The latest on the Karen Read murder case
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Alan Jackson sheds light on Karen Read’s legal expenses in Vanity Fair interview
For Read, last month's acquittal was a moment three years, two trials, and millions of dollars in the making — after all, high-profile legal teams don’t come cheap.
Karen Read walked out of Norfolk Superior Court last month a free woman, flanked by the heavy-hitting defense attorneys who secured her acquittal on murder and manslaughter charges.
For Read, it was a moment three years, two trials, and millions of dollars in the making — after all, high-profile legal teams don’t come cheap.
Even before she stood trial a second time in the January 2022 death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, Read told Vanity Fair last October that she owed her lawyers more than $5 million in deferred legal fees. She’d drained her life savings, sold her Mansfield home for $810,000, and was reportedly living off the remainder of her 401(k) after losing her jobs as a Fidelity Investments equities analyst and Bentley University finance professor.
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But as Read told Vanity Fair at the time, “If I can get the entire truth of this case out in the public forum, that, to me, is priceless.”
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While the final sum of her legal bills is between Read and her lawyers, lead attorney Alan Jackson shed some light on the subject in a new Vanity Fair interview published Monday. Reflecting on the sensational case, Jackson told the magazine his firm alone would have billed $10 million for Read’s 2024 mistrial and subsequent retrial.
California-based Werksman Jackson & Quinn supplied two members of Read’s defense, Elizabeth Little and Jackson. Rounding out the team were Boston-based attorney David Yannetti, New York’s Robert Alessi, and Victoria Brophey George, an alternate juror from Read’s first trial.
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Vanity Fair reported Read paid $1.2 million leading up to and during that first trial to cover bail; hire private investigators and experts; and accommodate, feed, and transport three of her lawyers. According to the magazine, Read paid those costs out of her savings and with $400,000 donated by friends and family, also drawing about $500,000 from her legal defense fund.
“Right now, I’m paying for everything entirely on the charity of supporters,” Read told Boston 25 News reporter Ted Daniel in February, months before her second trial began. “I’ve liquidated my retirement. I’ve sold my home. And everything else is from supporters.”
Read’s since-deactivated defense fundraiser raked in more than $1 million from more than 13,000 donors as of mid-June, per The Patriot Ledger. Read’s supporters also organized fundraiser events and giveaways to help pay for her defense, memorably raffling off a private dinner date with Read and Jackson earlier this year. According to Vanity Fair, some of Read’s lawyers worked pro bono, as did the nine law clerks who assisted the defense throughout the retrial.
“It’s important to know that although the attorney time involved is in the multi-million-dollar range, $5 [million], probably $6 million, … most of us — all of the lawyers — are not getting paid that,” Jackson told Boston 25 in February. “We have not taken that money; we’re not going to take that money.”
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He said the defense team — including Martin G. Weinberg, who handled Read’s appeal following her mistrial — fought on Read’s behalf because “none of us are willing to stand by and watch her get railroaded or steamrolled by the power of the government when she did not do this.”
Prosecutors had accused Read of backing her SUV into O’Keefe in a drunken rage while dropping him off at an afterparty in Canton early on Jan. 29, 2022. Her lawyers have long maintained she was framed for murder as part of a botched and biased investigation, suggesting instead that O’Keefe was mortally wounded after joining the party inside 34 Fairview Road.
In the end, jurors only convicted Read on a charge of operating under the influence of liquor, for which she received a year of probation.
Read and Jackson have since joined forces with LBI Productions to bring her story to screen in the form of a scripted adaptation, though the financial elements of the deal have not been made public. A literary agent is also shopping publishing rights for a book project with participation from Read and Jackson, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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Read still faces a pending wrongful death lawsuit from O’Keefe’s family and has retained six lawyers in all: William Keville, Christopher George, and Marissa Palladini from Melick & Porter, and Damon Seligson, Aaron D. Rosenberg, and Charles Waters from Sheehan Phinney.
The civil case is due back in court Sept. 22 for a status conference.
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