"Spotlight" Interview: Manny Vega

By Celeste Hoang
TakePart
March 10, 2016

http://www.takepart.com/video/2016/03/10/manny-vega

[with video]

As Spotlight captures the unraveling of the Catholic Church's sex-abuse cover-up, survivors and families have come forward to talk about the decades-long scandal.

TakePart is sharing a series of five interviews, including survivors’ reactions to the film and an interview with Boston Globe reporter and survivor advocate Mitch Garabedian. (Disclosure: Spotlight was produced by TakePart’s parent company, Participant Media.)

“I went 40 years without talking about this,” survivor Jim Scanlan says in one of the interviews. “Matter of fact, I went 40 years avoiding this topic. For the first time in my life since the movie came out, I’ve really come out of the shadows.”

RELATED: Inside the Groundbreaking Investigative Journalism Behind ‘Spotlight’

The film follows the newspaper’s Spotlight team of investigative reporters as they delve into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, eventually revealing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Archdiocese of Boston that touches off a wave of revelations around the world.

“The first time I watched Spotlight was in a small screening room, and I just cried almost straight through,” survivor Joe Crowley, whose story is depicted in the film, says in one of the interviews. “What I learned through this journey is that every voice counts, and one of them was mine. I’m so tired of almost 38 years now of carrying this shame and guilt. I didn’t do anything wrong.”