AP’s Paris bureau broke news with an early scoop on the staggering scale — hundreds of thousands of victims — in a long-awaited report on sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church. That was just the start of a week of powerful and delicate AP coverage of France’s first nationwide reckoning with systemic church abuse, cover-ups and decades of trauma.

AP 21277635045931 hm church abuse i

Olivier Savignac, president of Parler et Revivre (Speak Out and Live Again) victims’ association, speaks during an interview with AP in Paris, Oct. 4, 2021.

AP Photo / Alex Turnbull

On the eve of the report’s release, Paris-based senior field producer Masha Macpherson and video journalist Alex Turnbull tracked down an abuse victim who had inside information about the findings — notably, an estimated 216,000 children had been abused by clergy over the past 70 years. Their on-camera interview saw massive use.

The following day, reporter Sylvie Corbet, senior producer Jeff Schaeffer, Macpherson and other Paris staffers, working closely with AP Vatican authority Nicole Winfield, produced fast-moving, comprehensive coverage on the release of the 2,500-page report.

AP had live video, six video edits and two stories, including emotional reaction from victims and bishops; victims’ groups shared AP's stories online. And Schaeffer found a searing, intimate way to tell the victims’ side of the story in all formats: through the eyes of an actor who was abused by a priest and is working out the trauma onstage. Actor Laurent Martinez later shared his appreciation for AP’s respectful handling of his painful personal story.