Karen Read says lawsuit is 'crusade' to expose police corruption, bigotry, misogyny

Read sued the Massachusetts State Police and Canton Police on Thursday.

Nearly a year after she was acquitted of killing her boyfriend, Karen Read told ABC News she is on a "crusade" to expose corruption, bigotry and misogyny in two Massachusetts police departments that she claims framed her for murder.

"I have to make some good come of the pain," Read said. "I've learned something about the underbelly of these institutions that I feel I have to do something with, I have to make something good come of this."

Read, 46, was found not guilty last June of murdering her Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe. Prosecutors accused her of hitting O'Keefe with her car outside of another officer's home and leaving him to die in a blizzard in January 2022. She argued that the collision never happened.

Read filed a new lawsuit on Thursday accusing the Massachusetts State Police and the Town of Canton Police Department of hiring "virulent bigots," naming former Massachusetts Police Officer Michael Proctor and former Canton Police Officer Sean Goode who had lead roles in the case.

The lawsuit includes previously unseen text messages allegedly from Proctor and Goode disparaging women, Black Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, Hispanics, Arabs and the LGBTQ community.

"America sucks...Hitler was really on to something, then the [expletive] US had to step in and ruin it," one text message allegedly from Proctor said, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also quoted Proctor allegedly describing a woman as an "absolute pig" and using a variety of other vulgar terms.

"The messages show who he is as a human being," Read said in the interview referencing Proctor's text messages. "It's not just words, it's his way of thinking, it's how he looks at the world, it's how he looks at people who are not like him, who are not white American men, that person in their core cannot logically objectively investigate someone."

In a statement to ABC News, an attorney for Proctor pushed back against the allegations in the lawsuit saying, "The focus on anything other than Ms. Read’s own conduct on the night Officer O’Keefe was killed is as telling as it is predictable."

"Events in Mr. Proctor’s personal life have been reviewed, ad nauseum, by a grand jury, the District Attorney and the Massachusetts State Police. It is a matter of undisputed fact that anything Mr. Proctor did or said in his personal life, years before Officer O’Keefe was killed, had no bearing whatsoever on the investigation of Karen Read," Matthew Hamel, Proctor's attorney in the Read case, told ABC News.

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