DEDHAM, Mass. (Court TV) — A judge has ruled that prosecutors will be able to access a blogger’s phone to look for evidence related to witness intimidation in Karen Read‘s murder trial following a bizarre hearing on Thursday.
Karen Read and her attorneys stand in court after interrupting Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan during a hearing related to her case on March 20, 2025. (Court TV)
Read and her attorneys were in court on Thursday to address several motions ahead of her retrial on charges she murdered her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, but their hearing followed one for a case that’s closely related.
Aiden Kearney, a blogger known as “Turtleboy,” became a central figure in Read’s case ahead of her first trial and was a proponent of the theory that Read was being framed in a wide-ranging cover-up. Kearney is facing a number of charges, including intimidation of a witness, for his alleged behavior involving witnesses in Read’s trial. Because of those charges, the district attorney’s office already has possession of his phones, but Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan took the unusual step of going before a judge to ask for permission to access the data for use in Read’s case.
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The Thursday morning hearing, which featured a different judge in the same courtroom where Read’s hearings are normally held, was interrupted by Read and her team, who walked in while Brennan was mid-argument and sat down at the counsel table alongside Kearney and his attorney, Tim Bradl. Her team joined Kearney and Bradl over Brennan’s objections. “We’re not concerned about what’s in Mr. Kearney’s phones,” Bradl told the judge. “We’re concerned about (the prosecution’s) bizarre interpretations of the witness intimidation statute.”
Judge Adam Sisitsky, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecution that “interference can be made that the parties encouraged Mr. Kearney … to personally attack witnesses and their family members ‘with a sole purpose to embarrass, intimidate, harass and deter these individuals from testifying.'” To that end, Judge Sisitsky said the prosecution was welcome to look at any communication Kearney had on two phones with Matthew McCabe, Jennifer McCabe, Brian Albert, Christopher Albert, Colin Albert, Juliana Albert, Michael Proctor and Elizabeth Proctor from April 8, 2023 to Oct. 5, 2023, as well as any pictures or images showing evidence of witness intimidation.
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Alan Jackson stands at counsel table as Karen Read’s team joins Aiden Kearney and his attorney in court on March 20, 2025. (Court TV)
Brennan told the court he did not intend to use the communications as evidence that Read was involved in witness intimidation but rather as pointing to her consciousness of guilt, given her frequent communication with Kearney.
In a separate motion filed on Thursday in Read’s case, Brennan has asked the court to give him text messages between Read and her attorney, David Yannetti, between Jan. 29, 2022 and Feb. 2, 2022 — the three days immediately following O’Keefe’s death. The motion argues that Read has waived the attorney-client privilege that would normally shield those conversations when she “voluntarily and intentionally disclosed the existence of these communications and her initial thoughts about her culpability for causing the death of John O’Keefe during various public interviews.”
Judge Beverly Cannone will hear arguments on the motion when the parties return to court on Tuesday, March 25. Jury selection for Read’s retrial is scheduled to begin on April 1 and last several weeks.
