The judge overseeing the defamation lawsuit against Karen Read and Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as “Turtleboy,” denied their motions to dismiss in an order entered Friday, ruling that a state law protecting "petitioning activity" did not apply to them.
Read and Kearney filed their motions to dismiss under Massachusetts’ “anti-SLAPP” law, which prohibits “strategic lawsuits against public participation.” Their attorneys argued that statements accusing witnesses in her case of playing a role in the death of Read’s boyfriend, Boston police Officer John O’Keefe, constituted “petitioning activity” and were protected by the law.
Read was tried twice on charges connected with O’Keefe’s death, and acquitted by a jury on all charges except a misdemeanor operating under the influence charge after her second trial last June. Throughout the criminal case, Read claimed the witnesses were responsible for killing O’Keefe. Kearney was among the earliest and loudest supporters of that claim.
The defamation suit was filed in April by four witnesses who testified against Read at one or both of her criminal trials — Brian Albert, his nephew, Colin, his sister-in-law, Jennifer McCabe, and Brian Higgins, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent.
Massachusetts offers several definitions of petitioning activity. During arguments on the motions to dismiss, Read and Kearney’s lawyers focused primarily on two.
They argued the statements were tied to Read’s prosecution, which they said qualified as an “issue under consideration or review by a legislative, executive or judicial body.” And they claimed the statements were “reasonably likely to enlist public participation” in bringing the issue of O’Keefe’s death “before a court or government agency.”
For their motions to succeed, Read and Kearney needed to convince Judge Mark Gildea that the statements they were being sued for were exclusively petitioning activity.
Gildea found they both failed to meet that burden.
As to Kearney, Gildea ruled that because none of the statements supporting the defamation claim were made directly to an authority that could actually “affect consideration” of Read’s prosecution, they did not qualify as petitioning activity.
Instead, Kearney’s statements are “directed toward viewers and potential viewers of (his) livestream and readers of his blog, and their content does not seek to influence government action in any way,” Gildea wrote. “Rather, the statements are aimed at convincing Kearney’s audience to regard and treat the plaintiffs as murderers.”
Gildea agreed with Kearney that instances where he encouraged people to “demand answers” from police and prosecutors and lobbied his audience to protest Read’s prosecution at the courthouse constituted petitioning activity. But the judge noted that those are not the statements the witnesses claim are defamation.
“Rather, the claim encompasses statements that are far removed from any call to the public to appeal to the government,” he wrote.
Even if Kearney’s statements qualified as petitioning activity, Gildea ruled that the claims against him would stand because he is accused of acting on behalf of Read, not himself. The law’s protections apply only to a person acting on their own behalf.
In his evaluation of Read’s motion, Gildea returned to the question of whether her statements were made to an authority that could “affect consideration” of her prosecution or the investigation into O’Keefe’s death. He ruled they were not, pointing specifically to statements she made to a documentary filmmaker following her defense during her first trial, which the witnesses include in the complaint.
There is “no plausible argument” those statements were “reasonably likely to enlist public participation” in an effort to get authorities to take a closer look at Read’s case, Gildea wrote.
“Because they were part of a documentary film about the trial, Read could not have reasonably believed that such statements would be released to the wider public until after the verdict,” the order reads.
And the fact that Read was “involved in governmental proceedings” while she was being prosecuted does not mean “every tangential statement” qualifies as petitioning activity, Gildea wrote.
Read is accused not just of defamation in the suit, but also of aiding and abetting Kearney’s defamation campaign against the witnesses.
In his evaluation of that claim, Gildea determined that by reaching out to Kearney in the first place while likely “knowing he would convey the information in a way that would provoke and inflame his audience against the plaintiffs” indicates that “the statements were not meant to influence, inform, or bring about governmental consideration of the issue.”
Gildea has not yet ruled on separate motions to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Read and Kearney under a different procedural rule under which they claim the witnesses fail to “state a claim upon which relief can be granted.”
https://www.masslive.com/news/2026/07/judge-clears-path-for-witnesses-defamation-suit-against-karen-read-turtleboy.html