Karen Read is a middle aged white professional woman who was dating a Boston police officer. Read and John O’Keefe, her police officer boyfriend, met up with their hard drinking social group at a Canton bar one evening during a snowstorm, a group that included police officers, an ATF agent and O’Keefe’s childhood friends. The group decided to move the party to the home of a police officer nearby.
Read and O’Keefe, both drunk, got in Read’s SUV with Read driving and headed the short distance to the after-hours party. Read and O’Keefe had a contentious, drama-filled relationship that was fueled with plenty of alcohol and this evening they were arguing, as usual. O’Keffe exited the SUV to walk up the lawn to the party and Read, probably in an alcoholic blackout based on her statements to friends after the crash, then deliberately hit O’Keefe with the SUV, causing him to fly backward, hit his head and either die immediately or die of hypothermia in the snowstorm when Read drove away without rendering aid.
Fairly straightforward criminal case where a prosecutor might have charged murder understanding that the case would settle on a lesser charge because intent would be difficult to prove. But that’s not what happened.
Read was indicted, charged with murder. A local Right wing You Tuber in the Canton area who had a long-standing (and justified) beef with the corrupt Canton police department took up Read’s case and made her a celebrity, insisting that Canton police had framed her, and the “Free Karen Read” movement was born. Tens of thousands of people now start following the case, insisting Read is innocent.
All of that was interesting, but the main reason I followed the case was what the defense found on two police officer’s private phones, one a Massachusetts’s state trooper who was the lead investigator on the case and one a Canton police officer. They’re absolute misogynist pigs. They call Read a cunt, malign her appearance, call her crazy, search for “nudes” on her seized cell phone, say she should die, and they write all these things on a text chain that includes their high school buddies who are not police officers, pre indictment, while they’re supposedly impartially investigating O’Keefe’s death. Alan Jackson, the very good and very expensive defense lawyer from California Read hired, must have thought he died and went to heaven when he saw these texts.
Politically, this is a Right on Right battle – the You Tuber is a Righty as is Read and all of her corrupt cop buddies. Criminal defense attorneys have one job – they must force the state to prove every element of the crime. That’s it. That’s the job. It’s not about guilt or innocence or right or wrong. So Jackson, probably knowing he couldn’t defend Read on the facts, instead told a compelling story about corruption and bias in policing using these texts and the fact that all of these police officers are basically drunken thugs who break the law themselves on a regular basis and cover for one another. The police were and are corrupt and biased! Jackson had a lot to work with! So the jury bought it – they hung on the first trial, and Read was acquitted at the retrial.
I watched most of the trial and although I think the physical evidence showed that Read hit O’Keefe deliberately (although I think she’s an alcoholic and was operating in a black out) I was okay with her acquittal because the system worked as it should – the state couldn’t prove the case because the state had no credibility due to their own corruption and revealed bias against Read. So “right” result although Read killed her boyfriend and was never held accountable.
But wait. There’s more. Read has now filed a civil suit with a complaint alleging that Massachusetts and Canton did not properly supervise their officers, which led to reputational and financial harm to Read. And during THAT case we got some more text messages. Woo boy, if you thought the misogyny was bad, look out because here comes vicious racism, much more misogyny, antisemitism and Hitler worship.
Among the claims, Read's attorneys share scores of explosive racist and obscene texts allegedly shared between former State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator in the failed murder case against Read in connection with the death of Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, and former Canton Police officer Sean Goode.
In response to a car accident allegedly involving a Black motorist, Proctor tells Goode, "I wouldn't rush if you're working. Let them die," according to the complaint.
In another, Proctor says, "America sucks. ... Hitler was really on to something," according to the complaint.
The lawsuit claims the State Police and Town of Canton "have spent years trying to conceal: an imbedded culture of bigotry, misogyny, systemic failures, and institutional rot at the very core of both organizations."
John Roberts and the Right and a huge cottage industry of whiny, entitled Gen Xers moaning about how they have to take diversity training keep telling us we’re in post racism and sexism and religious bigotry America, and state actors keep proving them wrong.
Imagine you’re a black person or a woman or a Jewish person reading these texts and you’re a person of interest or suspect in a criminal case in (liberal!) Massachusetts. You better get yourself an Alan Jackson, or you’re going to prison.
