and two of his friends to have repeated sexual contact with him.

He learned from evidence obtained in the early stages of the case that seven bishops in four states had known that Father Holley, whom the church had sent secretly to four different church-run treatment centers, was a serial child molester.

(Father Holley was sentenced to up to 275 years in prison in 1993 in New Mexico and died at 80 in prison in 2008.).

Saviano to settle the case on the condition that he sign a confidentiality agreement, as church officials across the country had done with many other survivors.

“He had this story that no reporter would believe — that the Catholic Church was engaged in an international criminal conspiracy to cover up the crimes of thousands of priests.”.

Three years later, when Martin Baron, the new editor of The Globe, pushed for an investigation into systemic sexual abuse in the church, the Spotlight team circled back to Mr.

Saviano arrived in the newsroom with a box of documents and talked with the team for four hours.

In that box was a CD with documents from clergy-abuse lawsuits from around the country — detailed documents that Mike Rezendes, a reporter who was part of the Spotlight team, said in an interview were foundational to the team’s understanding of how the church had covered up so many cases of abuse.

Saviano also told the team his personal story of how he had been molested.

By 2003, Massachusetts authorities said that as many as 1,000 children had been sexually abused by 250 priests in the Boston archdiocese over 40 years, and that Cardinal Bernard F.

His father, Pasquale Saviano, was an electrician.

His mother died in 1976, and he had never told her or his father that he was gay or that he had been abused.

When he finally told his father about his past, in 1993, and that he was going to talk to The Globe, his father was furious.