Blogger Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney leaves court on June 18, 2025, the day Karen Read was acquitted of second-degree murder charges. / Photo By Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald via Getty Images
It was 2:07 a.m. on April 18, 2023, when Kearney sent a message from his home in Holden. He had been typing feverishly, working on his initial blog post about the murder of John O’Keefe. Now he attached it to a message for an intermediary between him and Read: “Read it over.”
“Change exonerating to exonerate at end of first paragraph,” Read responded through the intermediary at 2:09 a.m., according to an extraction of Kearney’s cell phone, which was obtained by prosecutors as a result of witness intimidation charges against Kearney and became public after he sent it to a now-former girlfriend and others. “He has a niece and NEPHEW.”
“Thank you,” replied Kearney. “Keep them coming and I’ll live edit.”
At 2:14 a.m., Read sent another note through the intermediary: “KERRY [Roberts] repeated the same story as Jen.”
She kept sending edits until 3:06 a.m., when she was satisfied. “Amaze ball sauce!!!!!” she wrote, according to the phone extraction. “Thank you soooo much.”
“Hope they like it,” Kearney wrote through the intermediary, a former college acquaintance of Read’s named Natalie Wiweke. “They love it. Incredible,” Wiweke replied.
The week prior, Wiweke had been introduced to Kearney over Facebook by one of his followers. The two began texting, and after getting Read’s approval, Wiweke started receiving information from Read and passing it to Kearney, according to Wiweke and messages from Kearney’s phone extraction.
There was other information Read wanted to make sure Kearney had. “She started sending me pictures of Jen McCabe, Colin’s battered knuckles, all the different Alberts, and just who’s who,” Wiweke, who now regrets her support of Read, told me. That included a photo from Read—which Kearney published—supposedly showing State Police lead investigator Michael Proctor with McCabe’s daughters. In fact, they were not McCabe’s daughters.
Kearney was an unlikely person to take on this role. Less than two weeks after O’Keefe’s death the prior year, he addressed the case on a YouTube livestream. “No doubt she killed him, because obviously the taillight was out, but who the fuck intentionally kills someone by backing into them?” he told his fans. He speculated that Read was drunk and had driven into her boyfriend by accident.
That, however, was before Read and her lawyers started giving him access to information about the case to report for them, which could make him a star—an award-winning journalist, even. (“Please tell TB he will get ALL the credit from my camp when this blows up. And when I talk to Dateline next,” Read wrote to Kearney via Wiweke.) Communicating through text and Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and eventually by phone, Read would go on to use Kearney to disseminate the alternative theory she hoped would upend the case against her and keep it from ever reaching trial. (Read did not respond to requests for comment.)
Kearney called himself an “investigative reporter,” but his first blog was based entirely on court documents from the defense, including a motion and 92-page affidavit filed five days earlier, on April 12. In it, Read and her celebrity attorney from Los Angeles, Alan Jackson, argued that Brian Albert and his nephew Colin Albert were responsible for O’Keefe’s death, and that Jennifer McCabe helped cover it up along with investigators.
From that first post, and the hundreds more that would follow, putting the blame on the witnesses became a recurring feature of Kearney’s coverage as Read continued to direct it.
The morning the first blog hit, it jolted the tight-knit Canton community, rippling through group chats and youth sports’ sidelines. The witnesses’ phones started blowing up, their DMs filling with questions and accusations. In the face of the online harassment, the witnesses rushed to shut down their social media accounts. Read appeared pleased with the fallout. “They’re all folding,” she texted Kearney through Wiweke.
For Kearney, the reaction was welcome. His page views, largely from readers who call themselves Turtle Riders, surged to a reported 80,000 a day that April, up from about 40,000, according to figures Kearney previously provided to Boston. Many of those followers would form part of the Free Karen Read (FKR) movement, acting as foot soldiers in a campaign against the witnesses that he directed after taking his own marching orders from Read and her lawyers.
A few days later, on April 22, Kearney—using the Canton Police Department’s incident report, which the defense had recently filed unredacted, against court rules, with the witnesses’ personal information—called McCabe and Brian Albert while livestreaming and accused them of covering up O’Keefe’s murder. He claimed McCabe was sleeping with Albert, her sister’s husband. Then he showed images of that unredacted report on the livestream. His thousands of viewers now had the witnesses’ private phone numbers, addresses, and Social Security numbers.
After Kearney’s stream, Read’s local attorney, David Yannetti, texted to congratulate him. “That was priceless, dude. GREAT fucking show, really enjoying the turtle reporting,” he wrote, adding that Kearney mispronounced his name but, “I loved how you followed it up by, ‘that proves that I am not talking to them,’” according to Kearney’s phone extraction.
The next day, Wiweke sent Kearney a message from Read, who wanted him to write more about the secret federal probe. “Not public: the feds have been involved longer than anyone is likely guessing,” Read told him. A week later, Wiweke relayed confidential federal grand jury information that Read should not have known about. “The 1st Asst US Attny. They don’t shoot and miss—they have a case—and way more evidence than we do. I know this for a fact. Jen McCabe testifies this coming week. I’m not sure about the others. This is not going to trial (for me).”
The following week, on May 3, at the first pretrial court appearance following Kearney’s inaugural blog, it appeared clear that the effort to seed the alternative theory through Kearney’s coverage was working. For the first time, a crowd of protesters gathered outside the courthouse, and a few dozen TV cameras and reporters were there to capture it all. “They were clapping,” Jackson told Boston in 2023. “And then as we walked in, the door shut, they started applauding, and we realized, okay, things have just shifted.”
Inside the courthouse, the next step in the campaign was about to unfold. Two weeks earlier, on April 20, just days after publishing his first post, Kearney had spoken with Read’s defense team, who confirmed to him the federal investigation was under way—according to Kearney’s phone extraction and admissions Kearney later made on his YouTube livestream, where he acknowledged that Read’s team had been his source. That same day, after the call, Kearney posted a blog detailing the federal probe. In it, Kearney wrote: “According to reliable sources close to the matter a federal grand jury has subpoenaed multiple witnesses who were in the home of Boston Police Officer Brian Albert on the night fellow BPD Officer John O’Keefe was killed. The FBI has taken over the investigation and they have visited the homes of multiple witnesses.” He confirmed “with 100% certainty” that Jennifer McCabe had received a subpoena, even though federal grand jury information is supposed to be strictly confidential. At the time, Kearney publicly denied—including to me, while reporting my story in the subsequent months—that he had any contact with Read or her team. (On a later livestream, he acknowledged that he had “lied” to me, at Read’s request.)
On May 3, the defense team’s leak came full circle. “It’s been reported that the federal authorities have now gotten involved in the circumstances surrounding this case and have empaneled a federal grand jury to investigate some of these circumstances,” Jackson announced to the court. Then, raising his voice for dramatic effect, he added, “Karen Read should not have to wait for the feds to figure out which heads should roll.” Jackson was able to speak about federal involvement and the grand jury in open court, and have it entered into the public record, because it had already been reported by Turtleboy. In a later court filing opposing a proposed gag order, Yannetti argued that Jackson had merely been “reiterating what had already been publicly reported”—not, he said, revealing anything about the grand jury being empaneled, “something about which the defense team would have no knowledge.” What Yannetti did not add is that it had been reported because his team had leaked it to Kearney. (Jackson and Yannetti did not respond to requests for comment.)
But the defense team’s role in the federal investigation went back further than merely leaking it to the press.
Colin Albert on the stand, during the 2024 Karen Read trial. / Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe
“Did you kill John O’Keefe?” Colin Albert says Adam Deitch, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, yelled at him.
“No,” he replied, shocked.
“Tell us the truth!”
It was a suffocatingly hot day in late July 2023 when Colin was called to testify before the federal grand jury at the Moakley Courthouse, Colin recalls. Nineteen years old and recently finished with his freshman year at Bridgewater State, where he played football, he says he didn’t understand why he was even there.
Colin’s lawyer was not allowed inside the small, square room where rows of jurors faced him. Not one—as is customary—but two federal attorneys questioned him. Two of them were Adam Deitch, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who is now running for Norfolk County District Attorney, and Joshua Levy, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, a role that doesn’t typically question witnesses. (Dustin Chao, another Assistant U.S. Attorney, was also present.)
Behind Colin’s shoulder, Kearney’s tweets and blogs were projected onto a screen, Colin says. “Every single thing came from him. They didn’t use anything else, nothing else,” Colin tells me, noting that they didn’t even bother to take Kearney’s name off the screenshots. “Eventually they accused me of every single thing [Kearney] said.” They also projected, Colin says, the same pictures Kearney had published on his blog—Colin playing football, Colin at a wedding when he was a young boy, Colin’s bloody knuckles. Those pictures, according to Kearney’s phone extraction, had originated with Read, who had found them while trolling Facebook late at night and sent them to Kearney through the intermediary to print online. According to Colin, the material federal prosecutors put before the grand jury had, in significant part, originated with Kearney. What he didn’t know at the time was that Kearney had received it from Read.
After hours of confrontational, combative questioning, Colin asked for a break, went back into the small room where his lawyer waited, and broke down. When it was all over, he broke down again in his father’s car. “I couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t even speak,” Colin says. “I was like, What the fuck did they do to me in there?”
Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey has called the federal intervention in his office’s murder case “unprecedented.” He is not the only one. According to a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who worked in the office’s Public Corruption unit, it is rare for the federal government to open a parallel investigation into an active state homicide case—and rarer still for a murder defendant’s attorneys to bring the case to them.
How exactly Read’s defense team got the ear of the U.S. Attorney’s office before the federal investigation began remains unclear. What’s clearer is a series of documented connections—some direct, some circumstantial—between people around Read’s case and people around the federal office that took it up. Yannetti had a prior professional relationship with Rachael Rollins, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts in the fall of 2022, when the federal probe began. He had been invited to serve on Rollins’s transition team when she took office in 2019. According to multiple sources, including Morrissey, Rollins deeply disliked Morrissey, whom she had publicly accused of being misogynistic.
In a letter he wrote to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility after learning his witnesses were being subpoenaed to the federal grand jury, Morrissey formally raised what he called concerns about “motive, conflict or appearance of conflict, and potential bias by the Office of the United States Attorney for Massachusetts.”
Morrissey wrote that Chao—the head of the U.S. Attorney’s Public Corruption unit, who was heading up the federal investigation—had asked a Massachusetts State Police detective in 2018 if he “had any kind of damaging information on the district attorney, first assistant, or the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office.” (I confirmed this with the detective, who added that Chao had disparaged Morrissey in vulgar terms and told him, “I would do a case against that guy if you know anything about him.”) The animosity, Morrissey wrote in his letter, stemmed from his office attempting to demote Chao’s wife, Laura, from her position at the Norfolk County DA’s office years earlier. (She resigned instead and filed an ethics complaint, which was dismissed.)
Morrissey also pointed to Rollins, who resigned in the wake of an investigation by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General that found, among other ethical violations, that she tried to create the public impression that the DOJ was investigating a political opponent of hers. “I believe that a reasonable person could conclude that the same type of tactics are being employed against the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office in the Read investigation,” Morrissey wrote. (In an emailed response, Rollins says that “the unsigned OIG report is an allegation. Not a finding,” and she disagrees with it.)
The former Assistant U.S. Attorney told me that Kearney’s blog was something federal prosecutors in the office would read—most of the time it was “nothing,” he said, but “10 percent of the time there may be something there.”
The office had, in fact, brought a public-corruption case that Kearney’s blog had covered aggressively: Monica Cannon-Grant, a prominent activist whom Levy, Chao, and Deitch would indict and prosecute for, among other things, defrauding the city of Boston out of COVID relief funds. (Kearney denies having ever spoken to anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s office.)
Public corruption cases are notoriously hard to bring, the former Assistant U.S. Attorney told me, especially in blue Massachusetts, where there aren’t two political parties investigating one another. Prosecutors are desperate for—and rely on—tips, he says, and take them from wherever they can, be it the Boston Globe Spotlight team or Kearney, anonymous whistleblowers, even a murder defendant. For her part, Read claimed, in her communications with Kearney and others, to have a direct line to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
None of this fully explains how Read’s defense team got their case before the U.S. Attorney’s office. But why the office took it up may be less mysterious. The former Assistant U.S. Attorney told me that the opportunity to potentially expose a major cover-up involving the state police, Canton PD, and the DA’s office would have been, in his words, “right in the wheelhouse” of any U.S. Attorney’s office—and career-defining for whoever led it. That was Levy, then the Acting U.S. Attorney after Rollins’s forced resignation. (Levy did not respond to requests for comment.)
However it all went down, in September 2022, according to a statement from Jackson in court, the feds subpoenaed the defense’s entire case file. Morrissey says his office reached out to Levy multiple times, offering to share the state’s evidence from their investigation. Levy turned them down.
Instead, Levy called the witnesses before a grand jury. “When you have the leverage that the feds have, sometimes you want to put pressure on. You drag people into the grand jury, that kind of stirs the pot. Gets people talking,” says the former Assistant U.S. Attorney, adding that if he had caught wind of an alleged vast conspiracy, he, too, would have pulled at a few strings to see where they led.
Brian Albert on the stand. / Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe
Where that led, Brian Albert believes, was to the witnesses being treated as suspects. Albert—who was a sergeant, detective, and commander of the Boston Police Department’s Fugitive Unit, who helped catch the Craigslist killer, and who earned honors for bravery and valor—was also called to testify before the federal grand jury. “It was very aggressive.… I was not in there as a witness,” he says. “I was in there as the suspect. That was the first time that anybody of any importance was insinuating that.”
Just as with his nephew Colin, Brian says, the U.S. Attorney’s office appeared to take much of their information from Read’s defense team via Kearney’s blogs and social media posts. Brian says he was tag-teamed by three federal prosecutors—Levy, Deitch, and Chao. “I do not rile easily,” Brian says. “And I was freaking distraught.” His wife, Nicole, sister of Jennifer McCabe, and McCabe’s daughter, Allie, were also reduced to tears by the hostile questioning during their own testimonies.
While Read was telling Kearney that she had a direct line to the feds, O’Keefe’s family could not get a return phone call or email from the U.S. Attorney’s office. John’s brother Paul O’Keefe reached out to Levy repeatedly and got nothing in response.
Though the O’Keefe family and the prosecution could not get any answers, Read continued to weaponize the feds’ involvement for Kearney to disseminate. In early May 2023, for instance, she texted through the intermediary: “Josh Levy is the 1st Asst. There’s only one 1st Asst, and he doesn’t typically prosecute. Like, he never prosecutes, he just delegates to the assistants within the divisions (eg, Adam Deitch). But he’s running this GJ,” and “To substantiate the gravity of this particular federal probe. Levy is not a prosecuting attorney, but he’s making an exception for this case.”
Meanwhile, the existence of the federal case only amplified the harassment of the witnesses—and was used to legitimize it—with disastrous effects. McCabe says she reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s office multiple times, telling them one of her daughters had begun self-harming and had spent three months in a partial mental health program. She got no response.
This, too, is unusual, according to a retired FBI agent from the Massachusetts field office, who worked on public-corruption cases. “We went after people that were bothering our witnesses all the time,” the former agent says. It’s standard operating procedure, and they could have done the same to Kearney and his followers. “We’d go out and tell them, ‘Look, if you do it again, we’re going to arrest you. Leave our witnesses alone.’” Protecting witnesses so they can come forward to testify is critically important to the integrity of the justice system.
Meanwhile, the worst harassment was only beginning.
Jennifer McCabe. / Photo by Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool
On July 22, 2023, McCabe, her husband, and two of her four daughters huddled inside their Canton home as Kearney stood outside, screaming into a bullhorn at a crowd of more than 100 followers. “I want all Jen McCabe’s neighbors to know, in case they don’t already know, that the people who live right here [are] cop killers! These are cop killers!”
Over the course of two hours, Kearney, driving a brand-new Lexus, had led a caravan of cars on what he called a rolling rally. Dozens of cars made their way through the streets of Canton, stopping at the homes of seven different witnesses to listen and cheer on Kearney as he blared accusations while livestreaming for the rest of his followers.
Kearney’s behavior at the rally had the backing of Read’s attorneys, who had also filed the police report in court with the witnesses’ unredacted addresses. That evening, after the rally, Yannetti messaged Kearney, “Thanks for your continued support,” according to Kearney’s phone extraction.
By this point, Yannetti and Kearney were in regular communication, with Kearney sending Yannetti tips, and Yannetti sending court documents and confidential information—on top of the many phone calls between them. For instance, after McCabe went to Stoughton District Court for a Harassment Prevention Order against Kearney, Yannetti texted Kearney on May 30 with news: “HPO DENIED.” That night, Kearney blogged about it, ending his post with a kicker: “The bad news for Jen is that we’re just getting started. Buckle up horse face.”
By the beginning of May, Read had dropped the intermediary, and she and Kearney started communicating directly over Signal, and many of their messages appear in Kearney’s phone extraction. They also communicated by phone—189 times, totaling more than 40 hours—in 2023 alone, according to an affidavit filed the following year seeking a search warrant to seize Read’s phone. Kearney also recorded some of those calls presumably without Read’s permission—an act that Massachusetts law defines as illegal wiretapping—and those recordings have also been leaked online.
All the while, the witnesses were being targeted relentlessly. The Free Karen Readers followed and confronted them—showing up at Caitlin Albert’s wedding in New Hampshire, posting pictures of the McCabes on vacation in Aruba, screaming at Brian Albert as he tried to eat lunch in a crowded mall food court. It got so bad that Colin Albert says he was forced to quit playing football and give up his lifelong dream of playing in college as a result of the harassment from Kearney and his followers. He is now enrolled in the U.S. Army.
Not knowing what else to do, on August 25, for the first time in his 12 years in office, Morrissey released a nearly six-minute video statement, pushing back on the “absolutely baseless” claims of conspiracy, condemning the harassment of the witnesses, and disavowing the “false narratives.” “The witnesses,” he said, “certainly did not commit murder or any crime that night.”
It didn’t help.
On September 5, Kearney directed remarks in a YouTube livestream toward Chris Albert, the father of Colin Albert. “I go down to your pizza shop, and I stand out there for an hour, and I yell shit about your son,” Kearney said. “I accuse him of some of the most heinous things possible, and I affect business. People don’t want to go into your business because of the things that I’m saying.”
A few days later, Yannetti messaged Kearney: “These bastards deserve all the scorn we are giving them.” Yannetti knew—and approved of—Kearney’s public behavior. Later that same day, when Kearney texted Yannetti not to worry that he would get in trouble, Yannetti responded: “I am concerned they want you badly. They charge you, then a judge prohibits you from having contact with witnesses,” according to Kearney’s phone extraction.
Around that same time, according to a complaint later filed in court by the witnesses, Read and Turtleboy became administrators of the Facebook group “Justice for Officer John O’Keefe & Karen Read-Turtleboy Official.” The two had complete control over the group, including approving or denying posts, and the group played host to defamatory and harassing posts about the witnesses. According to the complaint, Read also personally posted in the group multiple times, including sharing confidential information that hadn’t yet been released to the public.
Meanwhile, Read continued to direct Kearney’s coverage of her case. On September 18, Read sent pictures of Brian Albert and his wife, Nicole, at their son’s football game. “Fucking cornered rat Brian Albert continues to fight us getting his FUCKING CALL LOG,” she texted, according to Kearney’s phone extraction. “Can you make a post just for this?” Kearney complied. (The Alberts “are living constantly on edge and have to hide like cornered rats,” he wrote in the post.)
She also directed Kearney to monitor multiple witnesses’ homes. “What we’d love is for someone to do surveillance on Wentworth tonight,” she texted Kearney the following week, in reference to investigator Michael Proctor’s house, after asking him to run the plates of a car with a Massachusetts State Police sticker on the back, according to Kearney’s phone extraction. “We really need surveillance set up. Please please don’t breathe a word of this,” she texted, followed by a request to go to the home of witness Kerry Roberts. “Get a pic of that cow’s Explorer,” Read texted.
The witnesses were not the only targets. In late September 2023, I wrote a story about the case that raised questions about Read’s account of what happened the night O’Keefe was killed. “What kind of horrible excuse for a mother supports cop killers?” someone texted me after the story was published, sending a picture of my sons when they were young, taken from my Facebook page. “You. You dragged them into this good job Ms. Voss.” My local police department sent extra officers to my son’s Friday-night football game.
The day my story went live, Read texted Kearney on Signal, according to his phone extraction: “Call out Gretchen for not confirming that stupid fucking manipulated text from Colin,” and “Did you call her out on missing the lack of a date stamp for Jan. 29?” Within hours, Kearney sent me a
barrage of texts, followed by blog posts trashing me—eventually putting my non-public phone number on the Internet, which people used to send me threatening and vile messages. Kearney also publicly accused me of sleeping with the DA’s married public relations officer. The accusation was false.
Kearney kept at it. Over the following months, his blog attacked me repeatedly. In one bracket-style feature he ran on witnesses, court personnel, and journalists, my name appeared alongside allegations that I had failed as a journalist, and that I had traded editorial favors for a burger dinner with the DA’s spokesperson. My phone number circulated in the “Turtle Rider” community; strangers sent messages accusing me of being a shill, a whore, a bad mother. I received calls late at night. When I appeared in the courthouse to cover the trial, women I had never met called me “disgusting,” repeatedly.
None of it changed what my reporting found. But it did make clear that anyone who asked hard questions about Read’s case could expect to be answered with the same machinery that was coming for the witnesses. The difference was mostly one of degree.
The harassment—and the news of the federal investigation that fueled it—served a purpose in Read’s defense: casting doubt on the witnesses by making them appear to be the perpetrators of the crime; and casting doubt on the state’s investigators by suggesting they were the subjects of a federal probe.
Read knew it was working. In a Signal message to Kearney on September 29, she reveled in the effects of his work. “Look at what you’ve done to their reputations!!” she wrote. “And to MY jury pool!!”
Hundreds of Karen Read supporters gathered in front of Dedham’s Norfolk County Superior Court before a Read court appearance. / Photo by Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
As the bus carrying the jurors made its way from an undisclosed location to the courthouse each day in the spring of 2024, the 12 jurors who were supposed to know nothing about the case looked out the windows at a massive banner on Route 1A that read in large red letters: KAREN READ WAS FRAMED. They passed dozens of protesters camped out at Legacy Place along the bus route, wielding posters with slogans like “Way Beyond Reasonable Doubt” and “DA, Stop Lying.” Even if they weren’t looking, there was no avoiding the sounds of people yelling “Free Karen Read” at their bus.
Though the judge had instituted a 200-foot buffer zone around the courthouse to protect the jurors from the contentious protests—which Kearney led on his bullhorn during pretrial hearings—it did nothing to help. Hundreds of women—and some men—clad in pink merch (Read’s requested color) lined the street across from the courthouse and in the adjacent field, shaking pink pompoms, dancing to music blasting out of pickup trucks, and walking dogs in Jackson/Yannetti shirts.
The jury room, on the second floor down the hall from the courtroom, overlooked that field—where Read and her legal team made their entrance and exit every day. “We could figure out when Karen was leaving the building and when she was coming back, because there were cheers,” says one juror in the first trial who requested anonymity to speak about the proceedings. When they peeked through the blinds, they could see it all—including, at one point, a bouncy house and lobster food truck, the field transformed into something resembling a circus. Many of them reported it all to the court officers. Nothing was done to stop it. “We kept saying, I can’t believe they’re letting this happen,” the juror says.
The juror also recounted what another juror had described: His wife had told him that Kearney was assigning nicknames to each of the jurors. “Just knowing that was really uncomfortable and not cool,” the anonymous juror says. Once the jurors recognized Kearney in the courtroom, she says, they grew nervous he would identify and dox them. He had done so to a juror in a previous case in that same court. “We felt intimidated,” she says, adding that about halfway through the trial, the jurors asked court officers to ask the judge to remove Kearney from the courtroom. He was not removed.
On July 1, 2024, the judge declared a mistrial after the jury said they were deadlocked. The anonymous juror believes Kearney had a direct impact on the outcome. “If the conspiracy theory was never created, there’s no doubt in my mind that she’d be in jail. No doubt.”
The day after the mistrial, Paul O’Keefe emailed U.S. Attorney Levy. “I would appreciate the opportunity to meet with you regarding your involvement in the murder case against Karen Read,” he wrote. “You were kind enough to meet with her and her legal team, and now I think it is time to meet with the family of the actual victim in this case.” He never received a reply. He sent another email. And another. He left a voicemail. Nothing. “The mere fact that they were involved was used in court to create a cloud of doubt. The defense used it as a weapon,” says Paul O’Keefe. “Nobody would come out and speak and say anything.”
O’Keefe’s family—who filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Read that August—weren’t the only ones who were stonewalled. Helena Rafferty, the Canton Chief of Police at the time, says she repeatedly reached out to Levy and Deitch, begging them to help. She told them that there was an enormous amount at stake—that if they didn’t do something, allowing the intimidation of witnesses to continue would set a precedent, allowing the “whole justice system to crumble,” she says.
They finally agreed to meet in the fall, between Read’s mistrial and the second trial. “I had repeatedly reached out to Adam Deitch, like these people are getting eaten alive. They’re your witnesses, too,” Rafferty recalls telling him. When she arrived at the meeting, nine people were seated around a large table, including Levy and Deitch. “I said, I am coming in to beg for help,” she says, and opened up a huge portfolio full of abusive letters and emails that had been sent to the witnesses, residents of her town. “And I’m crying. I’m saying, Help me help these witnesses! This is crazy!” She wanted them to speak up, to tell Kearney’s followers, the FKR diehards, that these witnesses were, in fact, witnesses—and not murderers.
Levy texted her later. They had talked about it for a while after she left, Rafferty says he wrote, and there was really nowhere they could go with it.
Levy stepped down in January 2025 due to the change in presidential administration, and Leah Foley was appointed U.S. Attorney shortly thereafter. Her office contacted Rafferty and other law enforcement figures involved in the case, including Commonwealth special prosecutor Hank Brennan, and let them know that the investigation was closed. The case that had run for nearly two years, during which time they allowed Read to stand trial for murder twice without intervention, resulted in no charges against any of the witnesses, or against anyone else. The only conviction from the entire investigation was of one of the federal grand jurors themselves, who pleaded guilty to leaking confidential grand jury information.
Though Foley told her law enforcement partners that they could announce it—and allowed lawyers for Brian Albert and Brian Higgins to state in open court that they were not targets of the investigation—her office never made an official statement. That left the door open for Read and her followers to hijack and misrepresent the news. “I don’t know if I believe that,” Read said with a smile when a reporter asked whether she was encouraged or discouraged by the feds’ decision to stop investigating the case. “I have good reason not to. From the horse’s mouth.”
Kearney’s stated goal of influencing the jury pool—“We are trying to affect the jury pool. We are,” he shouted at one rally. “That’s exactly what I’m doing”—appeared, by his own metric, to be succeeding. Jury selection for the state’s retrial of Read began on April Fool’s Day, 2025. It took 10 days and 591 prospective jurors to find 18 who were deemed fit for the trial.
The day the jury was brought back into the courtroom to ask a question amid their deliberations, two jurors appeared to look directly at Kearney, who was sitting in the media section, and smile. I was in the courtroom that day and saw it. After they delivered their verdict later that day, as they filed out, one of them appeared to look straight at Kearney and smile broadly. After the case was over, the jury foreman—who later said he didn’t take a single note after the first witness testified—called the witnesses “suspects” in a post-trial interview, even though the defense was prohibited from mentioning the theory of their involvement in the crime during the trial.
In addition to the harassment they continue to suffer, the witnesses now face Read’s own lawsuit against them. Alongside the wrongful death suit that O’Keefe’s family filed against Read in 2024 (which is still ongoing), Read has filed her own civil-rights suit against witnesses Jennifer and Matthew McCabe, Brian and Nicole Albert, Brian Higgins, and several law enforcement officials, alleging that they “concocted a plan, executed that plan, and framed an innocent woman” to steer the murder investigation away from themselves.
“Adam Deitch is still a sitting U.S. Attorney,” Read is heard telling Kearney in a phone call recorded in the months after her acquittal. She was warning Kearney not to tweet about what she called her “private conversations with Deitch and the lawyers.” She continues: “I really don’t need federal attorneys knowing that I’ve leaked stuff to you, and now you’re showing it off.”
I asked to meet Deitch to discuss Read’s statements about him and his role in the federal investigation. He agreed, and we spoke for three hours over coffee at a restaurant in Milton. In the months before our meeting, Deitch had sold his East Boston condo, moved to Quincy, and left what he calls his “dream job” at the U.S. Attorney’s office to run for Norfolk County DA—the office whose handling of the Read case had been the subject of the federal investigation he led. He told me he had heard the recording of Read but denied that he ever had private conversations with her. “I’ve never met Karen Read or communicated with Karen Read,” he said. “I did send thank-you notes to her and her family after they contributed to my campaign, and I’m proud to have the support of anyone who cares as much as they do about change in the Norfolk County DA’s office.”
Indeed, Read and her family—and her lawyers—have donated to Deitch’s campaign in each of the past two years. At presstime, Read’s family had contributed more than $5,000, and her legal team at least $9,000. Asked how he can appreciate the support of someone who, on the recording, describes what he insists never happened, he said, “I don’t know what she meant when she said that.”
Two of Read’s cell phones were seized by state authorities in January 2024 as part of an investigation into witness intimidation connected to Kearney. The phones remain in the custody of the Norfolk County DA’s office while the Commonwealth appeals a March 2026 order to return them to her. (On another leaked recording of a call with Kearney, Read said, “Do you have any clue what’s on my phones that they took?!” She did not specify.)
If Deitch wins the election, Read’s cell phones will be under his authority. Kearney, facing charges of felony witness intimidation, made his own view of a Deitch win explicit. In a livestream in November, just days after Deitch announced his campaign, Kearney said: “I have no doubt if he was elected district attorney, I think my problems would go away. I would hope so.”
I put Read’s statements on the recording to Deitch. “I’m not going to comment on specific allegations or cases without seeing the evidence,” he told me, saying that he has never communicated with or met Kearney. “If I have a conflict of interest in a particular case, then I will not be involved in the decision-making of that case.” And though he says the Norfolk County DA’s office has been rife with conflicts, he declined to comment on any of his own.
For instance, the chairman of his campaign committee, Michael Lohnes, is married to fellow Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Paruti, who has coprosecuted cases with Deitch (and whom Deitch says is a close friend). Paruti was also the prosecutor for the federal grand juror who leaked confidential information in the Read case; she requested a lighter sentence than the judge ultimately issued.
Though Deitch declined to discuss it, talk of an apparent connection—and conflict of interest—has been circulating online: Paruti and Read went to high school together and were both in the Spanish Honor Society (according to a yearbook photo) and were recently—until it was revealed on social media—Pinterest friends. Indeed, Read reportedly went to the wedding of Anne’s sister, Tricia, who was also in the Spanish Honor Society with them.
When asked whether he would reopen the investigation into O’Keefe’s death, as he has alluded to on the campaign trail, Deitch said, “I believe the O’Keefe family has been fed a one-sided set of facts.” (Although he speaks about the O’Keefes often while campaigning, he first contacted the family, according to Paul O’Keefe, only after Paul emailed him with several reporters cc’d, including this one.) Does that mean he believes the family is wrong that Read is responsible for O’Keefe’s death? “If you look at the evidence that has been made public,” he said carefully, “what’s clear to me is that the charges did not match the evidence.”
Deitch highlights his work leading the federal investigation in his campaign but says he cannot discuss its details. The investigation closed in early 2025 without charges. What it produced publicly was the text messages found on the personal cell phone of Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator on the O’Keefe case—messages so racist and misogynistic they led to Proctor’s dismissal and, later, the revocation of his law enforcement certification.
Deitch has appeared on the YouTube program of Emily See, a Free Karen Read podcaster whose past segments have included mockery of John O’Keefe’s mother and of the children of the witnesses. Deitch told me he was open to appearing on podcasts across the political spectrum to reach the widest possible audience.
A few weeks after our interview, Deitch declined an invitation to appear on a show called The Forensic Room, hosted by supporters of the witnesses and the O’Keefe family. Instead, Read and her father, Bill, attended the grand opening of Deitch’s new Quincy campaign headquarters.
“His campaign to run for the office,” Morrissey says, “certainly provides plausible motive for misconduct in the investigation he led as an Assistant United States Attorney.”
Paul O’Keefe. / Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe
Five minutes down the road from the Norfolk County DA’s office, more than 400 supporters of the witnesses in John O’Keefe’s murder investigation gathered on a March evening to raise money to defend themselves against Read’s lawsuit. Long tables flanking the ballroom were loaded with merch for sale; there was a silent auction, featuring donated Red Sox tickets and Loon Mountain getaways. Designer upholstered throw pillows—starting at a value of more than $600—had been donated by Natalie Wiweke, the former Read-Kearney intermediary, who flew in from California to show her support that night.
Inside, the crowd—which had grown too large for the dozens of round tables draped in white cloth—rose for a standing ovation for Peg O’Keefe, who was there with her son Paul to support the witnesses. Brian Albert, too, was met with thunderous applause as he took to the microphone. “This three-pronged attack was executed with military precision. It consisted of a vicious and unscrupulous defense team, an army of social media lunatics, and a highly unusual and unprecedented federal investigation—all coalescing, in my opinion, for the common goal of influencing the outcome of this case,” he said. The system, he said, failed them at every turn. “They allowed us to be lambs for the slaughter.… It’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and that’s saying a lot, because I’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer.”
The money they raised that evening would go to defend against Read’s civil lawsuit against them, and to fund a lawsuit of their own. One month after the event, on April 16, Chris Mattei—the lawyer for the Sandy Hook families who won a $1.4 billion defamation award against Alex Jones for claiming the shooting was a hoax—filed a lawsuit on behalf of Jennifer McCabe, Brian Albert, Colin Albert, and Brian Higgins against Read and Kearney for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy, among other counts. “This case arises from a multi-year conspiracy orchestrated by Karen Read and Aidan Kearney to subvert and prejudice the criminal justice process in Norfolk County, Massachusetts,” the complaint states. Read “knowingly destroyed the reputations and lives of innocent people to deflect attention away from her own culpability,” it alleges, and Kearney “received his information exclusively from Read and her legal team…made no independent journalistic effort to verify the accuracy of the murder accusations before publishing them…repeatedly ignored or dismissed evidence contradicting his narrative.”
Mattei says that the lawsuit put it best. “This operation to assassinate the character of innocent witnesses has caused incalculable harm, subjecting them to a daily tidal wave of hatred, harassment, and intimidation,” he says. “While the damage to them has been catastrophic, Read’s and Kearney’s lies, which were amplified by a vigorous public relations campaign, have also poisoned the community’s cohesion, tainted the criminal prosecution of Read, and deprived the O’Keefe family and the Commonwealth of the justice they deserve.”
On his livestreams since the lawsuit was filed, Kearney has called Mattei “retarded” and said Mattei would be his “play toy for the next few years.” He said he would “destroy [Mattei’s] reputation.” “Now’s when we double-down, motherfucker,” he said. “I have an army of people behind me.”
The witnesses had stayed mostly quiet through the investigation, both trials, and years of harassment. At the fundraiser that night, McCabe stood before the crowd of 400 and spoke. “We trusted the process. We trusted the system. We believed if we told the truth and endured, that would be enough,” she said. “We were quiet when quiet was right.… This time, we’re not whispering.”
This story appears in the August 2026 print issue of Boston, with the headline, “Read Between the Lines.”
