How Karen Reads multimillion-dollar celebrity legal team over-powered prosecutors and won, twice
Karen Read’s high-powered, multimillion-dollar defense team helped her overpower prosecutors — twice — to beat back murder charges.And they had help from a botched investigation and shady behavior from key witnesses and detectives.Read, 45, of Mansfield, Mass., was cleared Wednesday in the 2022 murder of her then-boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, receiving one year probation after being found guilty on the least serious charge of drunk driving.Read insisted on her innocence from the beginning and spared no expense in hiring an eclectic group of attorneys — including two high-powered Los Angeles defense lawyers, and an alternate juror who served at her first trial.During both trials, the defense team left no stone unturned as they put forward the theory she was a mere patsy in a sweeping law-enforcement cover-up.Read owed the defense team $5 million in deferred fees before the second trial even kicked off, Vanity Fair reported in October.The financial analyst and adjunct professor sold her house to help fund the case and was living off her 401(k) as she had lost her jobs at Fidelity Investments and at Bentley University in the wake of the murder case, the outlet reported.And Read — who garnered a cult-like following of supporters — also received over $1 million in fundraising from some 13,000 donors as of last week on a page set up by her defense team.The fundraising site that crashed for a time on Wednesday after the verdict was handed down.Read’s legal team was helmed by hot-shot L.A.
lawyer Alan Jackson — a former prosecutor who went on to defend the Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey sex-assault cases.Jackson — who was caught canoodling with Read last year as jurors were deliberating, The Post exclusively revealed — fought tooth and nail in his attempt to sow reasonable doubt into every aspect of the prosecution’s case.Jackson has been working alongside seasoned local trial lawyer David Yannetti since the first case, and the t...