10+ Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be True

Victims of abusive priests in Boston had been speaking up for years, saying church leaders knew about the abuse and simply moved the priests to new parishes. Their stories were often ignored or quietly settled. The Catholic Church seemed too powerful to question. Until it wasn’t.

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team exposed it in 2002, using church records a judge had made public. Cardinal Bernard Law had moved known abusers, like John Geoghan, from parish to parish. Law resigned, the church paid millions to victims, and similar scandals erupted worldwide.