Exclusive: A Juror From Karen Read’s First Murder Trial Has Joined Her Defense Team

When Victoria Brophey George got the jury summons for the first Karen Read murder trial outside of Boston in 2024, she didn’t balk. A Princeton graduate who grew up obsessed with the Supreme Court, interned with a federal judge, and got her JD from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, George says she feels a civic obligation to participate in the oft-dreaded enlistment. By the time she turned 34 last year, the employment lawyer had already served on two prior juries and acted as a foreperson.

George had heard about Read: The Massachusetts woman was all over Boston media as the prime suspect in the mysterious 2022 death of her Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe. Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey charged the then 42-year-old equity analyst with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of a personal injury or death. Prosecutors alleged that, in a drunken rage, she had fatally backed her SUV into O’Keefe, and left him to die in a blizzard. As Read told Vanity Fair last year in a two-part feature, she believed that she was being framed as part of a cover-up involving Morrissey and Massachusetts State Police detective Michael Proctor.

George, who joined Read’s legal team on Wednesday, was too busy caring for her two small children and grieving her mother, who died in 2023, to pay much attention, and was therefore qualified as a juror. “I was able to be a juror because I believed that the state court system was going to give her a fair trial,” she told VF weeks before she joined the team. “I’ve been trying to continue to believe in justice for a while.”

George is a conscientious rule follower: Once during the trial, after she drove past a “Free Karen Read” billboard outside Gillette Stadium, she told Norfolk County Superior Court judge Beverly Cannone to make sure she was on the up and up. The court assured her she was.

During nine weeks of trial, she says that she and other jurors stretched conversation limits to avoid talk of the case, which could not begin until deliberations. When another fellow juror began to openly criticize Read before deliberations began, according to several jurors, she and her peers reported the person to Cannone. The juror they reported was dismissed.

For George, the fulcrum trial moment was when Massachusetts State Police trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator on Read’s case, read aloud the text messages he had sent friends and supervisors only 16 hours into the investigation. “There will be serious charges brought on the girl…. She’s a whack job cunt. Zero chance she skates. She’s fucked.” When someone on the text chain surmised that the homeowner, on whose property O’Keefe was found, would surely “receive some shit” as well, Proctor responded, “Nope. Homeowner’s a Boston cop too.” (Proctor later called the texts “unprofessional and regrettable.” Earlier this month, the Massachusetts State Police fired Proctor for “unprofessional” conduct during the investigation of Read.)

“Knowing he was the lead investigator,” says George, “and based on his own words, he had a pretty strong personal bias against the person in the defendant’s chair. How do you ever trust the evidence coming from his investigation?”

On the day of closing arguments, a juror who appeared sympathetic to the defense was dismissed. As revealed in court earlier this month, the dismissal was prompted by Massachusetts State Police officer John Fanning—one of Proctor’s supervisors who Read’s lawyer Alan Jackson says had been on the “whack job” text chain. While huddled at sidebar to discuss the reason for the juror’s dismissal, Read’s lawyers—Jackson, David Yannetti, and Elizabeth Little—learned that Fanning, an investigator on the case working out of Morrissey’s office, had that morning reported an alleged incident he had not personally witnessed that supposedly took place several weeks prior.

“There was no evidence presented at the time, as the court knows,” Jackson told Cannone during a fiery exchange in his motion-to-dismiss argument on March 5. “There was no declaration. There was no report. There was no supporting documentation whatsoever…. Over the defense’s objection, this very potentially defense-friendly juror was then excused…. I asked the court to take evidence from Lieutenant Fanning. The court declined that invitation.”

Cannone did not dispute Jackson’s recollection of those events, but asserted that Fanning did not have direct or indirect access to the jury.

In the state of Massachusetts, alternate jurors are selected at the end of trial. Several hours after the aforementioned juror’s dismissal, the clerk magistrate rotated a box on a spindle and pulled out two tiles. He did not show the numbers to the court, but said that they belonged to George and the other juror who had reported the critical juror to the judge.

George requested a sidebar with Cannone, and she recalls saying that their dismissal from the voting pool did not seem like “a coincidence.” Cannone declined to comment for this story.

George had hoped her legal skills could be helpful in the deliberation room, as they had during a previous trial during which she served as a foreperson. In the state of Massachusetts, the judge chooses the foreperson based on a number of factors such as attentiveness through trial and demeanor; other times the decision can be made arbitrarily based on seat number.

To preside over the fate of Read, a woman being charged with fatally hitting her police-officer boyfriend, Cannone selected a retired Boston police officer to act as foreperson. During the trial, according to two jurors, the cop told his peers that he had been hit by a car.

According to multiple jurors who have come forward since a mistrial was declared, there was confusion in the deliberation room about whether or not jurors could declare a partial verdict. Even though the jurors were unanimous in deciding Read was not guilty of second-degree murder and leaving the scene, they were split on the manslaughter charge. Yet the letter from the foreman that Cannone read aloud in the courtroom indicated they were deadlocked on the charges, plural, and a mistrial was declared.

Read has appealed the verdict, claiming that her constitutional rights are being violated by being tried for murder a second time.

George has four children under five, including infant twin sons, and had no desire to come forward: “I waited for nearly a year after the mistrial, hoping the court system would work as intended to remedy some of the wrongs in this case,” she says.

During the March 5 pre-trial hearing, Jackson argued that Read’s case should be dismissed for reasons of “extraordinary government misconduct”—including Proctor’s bias, investigative failings, the suspicion of jury impropriety, and the fact that some video evidence was withheld from Read until January 2025. (On Tuesday, Cannone rejected Read’s request for an evidentiary hearing about the recently-surfaced video, which the Commonwealth has called an oversight, and denied Read’s motion to dismiss “because the claimed violations here do not rise to a level that would justify the most draconian sanction of dismission, and because the defendant’s constitutional rights can be fully protected in the coming trial.”)

But it was how Hank Brennan, the special prosecutor Morrissey appointed to try Read this time around, responded to Jackson’s allegation of jury tampering that compelled George to speak up. Brennan, who previously defended Whitey Bulger in federal court, suggested Read’s claims of “extraordinary governmental misconduct” were dangerous and reckless, with the potential to cause the public to “question the fabric of our entire judicial system.”

George tells VF, “Attorney Brennan implied that the defense was responsible for causing sentiments of distrust in the justice system simply by questioning inconsistencies, inconvenient facts, and missing evidence.” At that point, she decided, “If as a lawyer I was too afraid to stand up for what I believed in, who would?”

Even after the circumstances of her dismissal from the deliberating jury pool, and the contested mistrial verdict, George had been hopeful when Brennan was assigned to the case. The respected Boston lawyer released a statement last fall saying that one of his “core obligations” was to “make certain that Karen Read receives a fair trial” and the “dignity and fairness that every defendant deserves in our criminal justice system.”

Says George, “I was impressed by his background and naively thought that he would see the overwhelming evidentiary issues with the case against Karen Read. At minimum, I thought he would encourage the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office to dismiss two of the charges, given constitutional double jeopardy concerns.”

George was bothered by another seeming constitutional right at risk in Read’s case: her entitlement to the defense of her choosing. Earlier this month, Cannone denied Read’s request to add Mark Bederow, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney, to her team. Because Bederow represents Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as “Turtleboy,” Cannone determined that Read retaining him would constitute “a conflict of interest that is not waivable.”

George called Jackson shortly after seeing the ruling to express her mounting frustration as Read’s second murder trial approached. George joked that she is still licensed to practice law in Massachusetts should Read need an extra hand. Over the course of the conversation, the suggestion became less of a joke and more of a potential reality. On March 26, Read filed a motion to add George to the team.

The case has garnered so much media attention and so many polarized reactions that George hopes the public and future jurors can remember that two things can be true at once.

“What happened to John O’Keefe was a tragedy,” says George. “But just because something is sad doesn’t mean that the person in the defendant’s seat is responsible. I can feel bad for his family and believe she’s not guilty at the same time.”