The BBC - along with civil liberties groups and some US politicians - argue the case should be heard in public.

Apple (AAPL) is designing a new AirPods feature that would allow users to listen and respond to live translations of in-person conversations, according to a Bloomberg report that cites unnamed sources.

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The BBC understands the dispute over accessing encrypted data is set to be heard at the High Court.

On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

[Read: The diseases are coming]

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that emerged from that virus—roughly 23,000 times the budget for the preparedness program that could have helped mitigate its effects.

Complex systems—say, health care, or government, or industrial supply chains—without any built-in slack or redundancy are efficient but fragile. The effects of any disruption quickly cascade, and the potential for catastrophic risk grows. In 2021, a gust of wind turned a boat sideways in the Suez Canal—and upended the global economy, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Last year’s CrowdStrike outage is another example of an avalanche created by a minor problem within a system that was not resilient.

DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.

Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die.

The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis.

Musk may flippantly acknowledge the risk in interviews, but DOGE’s fundamental ethos—Silicon Valley will fix what the government cannot—almost entirely ignores it.

[Read: The dictatorship of the engineer]

Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us.

As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.

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In 1971, a British doctor was trying to puzzle out a mystery: How can a child with no signs of external trauma or injury present with bleeding between the skull and brain? That doctor, A. Norman Guthkelch was part of a wave of physicians and researchers newly concerned that an epidemic of severe child abuse had been passing, undetected, beneath doctors’ noses.

As one law-review article recounts, “Prior to the 1960s, medical schools provided little or no training on child abuse, and medical texts were largely silent on the issue.” A turning point was the publication of the 1962 article “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” which urged physicians to consider that severe child abuse may be at play when children came in with injuries such as bone fractures, subdural hematomas, or bruising.

The article goes beyond offering medical advice to prescribing an ethical framework that would take hold: “The bias should be in favor of the child’s safety; everything should be done to prevent repeated trauma, and the physician should not be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk of repetition exists.”

Armed with these new insights, Guthkelch hypothesized that the children showing up to his hospital were being abusively shaken. Although they did not show up with the usual fractures or visible forms of physical trauma, the presence of a subdural hematoma could indicate what would come to be widely known as “shaken baby syndrome.”

Decades later, Guthkelch would publicly worry that his hypothesis had been taken too far. After reviewing the trial record and medical reports from one case in Arizona, NPR reported that he was “troubled” that the conclusion was abusive shaking when there were other potential causes. “I wouldn’t hang a cat on the evidence of shaking, as presented,” Guthkelch quipped.

The narrow claim that shaking a baby abusively can result in certain internal injuries morphed into the claim that if a set of internal injuries were present, then shaking must be the cause. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with a neuroscientist who found himself personally embroiled in this scientific and legal controversy when a caretaker was accused of shaking his child.

Cyrille Rossant is a researcher and software engineer at the International Brain Laboratory and University College London whose Ph.D. in neuroscience came in handy when he delved into the research behind shaken baby syndrome and published a textbook with Cambridge University Press on the scientific controversy that embroiled his family.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Many forms of scientific expertise in criminal-justice proceedings have been debunked or come under scrutiny in recent years. Things like bite-mark analysis and blood-spatter analysis used to be commonly understood as rigorous empirical analysis. But these questionable theories often fall apart on closer inspection.

This is how science is supposed to work. Experts observe, they hypothesize, they test, and they revise their previous understandings of the world. And in academia and in scientific journals, that’s all well and good—but what happens when evolving science is brought into the courtroom? In a courtroom, no one is well positioned to rigorously evaluate a scientific debate: not judges, not jurors, and not even the people calling expert witnesses.

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper. Today’s episode is about abusive head trauma, but you probably know it by its older name: shaken baby syndrome.

Babies cannot speak for themselves. As a result, when doctors or prosecutors accuse a parent or caregiver of having violently and abusively shaken their baby, they are often relying on something that has come to be known as “the triad.”

The triad refers to three medical findings: subdural hemorrhage, or bleeding in the area between the brain and the skull; retinal hemorrhage, or bleeding in the retina; and brain swelling. If these findings are present, according to shaken-baby-syndrome adherents, that would mean a baby has been abusively shaken. Shaken baby syndrome also indicates that since these symptoms arise rather quickly, the child must have been shaken by the last person he or she was with.

It’s important to understand that for many years, the presence of all three of these medical events was not indicative of child abuse; it was dispositive. In 2015, Kentucky’s former chief medical examiner, who had personally diagnosed SBS, told The Washington Post that “doctors, myself included, have accepted as true an unproven theory about a potential cause of brain injury in children.”

My guest today is Cyrille Rossant. He’s a researcher with a Ph.D. in neuroscience who plunged into the world of SBS when a caregiver was accused of shaking his child, an allegation she denied.

This is a very serious topic, and I want to be clear—child abuse is very real, and our public and private tools for addressing and helping children at risk are distressingly insufficient. But in their zeal to help children, many doctors, prosecutors, and scientists have allowed what one New Jersey appellate court has called “junk science” to tear apart the lives of thousands.

Let’s dive in. Cyrille, welcome to the show.

Cyrille Rossant: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So you have a very personal connection to this issue. Can you tell us about how you first learned about shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, sure. So I actually lived a situation myself. So nine years ago, I had a baby who was being cared for by a caregiver. And when my baby was, like, five months old, he was sick. He was vomiting, and his head was getting bigger and bigger. So we brought him to the hospital, and they did a CT scan. And they found so-called subdural hematoma, which is blood around the brain.

And from that, they told me that it was shaken baby syndrome. It could be nothing else. So that meant that my baby had been violently shaken. So obviously, it was a very difficult thing to hear, and I was really distressed by the health of my baby. So he was taken care of. He had surgery, and fortunately he was fine after that.

So now he’s a healthy 9-year-old boy. But at the time, it was very hard. And obviously, since it was a situation of suspicion of child abuse, the hospital had to report the case to authorities and to call the police. And that’s how it all started.

Demsas: When that determination was made about your son, they didn’t leave you any doubt. When they saw the subdural hematoma, they said, Without a doubt, this is shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly. So at the time at the hospital, most doctors were really sure that it was shaken baby syndrome, that it could be nothing else. So the thing is that we had a nanny. And my son had symptoms when he was being cared for by the nanny. So she was, like, the prime suspect. But still, it was very hard for us to believe that it was possible at the time.

That being said, there was one doctor who was less certain about the diagnosis. It was actually the only doctor who was a specialist of child neurology. And he was telling us that it could be shaken baby syndrome, but it could also be something else, namely a medical condition where there’s an excess of fluid around the brain. He told us it could be a risk factor for subdural hematoma and that he was not really sure that my son had been violently shaken.

So it was a bit confusing for me, to have, like, most doctors who are really 100 percent sure that it was shaken baby syndrome and another one who is supposed to know more about these issues to be less certain. So I was really confused, and I couldn’t really live with this uncertainty, and I needed to know what had happened to my baby.

Demsas: And what happened with the caregiver? Did they arrest her?

Rossant: So yeah, basically, it took them maybe six months or something. But yeah, after six months, she was put in custody because, in the meantime, there was a medical expert who looked at the case and said, Well, yes. It’s a shaken baby. So it happened when my baby was being cared for by the caregiver, so it had to be her. So she was put under custody. She was interrogated by the police. And then she was being prosecuted for four years.

Demsas: Oh my God.

Rossant: And in this longer legal process, another expert looked at the case, and he did not really agree with the first one.

He said, like the child-neurology specialist at the hospital, that it could be a medical condition and that maybe it was not shaken baby syndrome. So there were two different opinions in terms of medical experts. And on this uncertainty, the judge decided to drop all charges, and the nanny was cleared after four years.

Demsas: This, I think, really underscores how serious of an issue this is. I mean, when a doctor or a scientific expert tells a court or a public-policy official or a policy maker that they’re certain about what something means, it sounds like they’re talking about a natural law or they’re talking about physics. And there’s often not the ability for public-policy makers or lawyers or judges to independently evaluate the research.

So as a result of your experience, you dove headfirst into the research here and have even written a book about the finding of SBS. I’m gonna just refer to it as shaken baby syndrome, even though there’s some controversy about whether it should be called that or abusive head trauma, just because I think most people know the term shaken baby syndrome, but I want to note for listeners that there’s some controversy over the use of that term.

But there are basically three areas of controversy I want us to explore: the mechanism of injury, the diagnostic reliability, and the evidence quality. Let’s start with the mechanism of injury. The fundamental question here is whether shaking your baby is the only way to cause the classic findings of SBS. Can you lay out the scientific debate here over that question?

Rossant: Yeah, so actually, I think you can say there are two different questions here. First is: Can shaking cause the injuries that are typically associated with SBS? And second: Are these medical findings always caused by shaking? So it’s kind of two inverse relationships—the causal link, and is it the only cause? If it’s a cause, is it the only one, right?

Demsas: Yeah. The way I’ve been thinking about it is: Can punching a wall create a hole? Versus: If we find a hole in the wall, does that prove that someone punched it?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: I think we can start with, like, can punching a wall create a hole? Can shaking a baby lead to the injuries of the classic findings of SBS?

Rossant: So the short answer for this is: We don’t know. We cannot shake babies for science, right? It’s not working like that. So we don’t know today. I really looked a lot for that question in the literature, and I could not find good, reliable scientific evidence linking shaking without impact—and that’s important—to the medical findings associated with SBS: so typically, subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling.

What’s for sure is that babies are shaken. It exists. There’s no doubt about it. We know that many babies who are shaken—they are shaken not in the most violent possible way. There’s a whole spectrum in the degree of violence you can inflict to a baby. And when it’s not so much violence, it’s still child abuse, obviously, but it might not be enough for the baby to be injured. Okay?

So we have some interesting data from a lot of countries who asked a lot of parents and caregivers, Well, do you shake your baby? Do you hit your baby? Do you slap your baby? A lot of types of child abuse. And so it’s really just, like, self-admitted abuse, right? And parents actually say yes. And a proportion of them admit doing these kinds of things to their babies, including shaking.

So it’s something that exists. And still, we can think that 2 percent is not that much, but it’s still, like, 100 times more than the number of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses. So it means that we miss most babies who are really shaken, but maybe they are not shaken that violently, because they don’t appear to be injured. They don’t go to the hospital, and they are not detected. That being said, sometimes the babies are shaken so violently that they are being injured, and it’s hard to imagine how a baby could be shaken in the most violent possible way without the brain being injured.

Now, the exact type of injury you are going to find around the brain, etcetera, we don’t really know. We don’t know. We can imagine that it’s going to harm the brain, but we don’t know how, exactly. There is some data that was obtained on animals. So there’s a whole literature on animal studies, like mice, rats, piglets, lambs, who are shaken for science—it’s horrific when you think about it, but these are things that are done by researchers. So animals are shaken, and they are injured. And we find some injuries in the brain, but they do not really look like what you find in shaken baby syndrome. It’s not exactly the same kind of findings. It doesn’t really match.

Demsas: What’s the difference?

Rossant: It’s really technical, but you will find some injuries in the brain itself, like traumatic lesions to the neurons and to the cables between the neurons. You might find some bleeding, but again, it’s not the type of bleeding you find in shaken baby syndrome, which is really specific.

Same for the retinal hemorrhage—you will find very severe retinal hemorrhaging in shaken baby syndrome. And this is not typically what you find in animals who are shaken. It doesn’t really match. So the way researchers are interpreting this typically is to say, Well, these animals are not good animal models for human babies, and human babies seem to have specificities for the kind of injuries we find. So far, we are not able to prove the causal link between violent shaking and the classic medical findings of shaken baby syndrome.

Demsas: So models have failed to show that shaking can generate enough force to cause those injuries, and studies that are on animals haven’t been able to reproduce the classic findings through shaking alone. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty, right? So it’s still possible that shaking your baby could result in the classic presentation of shaken baby syndrome. But it’s also possible that it might be something else.

So we’ve talked about, can punching a wall create a hole? Now I want to ask you about, if you find a hole in the wall, does that prove someone punched it? Because I think one of the core parts of this controversy is that it’s not just that when a baby presents with these injuries that doctors will say, It’s possible this baby was abused. There’s been a training of doctors to indicate certainty, that if you find this—it’s often called “the triad”—if you find this triad of injuries, then you should presume that the baby was shaken and that the baby was shaken abusively by the last person who was with the child when it began presenting with those symptoms. So why was that the medical consensus? Why did that training happen?

Rossant: Yeah. I think you’re right to say that it’s not just a cause; it’s the only cause. That’s the theory, right? Shaking is a possible explanation for the findings. It’s the only possible explanation, and it occurred just before the baby showed symptoms. So it’s a really, really strong theory that has been taught to doctors. Now, why has that been the case? I don’t know.

What I know is that historically, and you really need to dig down into the history of shaken baby syndrome to understand how it was born—it was born in the ’70s with this hypothesis that maybe shaking was one of the possible causes of subdural hematoma, but at the time it was just a hypothesis. And today it’s still a hypothesis. And that was in the beginning of the ’70s. And a few years later, doctors in the U.S. started to presume abuse whenever they found subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants. Why that has been the case, why this mere hypothesis, Maybe it’s shaking, was transformed into, It is shaking, and we need to call the police, that I don’t know. But by the ’80s, you start to see prosecutions based on this theory.

So somehow—I don’t know—some doctors in the U.S. started to do this. It’s important, also, to say that there was the context of reporting any suspicion of child abuse to authorities. That started in the ’60s. There was a big subject here in pediatrics at the time, because before the ’60s, it was not really obvious for doctors to think about abuse. They didn’t really think about it. And it suddenly changed in the ’60s. And they really realized that it was important for the medical community, and especially pediatricians, who see children all the time, to think about abuse whenever they find suspicious findings, like fractures, bruises, and subdural hematoma. That came in the ’70s.

So there was this big push for doctors to really report as many children as possible to the authorities whenever they have the slightest doubt on abuse. And since there was this hypothesis that maybe subdural hematoma is one of the signs that should make doctors suspicious of abuse, well, they started to call the police and to report these cases to authorities.

That being said, I think there’s a difference between being just aware that maybe children are abused and calling the police, and going to court and saying, This is abuse, and this is nothing else, and this is certain. This is a big difference to me. And this is really what I don’t understand, because, to me, doctors should treat patients and report possible child-abuse cases to authorities. But going beyond that and saying to the courts, I’m a doctor, and I know that this child was abused, even though there’s no other piece of evidence apart from the medical findings, this is the thing that is going too far for me.

Demsas: What other things can happen that can cause these symptoms to present in babies? Are there other potential explanations that you found when researching this?

Rossant: Yeah. So actually, now we know a lot of possible causes of subdural and retinal hemorrhage. First, there’s everything involving accidental trauma, like short falls and domestic accidents. Whenever there’s an impact to the head, even what appears to be a small impact, it can really cause severe injuries, including what we see in shaken baby syndrome. There’s also biomechanical data about this. Impact is really dangerous for the skull and for the brain in a child.

Then you have many rare diseases, like a genetic, metabolic, neurological conditions that can all cause subdural hematoma or be a risk factor for the development of subdural hematoma after a minor impact, which really happens in most babies. Once they start to sit down, they can fall, and when they try to get up, to stand up, they can also fall. So it’s really, really common for babies to hit their head. Most of the time, it’s not going to cause anything, but if there is a medical condition, if there is a risk factor, then it might cause the findings of shaken baby syndrome.

There are infections that can cause blood-clotting disorders. There’s really a lot of things. It’s really complicated. It’s really not possible to say that only shaking is the only cause of the SBS findings. There are also risk factors—again, it can be medical conditions.

But it can be just a prematurity. It’s a big risk factor. These babies are much more fragile. Babies who have a low birth weight, babies who have a large head—there are many little things like this that can increase the risk of a subdural retinal hemorrhage after minor impact. So yeah, it’s really complicated.

Demsas: I want to talk about some of the pushback that people like you have received from other scientists who stand by the shaken-baby-syndrome diagnosis and say that it is perfectly reasonable for doctors to presume, and for the courts to presume, that when these injuries present in babies, that we should assume a caregiver has shaken the child. What they often point to is the fact that numerous perpetrators have confessed and admitted to shaking their babies, and that the confessions often will provide detailed accounts that match the medical findings of shaken baby syndromes, and that they have these consistent patterns.

Why is that not convincing to you that, perhaps, maybe it’s the case that science hasn’t figured out exactly how shaking will cause these symptoms, but if people are admitting to having shaken their baby and then their baby is presenting with these symptoms, that’s a reasonable cause and effect to presume?

Rossant: Yeah, it’s true that confessions—today, it’s the main piece of evidence for shaken baby syndrome. The question is not whether confessions exist or not; it’s how reliable they are, and what you can learn from the confessions. So confessions do exist. And I also want to stress that, obviously, some of these confessions are true, and that some parents do abuse the babies, and they end up confessing when they are being interrogated by the police.

So yeah, you cannot possibly say that all confessions are false. It’s not working like this. That being said, I’ve studied this question a lot in the scientific literature, and it’s true to say that they are really unreliable scientifically. They are not scientific evidence. And it’s not obvious to realize that, because when you don’t know the subject, you think, Well, if the person admits something that horrible, it must be true. There’s no reason for an innocent person to say they did it if they did not.

But it’s much more complicated than that. The topic of false confessions in general—not just for a shaken baby, but for any type of crime—has been known for decades. You know the Innocence Project that was able to exonerate a lot of people based on DNA evidence? Well, it turns out that between 25 and 30 percent of all the DNA exonerations had falsely confessed, and they were factually innocent, because that was proved by DNA, which could point to someone else. So it’s something that exists.

Now, you wonder why innocent people confess. So there are many reasons. There’s even a classification that was done by a psychologist and scientist. There’s a psychologist called Saul Kassin, who is an expert of this, and he has devised a classification of false confessions.

So for example, one of the reasons is just plea deals. So they plead guilty, and they might not go to jail, and they can walk free, but they have to say they did it. But even without that, even in the police interrogation room, innocent people can be led to confess what they did not do, in this context.

For example, the police can say, Well, if you confess, the child, who is in foster care, can go back to you. You can get back your child if you confess. Or maybe, If you confess, your child can go back to the other parent. There are many incentives that are given by the police to the persons to confess. And the reason for that is that the police are being taught, like medical doctors, that shaking is the only possible cause and that it has to be that last person with the baby at the time of the collapse, right?

There’s also the whole thing of internalized false confessions. It’s really mysterious. It’s really a psychological effect that can lead innocent people who deny having harmed their child while being interrogated to slowly, in the course of hours or even days of interrogation in a very stressful context, to believe that maybe they did something that they did not think was harmful but was actually harmful, or at least that’s what they are led to believe. And it really happens a lot in this particular type of case. The police can make a lot of scenarios: Okay, maybe you didn’t want to harm your child, but you took the child from the bed a bit quickly, or maybe the head hit something, or you were not careful enough.

There’s a lot of scenarios that are being fed to the suspect. And in this specific stressful context, innocent parents who are really—they have this guilt of maybe they think they did not do everything they could to save their children. Maybe they tried to resuscitate their child with cardiac massage or something, or maybe they tried to slowly shake the baby, but it’s a very mild type of shaking. It’s really not a violent shaking. So you can always find something.

And this really happens, and I’ve seen it a lot, and it’s been documented on videotaped police interrogation. You can see it in some transcripts. So when you really dig into the details of what has been confessed exactly and how it has been confessed, and when you look at all the context of the interrogation, you realize that it’s really not, Okay. Well, okay. I admit it. I just lost my nerves and violently shook my baby. This is very rare. This is not the type of confession you see in shaken baby syndrome. It’s: Oh my God. Okay. Maybe I did it. I didn’t realize my baby was collapsing. And yeah, I tried to revive my child. And maybe in the process, I harmed my child, and I—oh my God.

It’s a really complex phenomenon. But it’s been documented, and I think it happens a lot. So you cannot just say, Okay, confessions exist, so it must be true, right? That being said, most confessions are obtained after the diagnosis—so typically, after the police have been called, and it’s most often in the police interrogation room, right?

So there’s this big contamination, and it’s more than that. It’s really a pressure, because the police think they know that the baby was shaken and that this person is guilty, so there’s a whole bias, right? What would be interesting would be to see if confessions can be obtained before—before the police interrogation and even before the medical exam that will show the medical findings that are associated with SBS. Because if it’s obtained before, then there’s no way the diagnosis could influence the confession. Obviously, this kind of confession is very rare, but there is at least one study that was able to find something like 36 cases where the confessions were obtained before any kind of medical exam.

So there’s a lot of reason to believe that these kinds of confessions are genuine, true, right? And what’s interesting is that, in those cases, you are not going to find the medical findings of SBS. So yeah, there are many reasons to be skeptical of this theory.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Shaken baby syndrome goes by a different name now, but the same problems persist.

[Break]

Demsas: I’m hoping you can explain why the term shaken baby syndrome has fallen out of use. Now we’re more likely to hear the term abusive head trauma, and I’d assumed that was due to the criticisms levied by folks like you who’ve become skeptical of the SBS diagnosis. But in a policy statement about the diagnosis, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that the name change to abusive head trauma “was misinterpreted by some in the legal and medical communities as an indication of some doubt in or invalidation of the diagnosis and the mechanism of shaking as a cause of injury.” And then they say that the AAP, “continues to embrace the ‘shaken baby syndrome’ diagnosis as a valid subset of the AHT diagnosis.”

So what’s your interpretation of what’s going on there?

Rossant: Yeah, so it’s true that in 2009, the AAP published a position paper stating that from now on, “abusive head trauma” should be used instead of “shaken baby syndrome.” And the way they justify this was because it was to encompass a broader source of abuse inflicted to babies—not just shaking, but also impact to the head. That’s the justification.

And there was one big study in ’87 by [A. C.] Duhaime and a few biomechanicians who really showed, first, that there were very often signs of impact, which was not really compatible with the idea that these babies were just shaken, right? And also, they did a biomechanical study to show that the forces involved with shaking are much lower than when there’s any kind of impact to the head. So impact to the head is really, really severe and implies very big forces to the head and big deformation and big energy. So it’s much more dangerous.

And there was some controversy in scientific articles about this that partly led to, I think, this decision to change the name from shaken baby syndrome to abusive head trauma, because it was not just shaking very frequently; there’s also impact.

Now, it’s true that before 2009, especially since the Louise Woodward trial in Boston in 1997, there was a lot of controversy in the media and the scientific articles on specifically shaken baby syndrome, the hypothesis that you could infer abuse just with the triad, without any sign of impact. And yeah, some people believe that this change of name is a consequence of this controversy. Obviously, the AAP, the medical institutions do not really acknowledge this, because their position has always been to say that there is no controversy at all, right?

So here we are. I mean, we have this change of name that has been more or less accepted by everyone, even though the term shaken baby syndrome is still quite widely known in the public.

There’s something else that should be pointed out. It’s that the term shaken baby syndrome was criticized—the very term—in particular by Norman Guthkelch, who first identified shaken baby syndrome, or at least the link between shaking and subdural hematoma, in 1971. He criticized the fact that the same term is used to describe both an act—shaking—and a set of injuries. So it conflates a unique hypothetical cause to objective findings. And it’s a real problem because you can’t talk about what you see without accepting that there might be other causes than shaking.

So that’s why he recommended to use another term, which was, I think, retinal-dural hemorrhage of infancy. That really just describes the fact that you find subdural and retinal hemorrhage in an infant without presuming anything about the cause. Unfortunately, that was not the choice that was made, and now we have abusive head trauma, which is also problematic because it also implies that, well, it’s abuse. So it’s a medical diagnosis that comes after you discover specific medical findings in an infant, and you give the term abusive head trauma, which implies that it was caused by abuse.

So there’s this whole thing of intent that is really not the job of medicine. It’s for the police and the justice to determine what happened and what the intent was. So the previous term was a problem with this respect, and the new one is still problematic in this respect.

Demsas: Yeah. It was really interesting when I was reading about the controversy with Norman Guthkelch, who you just mentioned. I mean, he’s called, like, the father of shaken baby syndrome because of his 1971 paper. NPR reported that he reviewed a case in Arizona, and they wrote that “he was troubled to see that the medical examiner’s autopsy had concluded that the baby died of shaken baby syndrome while discounting other possible causes.”

So, you know, given that, why do you think it’s been difficult for the medical community to become more agnostic about whether these injuries that show up in children are necessarily the result of abuse or of some other thing going on? Like, why is the AAP still saying this? I mean, I know you can’t speak about them specifically, but why do you think there’s just been such reticence from the medical community?

Rossant: Oh, that’s a very good question, and I am wondering this. I mean, it’s been almost 10 years that I ask myself this very question, and I don’t really know.

I think there’s—I mean, it’s more general than that. It’s, you know, in the human psychology, the fact that it’s very hard to recognize that you were wrong before. It’s very hard to change one’s own mind, especially when doctors have made a lot of diagnoses with very severe consequences: with removal, going into foster care, and, you know, criminal prosecutions, etcetera.

It’s very hard to accept that, as a doctor, you were wrong and you maybe did some misanalysis and you were responsible for, you know, miscarriages of justice, etcetera. I think it’s really the No. 1 thing that is blocking everything, this psychological aspects of doctors, who are humans, like everyone else.

Some doctors do change their minds with the new science, the new articles, new data, their new experience, new cases. They realize that maybe it was not as easy as we thought before, and they start to change their minds. They start to work for the defense, and then they are being targeted and bullied, attacked, especially by the establishments, and it’s always the same. So yeah, it’s really in human nature.

I think it’s also the scale. I think it’s not just a few errors here and there. It’s really, really massive. I think there are many, many cases which are misdiagnosed and that the so-called shaken babies were not really shaken. I mean, obviously, it exists, and there are many cases where the diagnosis was true, but many where it was not the case. So that’s also why it’s so hard to accept one’s own mistakes, because it's a really massive mistake that was done.

Demsas: Something you just said about how much they react to public censure here: There was a quote from this Milwaukee prosecutor. I believe this is from a ProPublica article, but he’s a deputy district attorney in Milwaukee, and he said it was, “providing reasonable doubt for sale.”

Essentially, there’s some criticisms of people who will provide reasonable doubt or arguments that provide reasonable doubt to accused criminals, whether it’s forensic evidence, like fingerprint analysis or DNA analysis or things like the SBS. But there’s been a real backlash from within the law-enforcement community to scientific evidence being muddled in courtrooms. And I wonder: Have you come across people who react to your work and believe you’re giving cover to child abusers? What do you say to them?

Rossant: Yeah, I think I kind of understand because there’s always this tension between, you know, being too safe on the safe side—I mean, is it better to put an innocent person in jail, or to let a guilty person walk free and potentially harm children, right?

And personally as someone who believes in democracy and, you know, les lumières, which is a really French thing. I think it’s really important not to harm innocent people. So it’s really kind of philosophical attitude, I think. But yeah, I can understand why some people believe that it’s not possible to take this risk of letting potentially dangerous people walk free.

But you know, in the end, I think we should all try to do our best and try to be as accurate and scientific as possible. Try to look at all the evidence on the one side or the other side, and then let the criminal-justice system do its work. And that’s why we have this notion of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” you know, the burden of proof, all of these things. They were designed precisely to avoid, as much as possible, putting innocents behind bars, which is a very terrible thing to do as a democracy, I think.

Demsas: Do you have thoughts on how you would’ve preferred to have things play out in your case? When a doctor is concerned about SBS with your child, what do you wish had happened?

Rossant: I think most parents, most families would accept something, some kind of measure that is not removing the child. So, you know, a follow-up with the psychologists, social workers, people that go to your place and that look at the room, how you handle your child, that follow you from a few months, maybe one year, I don’t know. It depends on the situation, but that is fine.

And we actually had that. Even though the nanny was being prosecuted after the first month, we did have a follow-up with a psychologist and social workers for, like, two years, I think. It was very light. It could have been, you know, more intrusive, and it would’ve been fine. I mean, there’s no problem as long as you have the freedom to have your child with you, right?

It’s really the fact that to remove a child from its environment, it’s a really big cost, so that should really be done in the most extreme cases. And typically, some judges do say that it only happens in the most extreme cases, and that they tried to do their best not to go that far and to find all possible solutions before resorting, as a last solution, to foster care.

But in practice, in the cases I know—and especially in the abusive-head-trauma cases—for very, very small children, babies who don’t speak, it’s very often removal into a foster family in a nursery. And that’s really, really hard for the child, and for the parents to know that the child is suffering from being suddenly put into a different place and without parents, without siblings, without the teddy bears and, you know.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess it depends on where you are and how the authorities function. But, you know, I could imagine that most parents would be okay with having an interview with Child Protective Services if, you know, it was respectful and there’s a clear protocol for what was being followed.

And I think there are a lot of civil servants who take their jobs seriously and want to make families better. But I think it’s very variable, especially in the United States, where this is not a federalized system. There’s very many different administrations of child protective services. And where you are can vary very differently, how you’re treated and how you interact with and how the state interacts with you.

And so, I agree—we would want to create a system where parents felt fine and open and welcome to that kind of surveillance and interaction, but I worry that we don’t actually have that in the entire world.

Rossant: Yeah. And it’s actually the same in France. Today there’s no centralized child-protection system. It’s each department, each region of France that has its own system. So there are great disparities between the different regions, and we do see very, very different treatments of similar situations, depending on where you are in the same country. So yeah, it’s a very difficult problem, and some families do not understand why it’s worse in their own case compared to other families.

Demsas: This was obviously a very serious episode, but I always like to end on a question that draws people to think about and reflect on a time when they themselves have believed something that didn’t turn out to be true. So in your life, is there a time where you believed something that ended up being only good on paper?

Rossant: Wow. Good question. I really never thought about this. But maybe I can say that initially—and sorry; it’s still about shaken baby syndrome, but initially—I believed that shaken baby syndrome was a thing.

Why? Because my own father was a pediatrician and an expert in court, and he told me many times about shaken baby syndrome, and he did testify for the prosecution in shaken-baby cases. So I knew it.

Demsas: Wow.

Rossant: Yeah, it’s really a crazy coincidence, right? Sadly, he passed away one month before the symptoms of my child. So just before that. He could have been very helpful, obviously. But that’s why I had this bias at the beginning, when I was starting to look into the literature. I was sure that shaken baby syndrome was entirely legitimate, and I thought there was no controversy.

So when I started looking into it, I really didn’t think that I would change my mind, but I actually changed my mind. It was really hard for me to do it, because I was so convinced that the scientific consensus was right. And even my own father was testifying in court that this theory was correct. So it was not easy for me to change my mind, but I had to, because that’s what the evidence was telling me.

Demsas: Well, that’s a model for what we’re trying to do on this show. Cyrille, thank you so much for coming on.

Rossant: Thank you. Thank you a lot.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smierciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

In lieu of a chattier Siri, Apple (AAPL) is seemingly back to leaning on its design bonafides to push its next big software updates.

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Photographs by Lila Barth

On overpasses and by roadsides they gather, holding banners and placards. In the early days, only a few people showed up, congregating at chosen times and scattered locations around Boston. But their cause has grown and their numbers have swelled. For Labor Day 2024, plans were made for “standouts,” as the organizers called them, in more than 70 places—all over Massachusetts, yes, but also in Ohio, Kansas, Florida, California, and elsewhere.

These assemblies are the most visible manifestation of what is usually referred to as the Free Karen Read movement. If in the fullness of time it will seem strange that such unity and passion should have been mustered in defense of a 45-year-old Massachusetts financial analyst and adjunct college professor accused of killing her police-officer boyfriend by backing into him with her car … well, not to these people gathered today. Young and old, and nearly always dressed in something pink, they joyfully express their shared belief to passing motorists through slogan: most often just FREE KAREN READ, though sometimes the signs convey more grandiose sentiments—LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, STOP THE CORRUPTION, INJUSTICE THRIVES IN SILENCE. And some are impenetrable to anyone not already following the case’s legal intricacies and surrounding hoopla: BUTT-DIALS GALORE, COLIN WAS IN THE HOUSE, WHERE’S CHLOE?

In most assessments, a large part of the credit for how all of this has come to be—or, according to the haters and detractors (and there are plenty), the blame for it—belongs to a man named Aidan Kearney. I met Kearney early one May morning last year outside the Norfolk County Superior Court in Dedham, just southwest of Boston, a month into Read’s trial for, among other things, second-degree murder. It was raining, so we sought shelter on the steps of the Registry of Deeds, across the road. A gaggle of Free Karen Read protesters were already beginning to congregate a block or so away, though they were required to keep themselves outside a judge-ordained 200-foot buffer zone. Because of the pink dress code among FKR supporters, the effect is as if, at a seemingly random point on a Dedham street, a color filter kicks in.

Aidan Kearney poses with Turtleboy fans outside the courthouse. (Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe / Getty)

Kearney isn’t one for small talk, and he was soon in full flow. “It’s so obvious that she’s innocent,” he told me. “The critics will say ‘Oh, he’s like a cult leader—he’s brainwashing these people.’ I assure you, I am not that charming. These are educated people that are getting into this story because they’re not stupid. And they look at all the facts of this case, and they’re like, ‘It’s undeniable that this is a cover-up.’ ” He gestured toward the gradually swelling cohort in the distance. “These people are out here every day. Rain or shine, it doesn’t matter.”

As we spoke, a woman standing nearby interjected.

“Sorry, I’m not eavesdropping, but I’m eavesdropping,” she said, then asked us: “So are you with them?”

“I’m the leader,” Kearney said evenly.

“You’re the leader?” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m Turtleboy.”

On the morning of January 29, 2022, not long after 6 a.m., the body of a 46-year-old man was found in the snow outside a house in the Boston suburb of Canton. His name was John O’Keefe, and he was an officer with the Boston Police Department. Three days later, an explanation was offered for how he had come to die there. It was reported that O’Keefe had been drinking early the night before with his girlfriend, Karen Read, and that, not long after midnight, she had driven him to a gathering at the home of another police officer, Brian Albert. Read said she’d dropped O’Keefe off in front of the house and driven away. But prosecutors were now implying that she had backed into him with her car. To Kearney, reading the news reports at the time, the story seemed clear enough. “I remember I was like, That’s sad for her,” he said. “And him. Because it was framed in the media as an accident—this horrible accident.”

Kearney is from Worcester, about an hour’s drive from Canton, and for the first 11 years of his adult life, he was a history teacher; he still rhapsodizes about how much he liked teaching lessons on World War II and the civil-rights movement. Eventually he would marry another teacher, and have two children. But he also became a kind of citizen-blogger, in the beginning mostly concentrating on Boston sports and matters around Worcester, at AidanFromWorcester.com. He wasn’t afraid to rub people the wrong way, specializing in calling out perceived hypocrisies, and gleefully relishing any chance to cut against political correctness.

As his audience and his reputation grew, these two roles, teacher and internet provocateur, proved incompatible. In an attempt to make his blogging anonymous, he adopted the name Turtleboy, but when the secret didn’t hold, his choice was made: He would be a full-time blogger.

As Turtleboy, Kearney made enemies aplenty, but he also gathered a lot of followers who liked what he was saying and doing, and the unfiltered way in which he did it. Before too long, he was making a healthy living via digital advertising and merchandise sales, as well as donations and subscriptions. When he first read about Read and the death of O’Keefe in early 2022, he sized up its possibilities as a story. Kearney is instinctively pro-police—“I’m a ‘Back the blue’ guy”—and the death of a police officer seemed like a subject with Turtleboy potential. “But I didn’t write about it, because I’m like, Well, I don’t really have a strong opinion on this,” he recalls. “It’s like: What a tragedy. This guy gets killed. I couldn’t imagine living with the guilt of accidentally running your boyfriend over and then not knowing it. And then I totally forgot about the story.”

In the summer of 2022, while Kearney wasn’t paying attention, the charges against Read were upgraded from manslaughter to second-degree murder. Evidence had emerged suggesting that the couple’s relationship had been fraught, and that Read and O’Keefe had been arguing; Read was now accused of knowingly hitting O’Keefe, with an intent to kill him. Kearney still didn’t take notice in April 2023, when the defense filing laid out a detailed counternarrative, arguing that Read was being framed, and that O’Keefe had actually been murdered by those in the house he was visiting.

By that point, the story had more or less vanished from public consciousness: I couldn’t find a single mainstream-media mention of Read and O’Keefe in the six months leading up to the April 2023 filing. Even these new defense assertions generated only a smattering of stories in Massachusetts newspapers.

That week, Kearney was preoccupied with what, back then, was fairly typical Turtleboy fare. He’d faced down what he called “An Antifa Child Drag Queen Mob”; he’d interposed himself in a dispute involving parents who had claimed that their child was facing racist abuse at a cheer gym; he’d set up the latest installment of his annual Turtleboy Ratchet Madness competition, in which his followers would vote, round by round, to name the worst of the “ratchets”—hypocrites, spongers, and other miscreants—his blog had identified in the previous year; and he had documented, or intervened in, sundry other disputes, while also describing how he had been swatted twice that week, with the police arriving at his home to follow up on bogus reports from Turtleboy haters that Kearney was suicidal.

That was what Kearney’s life was like. More than two years earlier, after some personal turbulence had prompted him to reassess his approach, he’d announced a wish to change gears. “I still love the ratchet stuff and always will,” he’d said. “But at the end of the day I’m more interested in exposing people who actually matter, rather than going the Jerry Springer route … I don’t want [my kids] to grow up and think their father pays the bills by writing a vulgar, smut-filled blog. I feel like it’s possible to make the same points I’ve always made while avoiding usage of jizz donkeys and spunk guzzlers. Plus, my favorite stories are the ones that expose corrupt systems in power.” He had gone on to write some stories in that genre, but so far the adjustment appeared to have been modest. Now another chance presented itself.

At lunchtime on April 17, 2023, a retired police officer named Brian Johnson sent Kearney the following message on Facebook:

Hi, not sure if you’re following the case of Boston police officer, John O’Keefe death but here is a recent motion. John was a great guy. Started his career in Duxbury. His sister passed away and he adopted his niece and nephew. My sources tell me that Brian Albert, a Boston police K9 officer, is a loose cannon. His dog mysteriously disappeared and he’s since sold his house. It looks to me like the girlfriend was set up. Something’s not right.

Johnson attached a PDF of the defense motion, then followed up with: “Oops, I left out that John was found with bite marks.”

Kearney says that his reaction to reading the defense filing was: “Holy shit, this is story-of-the-century stuff.” Early that evening, as he worked on an article about the Read case for the Turtleboy blog, he posted on social media, as a preview, the first words he would write about it:

I am currently working on perhaps the craziest story I’ve ever written, involving a Boston cop possibly being involved in murdering another cop, followed by an elaborate coverup designed to frame the murdered cop’s girlfriend … My jaw is currently on the floor.

He tweeted that he hoped to have the story out that night.

A follower immediately contacted him. She explained that she’d been in touch with a confidant of Read’s named Natalie Berschneider Wiweke, and she connected them via Facebook. Throughout the evening, as Kearney continued to write, he bombarded Wiweke with questions and requests, and Wiweke, who seemed supremely well informed on the minutiae of the case, provided him with material.

A few hours later, Kearney published his post, several thousand words long: “Canton Cover-Up Part 1: Corrupt State Trooper Helps Boston Cop Coverup Murder of Fellow Officer, Frame Innocent Girlfriend.” (Two of the many ways that Kearney’s work practices deviate from conventional journalism are his speed to certainty, and his full-throated advocacy.) From this first outpouring, he was all in: “Karen Read is a completely innocent woman, wrongly charged by corrupt cops who would see her rot in prison in order to cover up a murder of a fellow officer.”

Top: Karen Read listens to testimony during her murder trial, May 13, 2024. Bottom: A photo of Read and the man she is accused of killing, the Boston police officer John O’Keefe, which the defense presented at trial. (Pat Greenhouse / The Boston Globe / Getty; John Tlumacki / The Boston Globe / Getty)

Going forward, there would now be two completely different and competing versions of Read’s story. The narrative conveyed in the prosecution’s public filings ran along these lines: After an evening of heavy drinking, Read set off in her car with O’Keefe, whom she had been dating for about two years, heading for an after-party. They were texted the address of their destination, 34 Fairview Road, by a woman named Jennifer McCabe, whose brother-in-law Brian Albert, a Boston police officer, lived there. Sometime after midnight, McCabe saw what she believed to be Read’s Lexus pull up outside the house, then, sometime later, pull away. Just before five in the morning, McCabe received a call from Read, distraught and hysterical, saying she was looking for O’Keefe. Read and McCabe soon met up at McCabe’s house, and headed out to search for O’Keefe. Along the way, Read asked McCabe, “Could I have hit him?” and mentioned that her car had a cracked taillight. Approaching 34 Fairview Road, Read spotted a body even though McCabe couldn’t immediately see it in the snow. She screamed and ran over, then began CPR; she also twice yelled at McCabe to Google How long do you have to be left outside to die of hypothermia? (Searches to this effect were found on McCabe’s phone.) One of the firefighters who responded to the emergency call spoke with Read at the scene and reported her saying, “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.” O’Keefe’s autopsy determined that his death had been caused by a combination of blunt-force trauma to the head and hypothermia. Pieces of broken taillight subsequently found at the scene matched the missing pieces from Read’s Lexus.

O’Keefe’s teenage niece, who lived at O’Keefe’s home, where Read often slept over, reported overhearing O’Keefe tell Read a week earlier that their relationship was unhealthy and had run its course. Text messages between the couple that week further documented this strain. After Read left 34 Fairview Road that night, she had called and texted O’Keefe multiple times. In one voice message, she screamed that she hated him.

The prosecution’s implied narrative was clear: After an argument outside 34 Fairview Road, Read had drunkenly reversed her Lexus into O’Keefe, who had been sufficiently incapacitated that he didn’t move, and subsequently died of hypothermia. Her actions in the hours that followed were a combination of self-incrimination (“I hit him”) and cover-up.

Diving deep into the defense’s recent filing, complemented by his own supplementary research, Kearney laid out a very different narrative. He poured scorn upon the notion that O’Keefe’s stated injuries—“six bloodied lacerations varying in length on O’Keefe’s right arm … from his forearm to his bicep”; “cut to the right eyelid of the victim”; “two swollen black eyes”; “cut to left side of nose”; “approximately two inch laceration to the back of the head”; “multiple skull fractures”—were consistent with the impact from a reversing car. He also focused on what would become a talisman for those convinced of Read’s innocence: According to the defense expert called to do a forensic analysis of McCabe’s phone, McCabe had initially Googled the phrase hos [sic] long to die in cold at 2:27 a.m., several hours before she and Read returned to 34 Fairview and discovered O’Keefe’s body, and then had taken steps to delete this and other incriminating information from her phone. If true, this seemed impossible to square with the prosecution’s version of what had happened.

Presented as similarly complicating for the prosecution’s narrative was O’Keefe’s iPhone data from that night. According to the defense, the Apple Health app showed O’Keefe in the vicinity of 34 Fairview Road between 12:21 and 12:24, taking 80 steps and climbing the equivalent of three floors. (The Albert residence has three floors.) Between 12:31 and 12:32, O’Keefe apparently took 36 more steps. This also fits poorly with the notion that he was hit by Read’s car and never entered the house.

Kearney, drawing on the defense’s assertions, proposed an alternative version of events: Read had dropped O’Keefe off at 34 Fairview Road, then watched him enter the house from her car; when he didn’t answer her calls once inside, she left. By Kearney’s reckoning, there were 11 people already in the house. One of them was Brian Albert’s then-18-year-old nephew, Colin—a “notorious hothead” and “out of control meathead,” according to Kearney; Colin had appeared on social media after O’Keefe’s death with visible abrasions on his knuckles. Kearney suggested that soon after entering the house, O’Keefe got into a physical confrontation with Colin Albert, and that his uncle Brian, a trained mixed-martial-arts fighter, joined in. The altercation riled up the family’s German shepherd, Chloe, who in Kearney’s telling caused the injuries to O’Keefe’s arm. (The implication, which Kearney hadn’t yet spelled out, was that a fatally injured O’Keefe was then dumped outside on the lawn.)

All 11 people in the house, Kearney argued, must have either witnessed or been aware of the murder of John O’Keefe. It was McCabe, Kearney asserted, who suggested to Read that she might have hit O’Keefe, and falsely suggested that Read appeared to spot O’Keefe’s body before she could have realistically seen it. Echoing the defense’s case, Kearney argued that McCabe connivingly repeated the hos long to die in cold search on her phone so that she could pretend that this had been at Read’s request in the moment, all in an attempt to disguise the fact that McCabe herself had made that same search hours earlier, before Read even knew that O’Keefe’s body was lying in the snow.

Kearney also detailed the preexisting relationship between the lead investigator on the case, Michael Proctor, and the McCabe and Albert families; the defense’s evidence that the initial crime report was changed; and the fact that crucial pieces of taillight were recovered from the crime scene not on the morning of O’Keefe’s death but much later, after Read’s car was in police possession. He argued that the taillight was actually broken in an incident captured on O’Keefe’s Ring camera when Read, heading out to search for him in the morning, clipped O’Keefe’s car as she backed out. Kearney also noted that the Alberts had gotten rid of their dog, Chloe, four months after O’Keefe’s death and had then sold the house—“yet additional evidence of consciousness of guilt,” in the words of the defense. At the end of his article, Kearney recommended that “Trooper Proctor, Brian Albert, Colin Albert, and Jennifer McCabe should all spend [a] significant amount of time in jail, and two of them should be charged with murder.”

Those Kearney implicated would later dispute almost everything he suggested. During the trial, both Colin and Brian would deny that O’Keefe had ever entered the house that night or that they fought him. Brian Albert would testify that getting rid of Chloe and selling his home had nothing to do with O’Keefe’s death. Jennifer McCabe would deny deleting any calls or searches on her phone and any involvement in a cover-up, and would tell the court that she “never would have left John O’Keefe out in the cold to die.” For his part, Michael Proctor admitted to having a personal relationship with Brian Albert’s brother and his wife, but he denied that this influenced the investigation in any way.

Still, plenty of people found Kearney’s narrative compelling. “I published it,” Kearney told me, “and it, like, broke the website. I had to upgrade my servers.” His YouTube broadcast the next evening, in which he again went through this material, drew far more viewers than ever before. He had titled the initial article “Part 1” because he realized that this was one of those stories that might require more than a single dive; occasionally in the past, his blog had returned to an interesting story four or five times. But this story just kept going: As of this writing, his series about Read has nearly 500 installments, complemented by hundreds of lengthy YouTube broadcasts. “I rarely have time for anything else now,” he told me when we first met. “Every day, I’d wake up and I wouldn’t know what I was going to write about. Now I do. I’m going to write about Karen Read.”

As Kearney’s audience grew, he relentlessly seeded the idea that a great injustice was taking place, and Read was its victim. Kearney is not shy about taking credit for the effect he’s had. During Read’s trial, he would declare, “You never would have heard of this trial without me.”

Kearney’s detractors—there were many even before he started writing about Read, and they have grown in number and fervor since—point out that he was not the first person to write about the story, suggesting that he is taking credit for causing something when all he did was sail in its slipstream. Maybe. But there’s a solid argument that the whole public discourse around the trial—not just the heightened interest in it but the galvanizing of a small movement of people committed to defending Read against what they believed was an imminent injustice—was catalyzed mainly by his interventions.

Kearney likes to say that he is three things at once—a journalist, an activist, and an entertainer. Here are two particularly vivid examples of his rather unorthodox approach to covering the Read case.

First: On June 5, 2023, he turned up unannounced in the bleachers at a high-school lacrosse game where Jennifer McCabe and her family were watching their daughter play. “Why did you Google How long to die in cold, Jen?” Kearney asked, as he filmed everything. “I’m just curious.” McCabe sat there, a pained smile on her face, head turned toward the game, as Kearney repeated this question seven times. Told that he was bothering people, he retorted: “Well, they killed a cop. She’s a cop killer! These are cop killers! You know they’re cop killers, right?” When I asked Kearney what he was thinking as he filmed this, he replied, “This is great content. And also, I’m glad somebody’s saying something to her.”

Second: On July 22, 2023, he convened a “Rolling Rally,” in which he led a convoy of supporters on a tour of the Canton area, stopping at the crime scene, the police station, the courthouse, and the homes of those he claimed were implicated in John O’Keefe’s death, livestreaming all the while, and reciting the facts as he believed them through a bullhorn outside each property. Several dozen enthusiastic supporters can be seen on the video; Kearney has claimed that as many as 300 participated across the day. From the video footage, this Rolling Rally’s apparent atmosphere was less that of a vengeful mob than of a lively campaigners’ day out, though I imagine that distinction might seem moot to its targets. The first stop was the house Brian Albert had moved into after selling 34 Fairview Road. Standing outside, Kearney proclaimed through the bullhorn, “I do kind of feel bad for the neighbors. But, sorry, murderers moved in, so it’s unfortunate.”

Putting aside questions about the legality of these actions, it’s times like these when Turtleboy’s certainty is most striking. Especially when you consider just how deeply horrible these actions would be if he’s wrong.

The first time I met Kearney, we had the following conversation:

You’d agree that if Karen Read didn’t do this, then this is a horrendous thing that she’s been put through.

“Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, I mean, it goes without saying.”

But conversely, do you agree that if the people you’re pointing your finger at didn’t do it, then they’re being put through a pretty horrendous experience?

“Yeah, but there’s no way they didn’t do it. If there was any way possible that he was not killed inside 34 Fairview Road, I would not be taking the position I am. If I thought there was a 1 percent chance that he was not killed inside that house, I would not be taking the position I am. I’m 100 percent that he was killed inside that house.”

But to say that there’s a zero percent chance of the state’s narrative being true, or some version of it being true, is a pretty hard-core determination.

“I think it’s the most logical determination.”

What if it isn’t?

“I can’t answer that question, because it’s impossible for it not to be true. If I say, ‘Well, then I’d feel bad,’ then it makes the reader believe that I think this is a possibility. I don’t. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my whole life. I would literally bet everything I’ve ever owned on the fact that he was inside that house and beaten up.”

Kearney seems to have a traditional reporter’s dogged obsessiveness in search of evidence, sources, and telling details. But from the start, he has also frequently seemed to have the best information on the Read case, particularly about details that strengthened the defense’s argument.

In the second half of 2023, as the case drew more coverage and as Kearney’s role in both popularizing it and turning public opinion in Read’s favor gained notice, he was sometimes asked whether he was colluding with Read or her defense team. He would deny any direct dealings with Read. That denial was, Kearney now acknowledges, a lie. Not long after he was connected via Facebook to Read’s friend Natalie Berschneider Wiweke, in April 2023, he became aware that his source was more than simply well informed: She was channeling messages from Read—in fact, Kearney said Wiweke was “nothing but a copy-and-paste for Karen.” A few weeks after his first article, Kearney and Read began to communicate directly. Just how often they did so was revealed when Read’s phone was seized by state police in January 2024. Over seven and a half months, from May 7 to December 21, 2023, 189 calls, cumulatively lasting more than 40 hours, were logged between Kearney and Read. Beyond that were all the text messages and some calls they had exchanged on Signal.

“Yeah, I denied it,” Kearney told me. “Because I didn’t have her permission. She was an anonymous source.” He sees nothing to apologize for. “I’m a journalist writing a story,” he argued. “This is the subject of the story. She’s allowed to talk to me.” What this was, he maintained, was just him doing his job well. “I had the best source of information. She could give me information that no other journalist could get ahold of. And none of it was illegal.”

Yet even if everything Kearney has done is legal, many of his critics have suggested that he’s either knowingly or unknowingly being exploited by a murderer to sway public opinion and bolster her defense—that, as Kearney put it, “the dastardly Karen Read was like the grand puppet master of this whole thing.” Or maybe even, in a more nuanced way, that Read had managed to find a patsy smart and motivated enough—but also credulous enough—to carry her water farther than she could have ever dreamed possible. All she’d needed to do was sketch out a plausible framework within which she might be innocent; with his unstoppable drive, Kearney had filled in the gaps.

Kearney dismisses all such possibilities. He is adamant that he has neither accepted anything Read has told him uncritically, nor allowed himself to be steered into writing what she wanted him to write. “If anyone can show any evidence that Karen Read has been dishonest with me or is somehow hiding something, I will blast her,” he told me. “I would just rip Karen to shreds. But she always brings evidence to back up everything she’s saying.” (Read and her attorneys did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)

When I first met him, Kearney brought up, unbidden, a related accusation. “This is the car they think Karen Read’s brother bought for me,” he said as we approached a 2023 Lexus RX 350, parked among the pink FKR battalion outside the courthouse. Read’s brother works for a Lexus dealership. Kearney said that his bank records were pulled to investigate, but that nothing was found, because there was nothing to find. (Kearney also tweeted a copy of his $59,186.56 purchase contract.) The reality, he said, is more prosaic: “I am making more money than I used to. But I’m not being paid by Karen Read. I’m being paid by people like you’re seeing there”—he gestured at the pink-clad crowd—“that buy T-shirts and donate and buy subscriptions and everything like that. I’m doing something and I’m doing it well, and it’s paying off.”

Kearney couldn’t have imagined all the repercussions this story would have for his own life. It is a peculiar irony that while Read has thus far spent only a single night in jail—on the night of her arrest, February 1, 2022, three days after O’Keefe’s death—Kearney, the loudest supporter of the Free Karen Read movement, has served 60 days behind bars during the unfolding of the case.

Exactly how that happened—well, that takes a little explaining.

Toward the end of August 2023, the Norfolk County district attorney, Michael Morrissey, issued a lengthy video statement that appeared to be a direct response to Kearney’s activities. “The harassment of witnesses in the murder prosecution of Karen Read is absolutely baseless,” he said. “It should be an outrage to any decent person—and it needs to stop.”

Kearney, predictably, was far from impressed. He livestreamed a response from his car as he watched Morrissey’s video. “No, it doesn’t need to stop—it needs to accelerate, baby … It’s not gonna stop; it’s gonna go a million times harder than it did before. Wooo!” Before signing off, Kearney added: “You are my enemy, Michael Morrissey—just know that. I will not rest until you are completely destroyed.”

Only later did Kearney come to see Morrissey’s video in a somewhat different light. “That was my one and only warning to cut the shit or else I was going to jail,” he told me. “That video was for me.”

On the morning of Wednesday, October 11, 2023, Kearney had just seen his two children onto the school bus when he was arrested, brought to court in handcuffs, and then released on bail. He would be charged with a list of crimes—most significantly, eight felony counts of witness intimidation, each carrying a potential 10-year sentence. (More charges were subsequently added.) Among the many episodes referred to in the charges were the lacrosse game and the Rolling Rally.

“It sounds very serious on paper,” Kearney told me. “But my attorney is just not the least bit worried.” In legal filings, his primary lawyer characterized Kearney’s work as “peaceful investigative journalism, satire, and political hyperbole.”

Kearney argued that these charges have been deliberately engineered to discredit him, “because my reporting has been so effective in galvanizing public support for Karen Read.” He elaborated: “The reason they charged me with witness intimidation isn’t to convict me. They know everything I’ve done is legal and free speech and protected. The reason is so that they can just point to me and say, ‘You believe that guy? He’s charged with 16 felonies. He’s a bad person.’ ”

The conventional legal advice, if you’ve been charged with something, is not to repeat or compound or talk about the alleged offenses, at least until the matter is resolved. This is not the Turtleboy way. Each time a new prosecution document has spelled out his supposedly criminal words and deeds, Kearney has gone through it on one of his live broadcasts, paragraph by paragraph, justifying everything. Partly this is business pragmatism—“I’m paid to talk, so I have to”—but he says it’s a matter of principle, too. The way Kearney sees it, when he confronts those who were at Brian Albert’s house that night, he is facing down those who abuse their power. “These people are all thugs and bullies and mean girls. And somebody, for once, is standing up to them.”

Kearney’s own case has been moving slowly through the courts; any resolution is not expected until later this year. This might quite reasonably leave one wondering how, then, Kearney has already spent 60 days in jail. The explanation requires a detour into Kearney’s sometimes messy personal life. His current career sat poorly with his wife, Julie. “She married a teacher,” he told me. Turtleboy “is not what she signed up for, and I get it.” Kearney was reluctant to clarify too much, but various stories he’s told about his life in recent years seem to involve relationships with other women. He has referred to “sneaking around, living this double life I shouldn’t have been living.”

Toward the end of 2023, Kearney was in a relationship with a woman named Lindsey Gaetani. Then they split up. The exact details of what took place between them are contested in court filings, and are also poisonously debated on social media to this day. (There is a fecund online ecosystem devoted to poring over Kearney’s perceived evils—the “anti-Turtleboy industrial complex,” he calls it. He says one of his lawyers told him, “I thought Alex Jones was the most hated client I ever had until I had you.”)

What is undisputed is that, some weeks after their relationship had notionally ended, Kearney visited Gaetani’s home. Each would offer a very different account of who initiated this meeting, and of what took place during it. Kearney says that she asked him over to discuss a summons she had received relating to the Read case, and believes he has evidence that suggests she was deliberately colluding with the police to entrap him; Gaetani alleges that he assaulted her. Kearney strongly denies this. Problem is, if you are already on bail when you face an accusation like this, your bail may be revoked, and that’s what happened.

On December 26, his 42nd birthday, Kearney was taken to Norfolk County Jail. Against his wishes, he was placed in isolation—“because of my high profile,” he told me. Kearney has been on Adderall for nearing 20 years, and now he had to do without; that adjustment was difficult: “I couldn’t stay awake during the day. And because of that, I couldn’t sleep at night.” He missed his son’s first basketball game. He missed his daughter’s cheer competitions. (He told his kids that he was away for work. “In a way, I was.”)

But Kearney says prison was not so bad. He ran five or more miles a day, and he read: To Kill a Mockingbird, which he hadn’t liked in high school but did now; The Happiest Man on Earth, about a centenarian Holocaust survivor; then 1984. He also began to build a relationship with a Read supporter named Meredith O’Neil, who’d sent him supportive messages. By the time he was released, they were a couple. Soon afterward, the assault-and-battery charge that had triggered his bail revocation was dropped. (It could still be refiled, but has not been as of this writing.)

“You put me in jail for 60 fucking days—big deal,” he declared on one of his broadcasts after he was released. “I lost 10 pounds … I got close to my parents. I built new relationships. I met a much better girl. Like, life is so much better now. It’s, like, one of the best things that ever happened to me. All I do is win. I hope they know that. Putting me in jail turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. So thank you, motherfucker.” And he raised two middle fingers.

That’s the face Kearney seems most comfortable presenting to the world. Still, his first night out of jail, when he went to bed on his wife’s couch for probably the final time (they have since divorced), and he couldn’t sleep, and he kept looking at his kids’ photos on the wall, and thinking about how he would never leave them again, he reconsidered everything. For the first time, he found himself wondering: Should he stop writing about Read? “Because look at what’s at risk right there,” he told me. “Like, I could lose them. Nothing’s worth that, you know? Should I just stop?”

He didn’t stop. The incessant episodes about the Canton “cover-up” and YouTube live broadcasts soon resumed. On Thursday evenings, Kearney does a private broadcast for members of his Turtle Club. (Cheapest membership level: $15 a month.)

Being Turtleboy has been very profitable for Kearney. Boston magazine recently estimated that he earns $45,000 to $50,000 a month. He doesn’t explicitly dispute this, but notes that he has operating expenses, as well as a quarter-million dollars in legal fees. To explain how Boston came up with those numbers, he told me the writer simply estimated a figure based on his roughly 2,000 paying subscribers. When I pointed out that he had other revenue streams too—his website advertising and a wide range of merchandise (you can get a Free Karen Read pet hoodie in a range of sizes and colors, and a pink Free Karen Read baby onesie), as well as potential movie and book deals—he said that he had no clear sense of what he was earning. “I’m not a money guy,” he said. “I’m a content guy.”

One evening last June, I joined Kearney as he prepared to deliver his Turtle Club broadcast from his girlfriend’s Boston apartment. Seconds before going live, he took his seat, slipped a Turtleboy cap on his head, and started streaming.

After more than an hour of monologuing, he started reading out what he calls Turtlechats: People send him money—typically $5 to $20, though sometimes more—and in return, Kearney reads out their questions or comments. There’s apparently an understood etiquette here, one best not to fall afoul of. Seeing one message, he said sternly to the camera: “You can’t send a dollar. If you send a dollar, I ain’t reading your shit. It’s insulting.”

In response, a message soon came through from someone named Ben taking exception to this, informing Kearney, “You lost me bro.” What happened next reflects something fundamental about Kearney. Instead of brushing off Ben’s message, Kearney escalated dramatically.

“Let me be very clear, Ben. I couldn’t be happier to lose you. I hope you never come back and watch any of my shows again. I actually fucking hate you with every ounce of my being, and I’d be proud to have you unsubscribe to the channel.”

Kearney has brought the same hyper-incendiary instincts to his coverage of the trial. When I visited him last May, he had just been banned from YouTube for a week because of an online poll he’d posted asking his followers a question about the trial’s most recent two witnesses: “Who is the bigger piece of shit?” He told me he is just using his platform to say out loud what regular people watching the trial stream are thinking. “It’s guy-on-the-street talk,” he said, adding: “I’m rough around the edges, certainly. I have a potty mouth. My mother is always telling me to tone it down, and I’d like to. It’s something I’m working on.” Perhaps not that hard, though. Here’s a brief excerpt—not even the worst part—from his livestreamed commentary about the testimony of a witness named Julie Nagel:

This is a goddamn murder trial. There’s an innocent woman whose life is on the line. And all these townie fucking whores can do is get up on the stand and lie their fucking asses off. I hope you burn in eternal hell because that’s where you fucking belong, you stupid fat cow. You deserve to be fat and disgusting, because you disgust me.

But even as he’s delivering crude, derogatory commentary like this, he’s also providing cogent, detailed, and deeply knowledgeable analysis of the trial. This is a man who, on and off camera, can pivot in an instant from saying things like “townie fucking whores” to offering a deconstruction of subtle contradictions in testimony, or explaining how the last famous and controversial trial at the Norfolk courthouse was of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists convicted of murder and executed in the 1920s. “Sacco and Vanzetti didn’t have Karen Read’s lawyers,” he says.

As the prosecution presented its case at trial, Kearney appeared to grow even more confident that Read would be found not guilty. It was not hard to see things his way. Day after day, witnesses for the prosecution seemed to be brought to the stand less for purposes of showing how and why Read was responsible for O’Keefe’s death than to undermine the defense’s alternative theory that O’Keefe was killed inside 34 Fairview Road. I told Kearney that I assumed there must be some careful but as-yet-unveiled prosecutory plan at work, but Kearney was skeptical, never wavering from what he told me the day we met: “This is going to be the quickest acquittal you’ve ever seen.”

Kearney’s nom de blog comes from an infamous statue in the center of his hometown, one with its own messy history. The Burnside Fountain, now found on the southeast corner of Worcester Common, was built in the early 20th century, and features a bronze statue that the sculptor who was commissioned to construct it, Charles Harvey, named Boy With a Turtle. His design depicted a naked boy holding a hawksbill sea turtle. As he undertook the work in his New York studio, Harvey apparently heard voices, sometimes said to have come from the unfinished statue itself, telling him to kill himself. Heeding them, he went to the bank of the Bronx River and slit his throat. Another artist completed the statue.

Left: Free Turtleboy hats are among the abundant trial-related merchandise for sale. Right: The statue that inspired Kearney’s pseudonym, on Worcester Common, in Massachusetts. (Lila Barth for The Atlantic)

But that is not why Harvey’s final work became famous. It’s not entirely clear whether Harvey’s intention was to depict a boy riding a turtle upon the seas or to capture the moment of releasing a turtle into the wild. But one scenario easily comes to mind for many observers. As Kearney succinctly put it: “The statue obviously looks like a boy having sex with a turtle.”

The idea to use the name Turtleboy was not Kearney’s own. Inviting suggestions for what to call a new iteration of his blog in 2013, which at the time he intended to be anonymous, he considered “Word From the Woo” (Woo being a local term for “Worcester”) and “Jogger Blogger.” Then a follower proposed “Turtleboy Sports.” Kearney knew immediately that it was right—“What better name for a Worcester guy? Turtleboy!”

His followers soon became known by the name they have to this day: Turtle Riders. When I asked Kearney why, he said, “Well, it’s better than Turtle Fuckers.”

One day in the first week of June, a trial half day, Kearney and I arranged to talk at lunchtime while he drove back to Worcester to see his kids after school. But when he emerged from the courtroom, he asked whether I minded if we made a detour. Some Turtle Riders were gathering for lunch.

At first I couldn’t understand why they’d chosen a restaurant nearly half an hour’s drive from the courthouse. Then it became clear: The Turtle Riders’ chosen meeting place was the Waterfall Bar and Grille in Canton, the final place where Karen Read and John O’Keefe drank together on January 28, 2022. It’s where they mingled with Brian Albert and several others who would soon head to Albert’s home.

But that’s not all I would see on our drive.

“By the way,” Kearney said as we neared Canton, “do you want to see 34 Fairview Road?”

He took a left turn, and soon we arrived. “They say she was parked right here,” he said, “and that John just stood back there by the flagpole, and that she gunned it in reverse and hit him.”

Kearney is fond of experiments and reenactments, both for his own edification and to create content for his viewers. In September 2023, he had come here in his Lexus and tried to duplicate what the prosecution said Read did based on its interpretation of data from her fancier 2021 Lexus LX 570: abruptly reverse 62 feet and reach a speed of 24 miles an hour. Kearney said that despite multiple tries, his best “pedal to the metal” attempt couldn’t get him above 19 miles an hour. He pointed to a spot some distance from the curb. “That’s where John’s body was found.”

As we talked through various scenarios, a car pulled up in the middle of the street, right next to us.

“Oh my God!” screamed one of the two women in the car.

“Shut up!” screamed the other. “We were just fucking talking about you!”

They couldn’t believe what they’d chanced upon: Turtleboy, in the flesh, at the geographic epicenter of their obsession.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, in a way that seemed both friendly and designed to chill the temperature a little. When they asked for a photo, he got out of the car and posed with them.

At the Waterfall, he knew most of the people joining for lunch—maybe a couple dozen Turtle Riders who seemed to be part of some informal inner circle—and he didn’t grandstand at all. Instead, Kearney sat at the edge of the room, talking quietly with whoever came by but making no pronouncements. This wasn’t bullhorn Turtleboy.

On the next morning’s “bus-stop live,” he told the Turtle Riders about me and what I’d gotten to see while hanging out with him and his crowd: “He got a taste of Turtle World.” He said I’d seen “how cool these people are. And, the lies that have been spread about who we are and what we do—and that we’re dangerous and bloodthirsty, and, you know, intimidating witnesses. We’re not about that, man. We’ve never been about that.”

June 10, 2024—day 22 of testimony in the Read trial—began with Kearney tweeting photos of the gathered FKR protesters at dawn, with this message: “Sometimes I can’t believe I created this movement, but I’m really glad I did.” Early in the day’s proceedings, taking exception to the latest ruling by Judge Beverly Cannone—who, in Turtleboy world, is only ever referred to as “Auntie Bev”—he tweeted, “Auntie Bev is being extra cunty today.” One darkly comic measure of how much influence Kearney has had on this trial is that this affection for giving offensive nicknames to people he doesn’t like leached out of the sideshow and into the official trial record. One of the police investigators, Yuri Bukhenik, had been mischievously rechristened by Kearney as “Bukkake,” the term for a very specific multiperson sexual act; on the stand, a witness named Julie Albert, Brian Albert’s sister-in-law, referred to Bukhenik from the witness box as “Trooper Bukkake.” “Everybody in the courthouse looked at me,” Kearney said afterward. “It was so satisfying, because I’m like, ‘Oh, she listens to my show.’ ”

Kearney’s intemperate Auntie Bev comment was soon forgotten, because the time had come for the lead police investigator in the case, Michael Proctor, to take the stand. Another complexity in this case was that, unbeknownst to the jury, there had been a federal grand-jury investigation into the Read investigation—a step toward justice, if you’re a Read supporter, or a misguided fishing expedition that the Read side somehow manipulated into existence, if you’re not. And although no charges have been filed as a result of this grand jury, it unearthed material that consequently became available in Read’s trial—including some deeply problematic private text messages sent by the lead investigator.

After inviting Proctor to share the details of the police investigation, the state’s attorney led him through much of this problematic material. It was a remarkable spectacle—the prosecution guiding its own witness toward such unhelpful testimony—but presumably the attorney had calculated that all of this would have been even more devastating if first presented by the defense. Still, the effect of this material was incendiary: In a volley of texts to friends, family, and colleagues, Proctor had referred to Read as, among other things, “a whack job cunt,” “a nutbag,” and “retarded”; he’d also joked about looking for nudes of her on her phone, and mocked her medical history. “She’s got a leaky balloon knot,” he texted, presumably in reference to her Crohn’s disease. “Leaks poo.” Most of the crudest texts didn’t speak directly to Read’s guilt or innocence, but when combined with other unprofessional asides—“Nope, home owner is a Boston cop,” he’d texted to a friend, in a way that could be read as implying that Brian Albert was consequently beyond investigation—they appeared corrosive to the prosecution’s case.

Kearney certainly thought so. “You can’t truly appreciate how OVER this trial is,” he tweeted from the courtroom, “unless you see the faces of the jurors while Proctor reads these text messages.”

Media coverage of the trial grew and grew, in tandem with a teeming online scrum in which Read’s innocence or guilt was incessantly debated. It was apparently easy to survey the same morass of evidence and then with fierce assurance come to completely different conclusions. Almost everyone seemed to be sure of the truth, and to think that anyone who didn’t agree with them was a fool.

As the trial neared its end, Kearney retained complete confidence that Read would be fully acquitted. But he was also clearly exhausted. “I’m kind of looking forward to it being over,” he had told me earlier. “I’m Karen Read–ed out. I enjoy the professional success I’ve had from it, but I don’t enjoy the stress that I’ve gotten from all these charges.”

Aidan Kearney at home outside Worcester, Massachusetts, where he blogs and livestreams on his various Turtleboy platforms about the Karen Read murder trial, October 2, 2024. (Lila Barth for The Atlantic)

Arguably the most significant testimony came in the trial’s final days. The prosecution’s vehicular-crash expert argued that O’Keefe’s injuries were consistent with impact from a reversing car (though his explanation of exactly how O’Keefe had been hit, and how his body had ended up where it was found, seemed murky), and its digital-forensics experts argued that the 2:27 time stamp associated with the words hos long to die in cold on Jennifer McCabe’s phone was actually tied to when the tab was first opened (to search for basketball scores), not when the potentially incriminating phrase was typed; they also testified that there was no evidence of deliberate data deletion. The defense pushed back hard.

On June 21, day 29 of testimony, just before 11 a.m., the defense began to present its case. Read’s attorneys called a snowplow driver who said that when he drove by 34 Fairview at about 2:45 in the morning, he saw nothing on the lawn where O’Keefe’s body was later found, suggesting that the body had been placed there afterward; a doctor who argued that the marks on O’Keefe’s arm were dog bites; a digital-forensics expert who maintained that the hos long … search did indeed occur around 2:27 a.m.; a forensic pathologist who testified that O’Keefe’s injuries were not consistent with being hit by a car at 24 miles an hour; and two accident-reconstruction experts who testified that the damage both to the car and to O’Keefe didn’t tally with the kind of collision proposed by the prosecution. Scarcely a day after it started, the defense rested.

Kearney, who had been studying the jury members’ reactions over the past few weeks, told me he thought there was a 70 percent chance that they would issue the inevitable not-guilty verdict after less than a day’s deliberation. There was just a 30 percent chance that they would need a second day, he said. No other outcome seemed conceivable to him.

But the first day passed, and then the second, and then the third. Now it was the weekend. And before the jury reconvened, two things happened. First, on Saturday, Kearney’s mother, who had pancreatic cancer, died. The second event, Kearney learned about only as jury deliberations resumed on Monday morning. A person contacted Kearney via Facebook to say that the police were at Kearney’s parents’ house in Worcester. Kearney called his father, who told him why: At 8:30 that morning, one of Kearney’s brothers had stepped out of the house and found a large turtle hanging by its neck on a rope from the porch railing. Dead. The turtle had “what appeared to be a gun shot wound on the back of the shell,” according to the police report, “and an exit wound … near its belly.” Kearney’s father, the police report went on to say, “explained that his son, Aidan Kearney, is Turtle Boy; a popular article writer. Mr. Kearney also mentioned that he and his family have been the victims of harassment for some time now due to his son’s occupation, but nothing to the extent of today’s incident.”

Kearney’s father sent him a photo. He immediately began speculating about who was responsible, throwing out different public accusations. “There’s no shortage of people who I think would do this,” Kearney told me. As of this writing, the dead-turtle investigation remains unsolved.

On Monday, after the jury had sent several notes suggesting that it was at an impasse, the judge declared a mistrial. Kearney was deflated. Though one can make a strong argument that, absent Kearney’s involvement, Karen Read would have been much more likely to have been found guilty, he took little succor in that.

A new trial was scheduled for this past January, then deferred until April. But in the weeks following the trial, an extraordinary thing happened. Read had been facing three separate charges. A number of jurors came forward to say that they had unanimously agreed to acquit Read on the most serious charge—second-degree murder—as well as the charge of leaving the scene of a crime; they had reached an impasse only on the lesser manslaughter charge (where a majority of them favored a guilty verdict). But during the court proceedings, no one had asked them if they’d reached unanimity on any of the individual charges. Read’s legal team argued that she could not be fairly tried again on these charges, as this would be double jeopardy; the prosecution argued that as no such verdicts had been officially recorded, double jeopardy did not apply. The issue is working its way through the courts.

After recovering from his initial dismay at the mistrial, Kearney carried on undeterred. He conducted new field experiments, explored new angles, and covered every new development. He got a juror to speak on the record about the deliberations. According to this juror, those who believed Read guilty of manslaughter focused on how drunk she’d been, and on the acceleration data from the car; those who believed her not guilty did not buy that O’Keefe’s injuries could have been caused by a collision with a reversing car. Many of the issues Kearney considered most important—the alleged 2:27 a.m. Google search, the Apple Health data suggesting that O’Keefe had gone into the house, Officer Proctor’s prior relationship with the Albert family—were apparently not central to their deliberations. “I’m in this world where I consume Karen Read content every day, and we all know it like the back of our hand,” he told me. “But the people deciding the case didn’t really seem to know it that well, if that makes sense.”

On a livestream shortly after speaking with the juror, Kearney let rip. Yes, the jury had unanimously taken murder off the table, but how could any sentient juror have believed what he now knew some of them did? If you were to question any of the jurors who voted guilty on the manslaughter charge about whether they would have staked their children’s lives on that verdict being correct, he asked rhetorically, what would they say? “Would you bet your children’s lives on that fact, that Karen Read’s guilty? Would you? Would you? Because I would bet anyone’s—like, literally anyone’s—life that Karen Read is not guilty and not think twice about it … I’m that fucking positive.” He couldn’t understand how the jurors who’d considered Read guilty of anything could think otherwise. “I hope they burn in hell, to be perfectly honest with you, those people. I really do. They’re fucking terrible people.”

Kearney and Read had stopped talking just before he was imprisoned, in December 2023, and some trial commentators had speculated that she was done with him. But on June 6 of last year, when I met him after court, he told me, “I actually talked to Karen for the first time in six months today,” and explained how he’d asked her a question outside court about footage of her car’s taillight, and she’d answered him with a big smile.

Kearney told me that he and Read resumed private contact a few days after that conversation in the street. The ice broke on June 10, the day of Michael Proctor’s catastrophic testimony. “I sent her a message on Signal, and I just said, ‘Good day. Now the whole world knows what an asshole he is.’ ” Read replied, concurring. “That reinvigorated conversation between the two of us,” he said. Now they’re back in more regular communication. “We just discuss various things about the trial and our thoughts on it,” he said. “My thoughts on it, basically.”

When Kearney sometimes talks about the cause of defending Read’s innocence as a kind of calling, he can sound jarringly grandiose. If he were to allow his arrest on “trumped-up, ridiculous charges” to cause him to back off, he told me one day, “I feel like I would be almost disrespecting everything our Founding Fathers believed in and risked their lives for. Our Founding Fathers were rich, all of them. And so they had the most to lose. People like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams. They could have just gotten along under British rule. They would have been fine. But … principles mattered with these people. And when they signed the Declaration of Independence, they knew that it was probably a 90 percent chance they had just signed their own death warrant. But it was worth it. It was worth it to abolitionists. To people like Martin Luther King. The great people in American history are the people who risked their own well-being for something bigger than themselves. I’m not comparing myself to them …”

People listening to that are going to say, “So you’re saying there’s a lineage: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Martin Luther King … Turtleboy?”

“Yeah, well, I think what’s happening with Karen Read is along those lines … Obviously this is a smaller scale. I’m not George Washington. But I just feel like you have to speak up about this.”

And so on he goes—fighting his own witness-intimidation charges while chronicling, with renewed intensity, each twist in the Karen Read saga. “I’m going to ride this out as long as I can,” he told me, “because it’s my thing.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped.”

Apple (AAPL) is delaying a much-anticipated AI upgrade of its voice assistant Siri.

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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

The most striking images from Donald Trump’s second inauguration were not of the president himself. Rather, they featured the array of tech billionaires who occupied some of the best seats in the crowded Capitol rotunda. There was X’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—all sitting alongside one another, their proximity to Trump sending a decidedly unsubtle message about the new power structure in America. The scene set up the possibility of “a new kind of American oligarchy,” my colleagues Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker wrote in The Atlantic that afternoon. Trump’s empowerment of Musk, the world’s richest man, to rampage through the federal bureaucracy in the weeks since has only deepened the sense that in America right now, a wealthy few are governing the many.

Since its earliest editions, The Atlantic has been preoccupied with the specter of oligarchy. The word appeared in this magazine’s endorsement of Abraham Lincoln in 1860—its only presidential recommendation for more than a century—when James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic’s first editor, wrote: “Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.” Two years later, in the midst of the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson contrasted America’s “two states of civilization”—the free, “democratical” North and the South, “a lower state, in which the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy.”

For decades thereafter, The Atlantic’s writers occasionally referred to the postwar southern political and economic hierarchy—wealthy, white landowners who dominated a disenfranchised Black population—as an oligarchy. In the early-20th-century trust-busting era of Theodore Roosevelt, oligarchy became a byword for the threat of corporate power. “The corporation has subverted law and honesty between individuals,” the writer Robert R. Reed warned in 1909. “It can and will, if unrestrained, subvert the basic ideal of American government, the happiness and welfare of unborn generations of American people.”

A generation later, Arthur E. Morgan, the first chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt, approached the idea of American oligarchy with a slightly more open mind. Writing in 1934, he noted that some institutions that Americans held in the highest regard were hardly democracies. Henry Ford, then the revered titan of the automobile industry, was both an “economic dictator” and a “popular hero.” Harvard University, governed by a “selfperpetuating” board of wealthy trustees, was essentially an oligarchy. “The American people has sized up this situation and is not worried about political theories,” Morgan wrote. “It tends to give its loyalty to the institution which best serves the public good, whether it be controlled by a democracy or by an oligarchy.”

Only around the turn of this century, as economic inequality increased to the point of crisis, did warnings about the dangers of an American oligarchy reemerge in these pages. Some appear quite prescient. A 1990 cover story profiling the economist Lester Thurow described a speech he addressed to members of the Washington, D.C., “establishment,” warning that they risked becoming an oligarchy of greedy profiteers that could bring economic ruin to America. Surveying the global landscape in 1997, Robert D. Kaplan wrote that “democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before … Many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington.”

Perhaps Thurow was presaging the financial collapse of 2008, which helped spawn a revival of anti-government populism that propelled Trump and his wealthy allies to power. And maybe Kaplan, writing in the relatively halcyon period of 1990s economic expansion, had people like Musk and his fellow tech tycoons in mind when he warned that the accumulated concentration of wealth and the “productive anarchy” of the technological revolution would need to be supervised—“or else there will be no justice for anyone.”

The tech giant is appealing a government order for access to customers' private data, the BBC understands.