John Geoghan

John Joseph Geoghan ( GAY-gən; June 4, 1935 – August 23, 2003) was an American serial child rapist and Catholic priest assigned to parishes in the Archdiocese of Boston in Massachusetts. He was reassigned to several parish posts involving interaction with children, even after receiving treatment for pedophilia. The investigation and prosecution of Geoghan comprised one of the numerous cases of priests accused of child sexual abuse in a scandal that rocked the archdiocese in the 1990s and 2000s and led to the resignation of Boston's archbishop Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on December 13, 2002. Law lost the support of fellow clergy and the laity after it was shown that his response to allegations against dozens of priests consisted of assigning them to different parishes, thus allowing the sexual abuse of additional children to take place. Geoghan was convicted of sexual abuse, laicized and sentenced in 2002 to nine to ten years in Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum security prison. Less than a year later, he was murdered there by Joseph Druce, an inmate serving a life sentence. The Boston Globe's coverage of Geoghan's abuse opened the door for public knowledge of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Boston and Catholic churches nationwide in general. This coverage is a key plot element of Tom McCarthy's film Spotlight (2015).