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Karen Read’s highly anticipated Vanity Fair profile is out. Here’s what we learned.
For her wide-ranging Vanity Fair profile, Read weighed in on her relationship with John O'Keefe, her murder trial, and why she won't "plea out."
After her highly publicized murder trial, Karen Read got candid about the case with Vanity Fair, allowing a reporter extensive access to her story — and her home.
As Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller recounted Tuesday in the first installment of a two-part series, the wide-ranging interviews occurred under unorthodox circumstances: Read opened her home to Miller and purportedly agreed to discuss all aspects of her life and legal saga, with no parameters and no lawyers present.
According to the article, Read has been living with family and friends while her case plays out, but she invited Miller to stay at her former Mansfield home for their interviews in August. Read also invited a volunteer security guard “who looks like John Cena and has a license to carry,” Miller wrote.
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“Strangest sleepover ever,” as Read reportedly described the interview setup.
More on Karen Read:
The second installment of Vanity Fair’s profile is scheduled to publish Wednesday. Here’s what we learned from Part 1:
Karen Read keeps a go bag handy in case she’s arrested again
Read, 44, has been arrested twice in the death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years: Once when she was initially charged in February 2022, and then again following her indictment that June.
Prosecutors allege Read deliberately backed her SUV into O’Keefe on Jan. 29, 2022, while dropping him off at a fellow Boston police officer’s home in Canton after a night of bar-hopping. Read’s lawyers, meanwhile, say she was framed in a coverup; they allege O’Keefe walked into the afterparty and was severely beaten.
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Her case resulted in a mistrial July 1, and the defense has appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court in an effort to get two of Read’s charges dismissed ahead of her Jan. 27 retrial.
Left in a state of legal limbo with her criminal case pending, Read keeps a Ziploc go bag on hand “in case of sudden arrest,” according to Miller. The bag’s contents: Advil, melatonin, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, drugstore lipstick, a piece of paper with her lawyer’s phone number, and a bottle of Laura Mercier foundation.
How much money does Read owe her attorneys?
Read has built a team of criminal defense heavy hitters for her case, and that kind of legal representation doesn’t come cheap.
According to Vanity Fair, Read still owes her lawyers more than $5 million in deferred fees and recently sold her house to subsidize her legal expenses. Read is now living off of what’s left of her 401(k) after losing her jobs as a Fidelity Investments equities analyst and Bentley University finance professor, Miller reported.
“If I can get the entire truth of this case out in the public forum, that, to me, is priceless,” Read told Vanity Fair.
Read says she won’t take a plea deal
As her retrial draws nearer, promising to put her personal life and intimate details on public display once more, Read said she’s forging ahead.
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The stakes are incredibly high: Read is facing a possible life sentence if convicted of second-degree murder, and her two other charges could put her behind bars for years. But don’t expect her to take a plea deal if prosecutors offer one.
“I’m not backing down now,” Read told Vanity Fair. “As scary as a potential conviction is, I will go to jail for something I didn’t do before I plea out. I will never give them that win.”
There were fissures in her relationship with O’Keefe
Prosecutors have pointed to Read’s strained relationship with O’Keefe as a potential motive, sharing the couple’s heated texts and asking O’Keefe’s niece and nephew — who lived with him after their parents died — to recall the verbal clashes their uncle had with Read.
Read told Vanity Fair that O’Keefe resented that she took on the fun parts of parenting while he played the disciplinarian. Speaking to Miller, Read also alleged O’Keefe never adequately mourned the loss of his sister, the kids’ mother, and was lukewarm on the therapy he attended with his niece and nephew at one point.
“I think that’s part of his stock,” Read told Miller, “this Irish Catholic, south-of-Boston, rub-some-dirt-on-it, drink-through-your-problems mindset.”
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As Read recalled in her Vanity Fair interviews, she and O’Keefe began drinking more on weekends — behavior she rationalized at the time as “unwinding” but said she now regrets. Prosecutors allege Read consumed a total of nine drinks in the hours before O’Keefe died and say a retrograde analysis put Read’s blood alcohol content between 0.135% and 0.292% around the time she drove O’Keefe to the afterparty. (Read, for her part, maintains she didn’t feel impaired.)
As Read and O’Keefe’s relationship began to sour, she exchanged flirty texts with one of his acquaintances, Brian Higgins.
“I knew Higgins found me attractive,” Read told Miller. “It helped me emotionally validate myself, which is embarrassing to admit.”
She thought O’Keefe was ‘screwing around’ the night he died
Witnesses in Read’s first trial also testified about an ill-fated Aruba vacation Read, O’Keefe, and his niece and nephew took over New Year’s Eve in 2021. There, Read allegedly accused O’Keefe of cheating on her with a family friend who was also on the group trip (the woman denied kissing O’Keefe).
Flash forward to Jan. 28, 2022, when Read and O’Keefe were drinking with friends and acquaintances at the Waterfall Bar & Grille in Canton. As the bar outing began to wrap up, another of the attendees — Brian Albert — issued an open invitation to keep the night going back at his house on Fairview Road. Read drove herself and O’Keefe over there shortly after midnight on the 29th.
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Read told Vanity Fair there weren’t many cars in Albert’s driveway, and she felt uneasy — she and O’Keefe didn’t really know Albert, though O’Keefe was friendly with some of his relatives. She purportedly sent O’Keefe inside to confirm they were welcome.
When minutes passed with no word, “I got pissed,” Read told Miller. She also knew a woman O’Keefe previously dated lived nearby.
“He’s got to be screwing around,” Read thought, according to Vanity Fair. She added: “I didn’t think he was physically incapacitated.”
Read eventually drove back to O’Keefe’s house, leaving him a series of angry voicemails.
Read says she didn’t implicate herself in texts with lawyer
Read also addressed a persistent rumor that she implicated herself in texts with one of her lawyers. One purported but unverified message often attributed to Read on social media is, “I didn’t think I hit him that hard.”
However, Read and defense attorney David Yannetti — who has represented her from the start — both said they didn’t communicate until after Massachusetts State Police seized Read’s phone and car, according to Vanity Fair.
Still, in the months immediately following O’Keefe’s death, Read was reportedly open to the idea she could have accidentally hit him that snowy night in January 2022.
“I told my parents, if I did anything in any way, I’ll pay my dues,” she told Vanity Fair. “That’s how this should work. I want to know the truth — good, bad, ugly.”
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