Massachusetts State Police headquarters in Framingham. (Google)
The onset of the new year has breathed new life into the still unsubstantiated claim that Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early had a hand in ordering the blackout of incriminating details from the arrest report concerning a prominent local judge’s daughter.
The latest allegation involves the same Worcester-based blog that was the first to break the story about the Massachusetts State Police’s treatment of Alli Bibaud’s arrest report — she, the daughter of Dudley District Court Judge Timothy Bibaud.
The blog, Turtleboysports.com, insinuated on Tuesday that the timing of the irreverent site’s latest Facebook-related punishment was somehow linked to a story the web site published criticizing a Worcester Magazine report which, through text messages obtained via an information request, arrived at the conclusion that there was no influence from Early’s office in the decision to redact portions of Bibaud’s arrest report.
Lindsay Corcoran, Early’s communications director, has yet to respond to a New Boston Post request for comment regarding the blog’s insinuation.
Meanwhile, Turtleboy has now apparently resorted to a tactic the site believes will shield it from future Facebook censorship.
Alas, Worcester Magazine’s report on the the text thread “shows Early’s office talking about” Bibaud’s October 16 arrest and “questioning media coverage of the incident,” but also claims there was no indication “that Early or his office asked for special treatment” of Bibaud.
Worcester Magazine’s account, however, includes the apparent disclaimer that “this story does not necessarily include all correspondence related to Alli Bibaud involving the DA’s office.”
Leonard H. Kesten, the Boston-based attorney representing the state troopers who filed federal lawsuits against top brass within the Massachusetts State Police and other unnamed defendants over the order to change Bibaud’s arrest report, told New Boston Post on Tuesday that claims dissociating Early’s office from the order will be contested in court.
Kesten pointed to Bibaud’s Monday, October 16 arrest and the subsequent “unprecedented” impounding of her arrest report the following morning. Kersten said he reviewed the chain of text messages identified in the Worcester Magazine report, and confirmed that he has previously read them, in addition to other forms of communication.
“Police reports are never impounded unless they involve a juvenile or cases of domestic violence,” Kersten said. “This case does not qualify.”
Bibaud was 30 years old at the time of her arrest.
Kesten, who confirmed that Worcester Magazine never reached out to him for its story, said the records he has reviewed so far indicates there was no obvious effort on behalf of Bibaud’s father to use his position to order the scrubbing of the arrest report.
Yet Kesten did point to a text message from Assistant District Attorney Edward N. Karcasinas Jr. in which Karcasinas apparently relayed a request from Bibaud’s father to “default her,” or enter into a form of binding judgment used at the discretion of a presiding judge when a party is unable to take action.
The “default her” text, according to a timestamp, was sent the morning after Bibaud’s arrest. A default, Kesten explained, would have called for Bibaud to be treated as if she had no lawyer present at her arraignment.
A lawyer for Bibaud did happen to show up that Tuesday (October 17) morning.
A request for default is not beyond the norm, Kesten said, but he added that an unanswered question involves the appearance that Tuesday morning of an attorney for Alli Bibaud, Kara Colby of Worcester — the person he dubbed as “the mystery lawyer.”
“Who hired her?” Kersten asked during the interview. “If I’m reading the texts correctly — it says [Bibaud] should default.”
Worcester District Court records show that Colby entered a handwritten motion the morning after Bibaud’s arrest to have the case “impounded prior to arraignment, along with the statement [of facts].”
Colby, who was apparently retained that Tuesday morning — the same day Bibaud would have been formally arraigned, according to Kesten — did not return a message left Tuesday afternoon seeking comment.
In addition, Kesten said he also plans to ask more questions about the timeline between the point where his client, State Trooper Ryan Sceviour, entered his arrest report into the state’s system and the point where Bibaud’s altered arrest report was submitted to prosecutors.
Records show that Sceviour’s original report was impounded Tuesday morning in Worcester, per Colby’s motion, yet two days later, on Thursday, October 19, Sceviour alleges (in his federal complaint) that he was ordered to draft a new report, to be delivered to Assistant District Attorney Jeff Travers.
Records additionally show that the next day — a Friday — Travers brought the case forward, and informed the presiding judge that ethics dictated the decision to alter Sceviour’s original report. Colby was not present for the Friday, October 20 court appearance.
Bibaud’s court file was transferred to Middlesex County the following Monday, October 23, records show.
“I’ve never seen an altered report once it’s approved in court,” Kesten said, referring to the fact that one of Sceviour’s direct superiors had already approved and signed off on Sceviour’s report. Even so, before the end of the work week, a higher-up inside the State Police had sent a trooper to Sceviour’s home on Thursday (October 19) and allegedly ordered him to scrub embarrassing details — including an alleged sexual proposition from Bibaud in exchange for leniency and an unprompted admission from Bibaud that had she obtained the heroin in her possession in exchange for sex.
An arraignment during such cases, Kesten noted, typically occurs the day after an arrest — barring weekends and holidays.
Bibaud, the day after her arrest, was admitted to a rehab facility in Worcester. Her case was moved more than a week later out of Worcester County and into Framingham District Court in Middlesex County, Kesten confirmed.
At another point during the text messages exchange, Assistant District Attorney Jeff Travers, in response to a text from Karcasinas alerting him of Bibaud’s arrest the night of the incident, asked Karcasinas if the district attorney’s office “needs to help” Bibaud find a detox bed.
Kesten said he had no problem with Bibaud’s case being transferred to a neighboring county. Her and her father’s connections (Judge Timothy Bibaud had previously spent 20 years working as a Worcester County prosecutor) necessitated the transfer, he noted.
“But they should have immediately moved it to Middlesex County and not impounded it,” Kesten said.
Kesten also added that he has a problem with the claim State Police brass have openly voiced to the media regarding edited arrest reports. Days after Turtleboy, citing inside sources, broke the story involving Bibaud’s redacted report, a FOX 25 News follow-up report included a statement from the State Police claiming that such revisions are not uncommon.
“That’s nonsense,” Kesten said, adding that he’s already collected dozens of unrelated arrest reports that feature even more salacious details than those mentioned in Bibaud’s original report that did not receive the same treatment.
Moreover, Kesten in a previous interview with New Boston Post challenged Governor Charlie Baker’s claim that his public safety chief, Daniel Bennett, did not play a role in ordering the State Police to whitewash Bibaud’s original report. Last month, after State Police Major Susan Anderson responded to Sceviour’s complaint, Kesten challenged her denial that the order to change Bibaud’s report came from higher-ups outside the State Police.
“This is an order, Jeff, we all have bosses,” Sceviour’s union representative, State Trooper Jeffrey Gilbert, claims Anderson told him.
On Tuesday Kesten once again stood by his clients’ account.
“All they did is their job,” Kesten said of Sceviour and Ali Rei, the other state trooper who assisted in creating the original arrest report. “For them to publicly suggest they did something wrong, that they were just being mean cops, that’s just plain wrong.”
As for Turtleboy, the website, which features posts from anonymous bloggers, claims the texts featured in the Worcester Magazine report show that Early’s office “rushed to cover up” the omission of the salacious details that originally appeared in Bibaud’s arrest report.
The website, according to a representative reached via email, in December lost more than $10,000 in revenue due to suspension penalties imposed by Facebook. The representative refused to share his or her identity.
Massachusetts State Police headquarters in Framingham. (Google) 
