Rachael Rollins, the former Suffolk district attorney who later served as the state’s top federal prosecutor before resigning in scandal, has received a subpoena to testify in the defamation suit filed against Karen Read, Rollins said Tuesday via social media.
Rollins posted a photo of her deposition subpoena in the suit filed against Read and Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as Turtleboy, by witnesses in her criminal case.
“‘Go to the @DoctorTurtleboy show,’ they said,” Rollins wrote above the photo. “‘It’ll be fun,’ they said.”
Rollins declined to comment when reached by email Thursday.
It wasn’t immediately clear when she went on the program, but she told an X commenter when asked that she had a “good time.”
“The people were fun and the show was well put together,” she wrote. “Broken up into skits & songs, video parodies & news snippets as well as games. Good audience involvement. It was a vibe.”
She later clarified that she was “not served [the subpoena] at the show. Apparently others were.”
Rollins didn’t name those others.
In June 2025, Rollins praised Kearney for his reporting on Read’s criminal case.
“Without [turtle emoji] boy, does anyone know or care about the KR trial? His relentless reporting — in the face of repeatedly being told by law enforcement that he was wrong & there was ‘nothing to see here’ — cracked this case wide open,” Rollins wrote on X on June 18, the day Read was acquitted. “That should not be lost in all of the reporting.”
Read, 46, a former financial analyst, had been charged with second-degree murder for allegedly backing her Lexus SUV into her boyfriend, Boston police Officer John O’Keefe, in a drunken rage early on Jan. 29, 2022, after dropping him off outside a Canton home following a night of bar-hopping.
Her lawyers said she was framed and that O’Keefe entered the Canton property, owned at the time by a fellow Boston police officer, where he was fatally beaten and possibly mauled by a German Shepherd before his body was planted on the front lawn.
Read’s first criminal trial ended in a hung jury in 2024, and jurors at her retrial acquitted her of murder last year, finding her guilty only of misdemeanor OUI.
In the lawsuit that’s the subject of the Rollins subpoena, several civilian witnesses allege that Read and Kearney colluded to falsely accuse them of being involved in O’Keefe’s death.
Rollins was serving as US Attorney for Massachusetts in the spring of 2023 when federal prosecutors began looking into state law enforcement’s handling of the case; she resigned weeks later while facing discipline for what the Justice Department described as a multitude of “blatant” and “egregious” ethics violations unrelated to the Read matter.
No federal charges directly related to O’Keefe’s death have ever been filed, although a woman who served on the grand jury that heard evidence in the federal probe pleaded guilty to leaking information from the proceedings.
In addition to the defamation suit filed by the civilian witnesses against Read and Kearney, O’Keefe’s family has filed a wrongful death suit against Read and the bars that served her on the night in question.
Read, in turn, has filed suit against investigators who worked on her case and some witnesses for allegedly plotting to frame her for O’Keefe’s death, as well as a second negligence lawsuit against the town of Canton and the State Police for allegedly hiring misogynistic and bigoted investigators who were biased against her.
All the various lawsuits remain pending.
Material from previous Globe coverage was used in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.