Karen Read reveals she owes her lawyers $5M, says her controversial courtroom grins due to ‘free conscience’
Karen Read admitted she owes her legal team $5 million since her trial for allegedly mowing down her Boston cop boyfriend and leaving him to die in a snow drift ended in a hung jury over the summer – and defended that her controversial courtroom grins as a sing that she has a “free conscience.”
Read, 44, opened up about her so-called “trial on a budget” for the Jan. 29, 2022, death of her then-boyfriend, John O’Keefe, in the second part of her Vanity Fair profile published Wednesday.
The former financial analyst paid her defense lawyers $1.2 million leading up to and throughout her nine-week court proceedings – including costs for transporting, housing, and feeding three lawyers, as well as hiring private investigators and experts, the magazine reported.
She hired star defense lawyer Alan Jackson — a former LA prosecutor who has defended the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey — to lead her team.
Read served as her lawyer’s support staff and negotiated reduced rates for Ubers to and from the courthouse, but still had to dig into her savings, deplete her $500,000 legal fund and rely on $400,000 in donations from friends and family to cover the mounting costs.
She still owes her attorneys $5 million in deferred fees ahead of her second trial next year she told Vanity Fair.
As for the critics who lambasted Read and her team for being spotted at ritzy restaurants during lunch breaks, Read simply scoffed “You try feeding Alan Jackson McDonald’s.”
During the first trial, Read was frequently photographed smiling in the courtroom. One headline even dubbed her “America’s Happiest Murder Defendant.”
“If I look happy, did it cross your mind that I have a free conscience? Because I didn’t do it?” she told Vanity Fair of the criticism.
“If being innocent and enjoying the support and refusing to be down day after day, month after month, year after year makes me America’s happiest murder defendant, then I’m America’s happiest murder defendant,” she insisted.
Read has repeatedly denied the prosecution’s argument that she drunkenly ran O’Keefe over with her SUV when she dropped him off at a Canton, Mass., house party with his cop friends.
The state claimed that Read abandoned O’Keefe’s body where it was later found in a snowdrift, but she insisted that she has no idea how he ended up dead with black eyes, skull fractures, and cuts all over his body.
She briefly addressed O’Keefe in her conversation with Vanity Fair.
“They want to see me incarcerated for the rest of my life despite never seeing evidence while you were alive that I mistreated you,” she said of the police officer’s family.
“We were dating for two years, and I’ve since eclipsed those two years. I’m going on three, and I’ve got to save myself now,” she added.
Read has a recurring nightmare of O’Keefe dying on the night of Jan. 29, 2022, but cannot remember what happened to him, she told the magazine.
In the dream, she said, she tries to get O’Keefe to remember how he died while his mother and brother, Peg and Paul O’Keefe, pin the blame on her.
“So Paul and Peg, if you think I killed John, that means you misjudged me for two years and entrusted two young family members in my care,” she said, referring to O’Keefe niece and nephew, who lived with him.
“Then in the blink of an eye, you now think I’m a cold-blooded killer who took away your son?”
Read added that she was especially hurt by the rejection from O’Keefe’s dad, who referred to her as an “angel” in a Christmas card just a few weeks before O’Keefe died.
Read – who has repeatedly suggested that O’Keefe was actually killed in a fight with his cop buddies, who then supposedly framed her – told Vanity Fair that she believed heavy drinking was the root cause of her beau’s demise.
“I feel that everything in the two years I dated John was a precursor to this horrible decision of us to go out drinking, and for John to think he was welcome with these people who never really acted welcoming to him before,” she said.
“Everyone was a drinking buddy, and everyone testified as much. Alcohol’s at the epicenter of this, and it was in my relationship with him. In hindsight, everything was just a precursor to this fateful, tragic night in his life and to a much lesser degree mine.”
Read is currently gearing up for her Jan. 27 trial while her lawyers press the Supreme Judicial Court to drop two of the charges against her – including one count of second-degree murder.
“I just don’t know how long the trail of dominoes is. Are there 10? Are there 100 more?” she said of the road ahead.
“I don’t know how long it takes to get there. But I know there’s a big explosion at the end.”
