Karen Read compares her case to OJ Simpson's in Vanity Fair interview

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Apr 10, 2025

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DEDHAM, Mass. — Karen Read in an interview published the same day jury selection hit the desired number of jurors for her retrial compared her case to that of O.J. Simpson, saying that she would have “cheered” his acquittal on murder charges.

“I felt so strongly about the prosecution and his guilt and the fact that he spent all this money on this dream team of lawyers,” Read said of the Simpson murder trial that spanned the better part of 1995 in an interview with Vanity Fair published Thursday. “They all looked like snake oil salesmen to me.”

She said that after going through an investigation by police that she and her legal team view as either corrupt or incompetent and the subsequent murder trial last year that ended in mistrial, her thinking had changed.

“I’m not saying I believe O.J. was innocent, but I believe that it was not a completely above-board investigation. Now that I am smarter, I would’ve cheered at that acquittal,” Read told the magazine. “You have to hold cops accountable.”

Read, 45, is accused of striking Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of about two years at the time, with her Lexus SUV after a night of heavy drinking and yet another argument in their allegedly deteriorating relationship. Prosecutors say she hit him with the passenger side rear of the vehicle while in reverse at around 24 mph and left him to die in the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton.

She was tried last year on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death but that ended July 1 when Judge Beverly J. Cannone declared a mistrial following the jury’s third note in a row indicating an impasse.

Attorneys ended Thursday, the eighth day of jury selection, with 16 jurors — eight women and eight men — which was what they were aiming for. The case will take Friday off and then resume on Monday in efforts to try to get even more jurors for the final pool, according to Clerk James McDermott. The jurors have a long trial ahead of them, with Cannone telling prospective jurors at the start of each day could take as long as eight weeks.

Read’s attorneys mounted a multi-pronged effort to have the murder charge dismissed after they say jurors came forward to inform them that the jury was ready to acquit on the charges of murder and leaving the scene and were only hung up on manslaughter. Read’s attorneys say that should be seen as a not guilty verdict on those two charges and that to try Read again on all but manslaughter would be a violation of her constitutional Double Jeopardy protections.

The argument has so far failed before Cannone, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the federal court in Boston and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. They have now petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case, but a request for a stay of her trial as the Court considers it was denied Wednesday.

The Vanity Fair interview is just the latest in a series of public statements Read has made since her first trial. Just ahead of and during that trial, she gave extensive access to herself and her legal team to a documentary film crew, and those fruits were aired last month on both the network ID and the streaming platform MAX under the title “A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read.”

The documentary was watched by more than 6 million people in its first week, according to a press release from the network.

Read was also the subject of an episode of 20/20 called “Karen Read: The Perfect Storm,” which aired in September 2024 and an episode of NBC’s Dateline which aired the next month.

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