‘Turtleboy’ seeking to disqualify special prosecutor in witness intimidation cases
Lawyers for the blogger Aidan Kearney are now seeking to disqualify the retired judge assigned to his witness intimidation cases as a special prosecutor, and to bar the Norfolk County District Attorney's office from prosecuting the case altogether.
The motion, filed by attorney Mark Bederow, comes after an ex-girlfriend of Kearney's filed a counterclaim to a defamation lawsuit he brought against her in Worcester Superior Court.
In that counterclaim, Lindsey Gaetani, the victim in one of the pending cases against Kearney and a witness in another, claimed Robert Cosgrove, the special prosecutor, improperly released an unredacted report of a sexual assault she had accused Kearney of.
Kearney has never been charged with sexual assault.
The claims brought by Gaetani have already forced Cosgrove to withdraw from one of the three pending cases against Kearney, a 2024 indictment for an incident involving Gaetani. No replacement prosecutor has been named and Kearney's lawyers are asking to prevent the district attorney's office from appointing one.
In addition to the claims against Cosgrove, Geatani has threatened to sue the district attorney.
In the 2023 indictment against Kearney, which stems from his conduct related to the Karen Read case, his lawyers are asking a judge to remove Cosgrove as prosecutor.
Essentially, Cosgrove must now defend himself against claims brought by Gaetani while also propping her up as a credible witness in a criminal case, Bederow writes.
The motion also seeks to remove Cosgrove from an ongoing investigation into whether Kearney and Read conspired to commit witness intimidation for similar reasons.
"Mr. Cosgrove's continued prosecution of the 2023 case and the 2025 investigation places him in the untenable position of (a) defending the credibility of a witness who has accused him of egregious prosecutorial misconduct or (b) attacking the credibility of a prosecution witness whose credibility the Commonwealth must defend," Bederow wrote in an affidavit. If Cosgrove were to stay on, he would be "laboring under an obvious and irreconcilable conflict."
Neither Cosgrove nor the other special prosecutor still assigned to the 2023 case, Ken Mello, have responded to the filing as of Tuesday morning. Kearney's lawyers recently filed a motion to dismiss that case , based largely on what they described as wrongdoing by Mello.
A hearing in Kearney's case is set for Wednesday at 2 p.m. in Norfolk Superior Court.
More about the case
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