On Tuesday, the day after a special on-campus screening of the new film “Spotlight,” the former members of the Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team on whom the film was based sat down for a panel discussion about how they reported the Massachusetts clergy sex abuse scandal.

As the film depicts, in 2001, the Spotlight unit investigated and exposed that the Boston Archdiocese was aware of and complicit in the molestation of children throughout Massachusetts for decades. As part of its investigation, the Globe sued the church to obtain access to incriminating documents from prior lawsuits that had been sealed from the public record. The Spotlight reporters conducted hundreds of interviews with survivors. From January 2002 on, the Globe published over 200 articles on the scandal, exposing both its scope and its institutional nature. The investigation garnered international attention and a Pulitzer prize, and it helped uncover a global epidemic of sexual abuse in the Church.

The panelists last Wednesday included former Globe editor and current Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron; Globe editor Ben Bradlee, Jr., who oversaw the Spotlight team during its investigation; former Spotlight editor Walter Robinson and reporters Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll and Michael Rezendes, who is still on the current unit; and attorney for the Globe Jon Albano. “Spotlight” screenwriter Josh Singer and Prof. Eileen McNamara (JOUR), a former Globe columnist who wrote an op-ed that inspired the Globe’s coverage of the scandal, moderated the panel.

Singer began the discussion by asking the panelists what their thoughts were when they found out that their story was going to be turned into a movie.

Bradlee, who, in the film, is portrayed by John Slattery, responded that none of the individuals involved believed the movie would make it to production, given the difficult and time-consuming process of financing and casting a film. “These two producers came and asked if we’d be interested [in having a movie made about the investigation], and we were sort of wary, and it’s so hard to get a movie made anyway,” Bradlee said. “And they disappeared for three or four years trying to put the financing together and returned with Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy, and we began telling them about how we got the story and came to trust them more and more, which was an important, key factor. And all of a sudden there’s this A-list cast, and here it is.”

McNamara then asked Albano to talk about the importance of legal action to the investigation. Albano, who is portrayed by David Frasier in the film, noted first that the case depicted in the film — in which the Globe was able to obtain key documents showing the Church’s complicity — was unique because of how the presiding judge opened the documents not only to those in the courtroom but to the whole public.

Albano answered, “I’ll always think that one of the most extraordinary things that Judge Sweeney did, that opened up God knows how many records and depositions, was to say, ‘Not only am I lifting this confidentiality order, but it’s all getting filed here so anybody can read that.’”

When prompted by Singer, McNamara, who is portrayed by Maureen Keiller in the film, then transitioned into a discussion on how the Spotlight investigation into the church’s complicity came to be. “People actually had been writing about this [clergy sex abuse], some of us up here, for a long time,” she noted. “We’d all cracked off pieces of it. The piece that I cracked off ... was that the Cardinal knew. Or if the Cardinal didn’t know, it would be an extraordinary thing that he didn’t know. And when you look back, none of this was really new.”

Robinson, portrayed by Michael Keaton in the film, added that the investigation into these cases differed from earlier coverage because of the cultural-historical context in which the investigation occurred. “I think what’s different about this case is when we got on it, the Internet age had begun. And when our stories were published in 2002, they went viral. But we also got lucky and we cracked the code, that it wasn’t just one priest; it was scores. And then it turns out it was hundreds of priests, and when you think about it, the most iconic institution in almost any city, that it would not only countenance but enable and then cover up the sexual abuse of thousands of children by hundreds of priests to most of us would be unimaginable. So we finally got it.”

Using Robinson’s statement as a jumping-off point, Baron, who is portrayed by Liev Schreiber in the film, explained the questions the team considered upon entering the investigation. “What we really needed to look for was ‘Okay, well what did the church do when it found out about those priests? ... Did it simply reassign them to another place where they could abuse again without any notification to parishioners there?’” Baron explained. “An institution like the church, which has the responsibility to protect children in its care, would reassign priests where they could abuse again and never alert anyone to the prospect of danger. I wanted to get at the institutional failure and the institutional horror, really. And that, I thought, was the bigger story rather than just ‘there’s a lot of priests who are abusing kids.’ I didn’t think that that would be nearly [as big].”

Singer later asked whether the panelists thought the story would still be broken today, over a decade down the line. Baron noted that, while the press is “under an enormous amount of pressure” from diminished financial resources, the Globe’s continued dedication to investigative journalism ensures that the story would likely still be broken today.

At one point during the event, Singer discussed his decision to forgo flashback scenes of the abuse from the survivors’ perspective. An early draft of the script, according to Singer, included brief flashes of imagery that survivors recall from when they were abused as they talk to the reporters; for one, an ice cream cone dribbling down his arm, and for another, a mobile hanging on the wall. However, he and McCarthy removed the flashbacks to uphold their own diligence as reporters of the investigation’s story, and because, as Schreiber states in the film when editing an article, “We didn’t need another adjective,” according to Singer.

Bradlee praised this screenwriting decision, pointing out, “You don’t want to see actual abuse going on. So it was a great call to leave that out and have that piece be told by the victims so eloquently.” Responding to Bradlee, Singer argued, “None of us want to see that, but we have to look at it. Like, I think that’s important. We need to look at this. Because when we don’t look at it, then it happens again and again.”

The discussion then moved into a question-and-answer session.

When asked about the emotional toll of investigative journalism, Rezendes — played by Mark Ruffalo in the film — responded, “I like to say that I’m a skeptic, but I’m not a pessimist. I think investigative reporting makes the world a better place, and I’m proud to be a part of it, so I don’t feel that it’s made me jaded — if that’s the suggestion — at all. It makes me hopeful that we can all find ways to play a part to make the world a better place, and for us, it’s investigative reporting.”

—Max Moran contributed reporting.