Karen Read has broken her silence after she filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts State Police and Canton Police Department after she was deemed innocent of killing her late boyfriend, John O’Keefe.
Read, 46, appeared on the Today Show on Tuesday, June 5, to reveal her goals for the lawsuit. She was joined by her attorney, Alan Jackson, who explained she’s seeking more than financial damages.
“What Karen wants, you cannot write on a check, which is exposure,” he said. “Exposure of the corruption that is the DNA of the Massachusetts State Police and the Canton Police Department.”
Read filed a lawsuit in Bristol Superior Court on Thursday, June 4, in which she claimed that her 2025 trial for the second-degree murder of O’Keefe, 46, revealed “an (embedded) culture of bigotry, misogyny, systemic failures, and institutional rot at the very core of both organizations,” according to court documents.
A jury found Read not guilty of O’Keefe’s murder after her first trial in 2024 resulted in a mistrial after a hung jury.
With her new lawsuit, Read said she is fighting against ways in which she believes she was wronged during her past trials.
“This was always our plan, that I had to save my own life first,” she said. “I can’t do anything if I’m not free. I had to fight for my freedom for years, and I knew as it unfolded I was never going to be able to just forget that this happened to me, that I was wronged in this way. I couldn’t just go back to life as it was. I have to continue fighting for justice.”
She added that the “acquittal is deserved, but the wrongs have not been completely righted.”
“They have been happening along the way, but I always knew this was going to happen if I could get the help legally to do this,” Read said.
O’Keefe died of blunt force trauma to the head after he was found mortally wounded on the lawn of the home of now-retired Boston police sergeant Brian Albert on January 29, 2022.
Read was accused of driving her SUV into O’Keefe while intoxicated and leaving him to die in a blizzard. She denied the allegations.
She was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene, and the jury only convicted her of the lesser charge of driving while intoxicated.
In the June 4 filing, Read shared disturbing voicemails, text messages and other communications between lead investigator Michael Proctor and former Canton police Sgt. Michael Goode as evidence. Neither person has been named as defendants in the lawsuit, and they both no longer work at their police departments.
Following the lawsuit, the Massachusetts State Police told Us Weekly that “these disturbing messages are entirely inconsistent with any basic standard of decency and certainly with the expectations of a Massachusetts State Trooper. These racist, sexist and abhorrent comments absolutely do not reflect the values of the Massachusetts State Police and are not tolerated within our ranks. They underscore and fully support my decision to terminate Michael Proctor.”
Meanwhile, the Canton Police Department issued a statement about the lawsuit on its Facebook page, saying that the town “has not been served.”
“As such we have nothing to review with legal counsel at this time. We have no comment on the press release issued by the Read legal team,” the department added.
