On Air

Michael Rezendes in the Spotlight: A My Life As Event

At 7:30pm tonight, WUSB will be broadcasting a talk by Michael Rezendes. Full details below:

The SOJ’s next speaker in its My Life As series is the journalist Michael Rezendes. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and political writer for The Boston Globe. Since joining the Globe he has covered presidential, state and local politics, and was a weekly essayist, roving national correspondent, city hall bureau chief, and the deputy editor for national news.

For more than a decade Rezendes has also been a member of the Globe’s Spotlight Team, where he shared a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for investigating and reporting the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. For his reporting and writing on the Church, he also shared the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and numerous other honors.

Rezendes’s reporting revealed that top Catholic officials had veiled the abuses committed by the Rev. John Geoghan, a Boston priest who molested more than 100 children in six parishes over three decades. In addition, Rezendes broke the stories about similar cover-ups by Church officials in New York City and Tucson, Arizona.

Rezendes and the Spotlight Team were also Pulitzer Prize finalists for a series of stories that uncovered abuses in the debt collection industry. “Debtors Hell” won the Public Service Award form the Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize.

As a Spotlight Team member, Rezendes played a key role in many of the Globe’s most significant investigations, including those probing the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, financial corruption in the nation’s charitable foundations, and the plight of mentally ill state prisoners. He was also on a team of reporters that won a first-place award from the Education Writers Association for a special section on school desegregation.

In 2008 and 2009, he was the recipient of a John S. Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford University.

Before arriving at the Globe, Rezendes was a staff writer at The Washington Post, and a government and politics reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and the Boston Phoenix. He was also a contributing writer at Boston magazine and the editor of the East Boston Community News. He is a co-author of “Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church,” and a contributing author to “Sin Against the Innocents: Sexual Abuse by Priests and the Role of the Catholic Church.”

Rezendes graduated from Boston University with a BA in English.

In 2015, Rezendes was played by actor Mark Ruffalo in the critically acclaimed drama Spotlight. For his performance, Ruffalo received nominations from the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences