It may not be suitable for all readers. |
- “A hero is not a god or an idea. A hero lives here on the street. Among us. With us. Always here, but rarely recognized. Look in the mirror and see yourself for what you truly are. You're a New Yorker. You're a hero. This is your Hell's Kitchen. Welcome home”
- ―Karen Page
Karen Page is a fictional character from Marvel Comics. She is the deuteragonist of Daredevil and the recurring character in The Defenders, The Punisher and Daredevil: Born Again.
She was a secretary for Union Allied Construction who met Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson after being arrested for a murder she didn't commit. Soon after, she was released after an attempt on her life while she was in her cell, and was subsequently employed as the secretary for Nelson and Murdock and briefly became the girlfriend of Matt Murdock.
Karen Page was created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett.
Background
Born in Fagan Corners, Vermont, Karen worked as a waitress at Penny's Place, a diner run by her mother Penelope and father Paxton, with her brother Kevin running the kitchen. After Penelope dies from cancer, Karen is left to run the diner with her father and brother. To cope with the stress and the fear that her father will drive the diner into bankruptcy without her around to do bookkeeping, she turns to drugs and hooks up with a dealer named Todd Neiman.
One night, after a heated argument over dinner, Kevin stages an intervention by burning down Todd's trailer. An enraged Todd attacks him with a tire iron, and Karen is forced to shoot him with the gun in his truck to keep him from killing Kevin. While driving away, Karen gets into an argument with Kevin, during which she drifts off the road and crashes into a guardrail. The car flips over several times before coming to rest on its roof, injuring Karen and killing Kevin.
The local sheriff, Bernie Cohen, takes sympathy on the Page family and falsifies the accident report to say that Kevin was alone in the car, so that Karen does not face prison time. Karen leaves town after being disowned by her father, and bounces around before arriving in New York City and landing a job as a secretary at Union Allied Construction, a construction company rebuilding Midtown Manhattan after the Chitauri invasion of New York.
Appearances
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Daredevil
Season One
Karen Page first appears in her apartment, surrounded by police, with a knife in her hands over a bloodied body. She is arrested and brought into custody. It is later revealed she discovered evidence that Union Allied's pension fund is being used by Wilson Fisk to launder criminal money. In response, Fisk has her framed for fatally stabbing a coworker, Daniel Fisher, in her apartment, and intends to have a lawyer on his payroll approach Karen to extort her into giving up her copy of the pension file.
However, a new and financially struggling legal firm, Nelson and Murdock debate whether to take her case, considering the evidence against her was so certain, that it would be difficult to build a case in her defense. They agree to take Karen on as a client thanks to a tipoff from Brett Mahoney, and she becomes their first case in court. This led Fisk to have Karen killed. In the first attempt, Fisk's right hand man James Wesley approaches Clyde Farnum, a guard who is indebted to him, and coerces him into hanging Karen in her jail cell under the threat of having his daughter killed. Farnum tries to strangle Karen with her bedsheets, but Karen fights back, drawing blood from one of Farnum's eyes.
Murdock agrees to protect Page by letting her stay at his apartment. Undeterred, Fisk sends another assassin to Karen's apartment to attack her when she sneaks out of Matt's apartment at night to retrieve the pension file, but Matt saves her and delivers the pension file and assassin to the New York Bulletin so that Union Allied's criminal dealings are publicly exposed. As a show of gratitude to Matt and Foggy for clearing her name, Karen offers to work for them as Nelson & Murdock's secretary.
While Fisk orders the murders of everyone involved in the scheme and the attempts to silence Karen, he settles for buying Karen's silence by coercing her into signing a nondisclosure agreement with six months' salary attached to it. While she reluctantly signs the agreement, she is angered that the people who tried to have her killed have not been brought to justice, so she approaches Ben Urich, the New York Bulletin reporter who broke the Union Allied story, and works with him to follow the money trail. She refuses to back down even after Ben makes clear that her prior activities in Vermont will be used against her to discredit her as a source. Eventually, she finds out that Union Allied has ties to Westmeyer Holt, a development company that Fisk is using to strongarm tenants into vacating tenements in Hell's Kitchen that he intends to develop into high-rise condominiums. One of these tenants, Elena Cardenas, is a client of Nelson & Murdock's. On one occasion, two Westmeyer contractors attack Karen while she is paying a visit to Elena, though she is saved when Foggy turns up and beats the men unconscious with his softball bat. Fisk later has Elena killed in order to lure Matt into an ambush by Nobu Yoshioka, a representative of the Hand that Fisk has had a falling out with.
After Fisk makes himself a public figure at the urging of his girlfriend Vanessa Marianna, Karen begins digging into his life looking for incriminating evidence against him. She finds out that contrary to Fisk's public claims that his mother Marlene died in childhood, she is in fact alive and well, and living in a nursing home in upstate New York. Karen and Ben visit Marlene, who tells them about how when Fisk was 12, he beat his abusive father to death with a hammer to protect her. Marlene informs Wesley of this visit, prompting Wesley to abduct Karen as she is returning to her apartment. He takes her to a warehouse, and tries to intimidate her into backing down by threatening to have her friends and loved ones killed, emphasizing his threat by leaving a loaded gun (which he procured from the head of Fisk's security detail) on the table. When Wesley admits that he has not informed Fisk about her and Ben visiting Marlene (on account of Vanessa having been hospitalized), Karen realizes that she will be off the hook if Wesley dies. When Wesley's phone rings as Fisk tries to call him from the hospital, Karen grabs the gun and shoots him to death.
She is deeply traumatized over committing murder, drinking heavily and having nightmares in which Fisk appears in her living room and strangles her to death with his bare hands. She is further wracked with guilt when Fisk personally murders Ben in his apartment after finding out from a mole at the Bulletin about Ben and Karen's visit to Marlene. Nonetheless, Karen composes herself and helps Matt and Foggy track down the hiding place of Carl Hoffman, one of the corrupt detectives who investigated her for Daniel Fisher's murder and who in the interim has been coerced by Fisk into killing his partner Christian Blake, allowing Matt to bring him in and have him give up Fisk.
Season Two
One year later, Karen comes into contact with and befriends Frank Castle when the firm takes Frank on as a client as he faces trial for murdering members of various criminal gangs that were responsible for the deaths of his family. She and Matt also briefly date, before Matt's double-life as Daredevil causes a falter in contributing to Frank's trial and Karen finds Elektra Natchios in Matt's bed when she tells Matt about it.
When Nelson & Murdock falls apart, New York Bulletin editor-in-chief Mitchell Ellison hires Karen to work for the paper so she can write an exposé on Frank's true story, setting her up in Ben's former office. During her investigation, she is almost killed by Colonel Schoonover, only being saved by Frank's intervention. In the season finale, Karen and several others that Matt has saved as Daredevil are kidnapped by the Hand as bait to lure Matt and Elektra into a trap. Matt is able to track the hostages down and rescue them with further aid from Frank after Karen convinces Turk Barrett to turn on his ankle bracelet to allow the police to find them, but Elektra is killed in the process. As the season ends, Matt meets with Karen in the shuttered Nelson & Murdock offices and reveals to her that he's Daredevil.
Season Three
Several months after the events of The Defenders, Karen is still refusing to believe that Matt is dead. To that end, she is hyperfixating on the Midland Circle collapse to a degree that Ellison begins to show concern and insists on paying the rent for his apartment even though she can barely afford her own. Ellison and his wife Lily also try to set Karen up for a date with his nephew Jason, with minimal success. Her belief that Matt is still alive is piqued when Ellison sends her to interview Neda Kazemi, a socialite whose father was rescued by Matt from assailants who attacked him on Fisk's orders to stop him from repurchasing a hotel he sold to one of Fisk's shell companies.
When Fisk is released from prison, Ellison tries to sideline Karen, seeing as her past involvement with Fisk gives her a conflict of interest. Against Ellison's wishes, Karen investigates and discovers that Fisk secretly owns the hotel he's being kept under house arrest in but is threatened by Fisk's fixer Felix Manning when she tries to get him on record regarding Fisk's money laundering. When Fisk frames Matt as a scapegoat for Ray Nadeem, the FBI agent who brokered a deal to make Fisk into an informant, Karen reluctantly confides in Foggy the truth about Wesley's murder as she believes the FBI will connect her to his death.
Sometime later, Matt shows up at Karen's apartment asking for her help bringing in Jasper Evans, an inmate that Fisk paid to shank him as part of his plan to manipulate the FBI into letting him out of prison. Although Karen initially is hesitant to work with him, Foggy and Sister Maggie convince her to give Matt another chance. Matt and Karen track Evans down and decide to have him go on the record with the Bulletin regarding his part in Fisk's schemes. However, Fisk finds out about their plans through the corrupt FBI agents on his security detail. Deciding that Evans is a liability that needs to be eliminated, Fisk gives Benjamin Poindexter a Daredevil costume to frame the vigilante for an attack on the Bulletin just as Karen and Ellison are about to interview Evans. Despite Matt's efforts to fight him off, Dex kills several of Karen's coworkers, critically wounds Matt, Foggy, and Ellison, and easily disarms Karen before shooting Evans dead with her gun.
Karen is fired from the Bulletin when she refuses to give Matt's identity over to a hospitalized Ellison. Incensed, Karen visits Fisk and tries to provoke him into attacking her by revealing that she accompanied Ben on his visit to Fisk's mother. When that fails to elicit a reaction from Fisk, Karen changes gears and reveals to him that she murdered Wesley. Fisk attempts to strangle her on the spot, but is stopped by Foggy's timely intervention. Fisk vows revenge and orders a hit on Karen as she hides out at Matt's church. Matt and Karen manage to drive Dex off, but Father Lantom is killed while shielding Karen from one of Dex's batons, and Matt is seriously injured. They are forced to hide in the church's crypt afterwards as Dex and other corrupt FBI agents return to search the place for them, during which Karen confides in Matt about killing her brother and Wesley. They are only able to escape with assistance from Sister Maggie, Foggy, Brett, and Nadeem.
After Matt saves Nadeem and his family from an assassination attempt by Fisk's henchmen, he and Foggy take on Nadeem as a client and negotiate with Blake Tower to have Nadeem testify about Fisk's criminal activities in front of a grand jury, while Karen hosts a press conference on the courthouse steps to denounce him openly. The attempt fails after Fisk successfully intimidates the jurors into not indicting him. After Nadeem is subsequently murdered by Dex at his house on Vanessa's orders, his widow delivers to Foggy a video confession he'd made hours before his death listing the various crimes that Fisk had ordered him and other FBI agents to commit for him, which Karen works with Ellison to publish on the internet in order to tarnish Fisk's reputation. Matt subsequently breaks into Fisk's penthouse, and after defeating Fisk and Dex in a fistfight, he coerces Fisk into agreeing to keep his knowledge of Matt's secret identity quiet and leave Karen and Foggy alone in exchange for Matt not going after Vanessa for ordering Nadeem's murder.
After Father Lantom's funeral, Matt and Foggy invite Karen to rejoin their firm, this time as a licensed private detective, and rename it "Nelson, Murdock, and Page".
The Defenders
After Datedevil's season two, Matt and Karen are back on speaking terms, although it is clear Karen is hesitant to resume a relationship due to her own secrets. Later, when Matt believes the Hand are targeting his loved ones, he visits Karen at her office to take her to the 29th precinct. Karen is angered when she finds out he has resumed Daredevil activities, but agrees to hide with Foggy in the 29th precinct until the Hand have been taken down. While there, she bonds with Trish Walker over their complicated relationships with Matt and Jessica Jones. When Matt is presumed killed in the destruction of Midland Circle, Karen refuses to believe Matt has died and holds out hope that he somehow survived the collapse.
The Punisher
After The Defenders, Karen is caught up in her grief over losing Matt and agrees to help Frank Castle, when he approaches her for help identifying the hacker who has been shadowing him (Micro) and knows about his past activities in Kandahar. When Lewis Wilson goes on a bombing spree, he delivers a manifesto to the Bulletin explicitly citing Karen's defense of Frank in her coverage. Incensed, Karen talks down to Lewis when she appears on a radio show to debate Senator Stan Ori. This prompts Lewis to try and attack Karen in a hotel, though he is driven off by Frank, who later goads him into killing himself in a meat locker in the hotel's kitchen.
Karen briefly appears in the second season of The Punisher, where she shows up to help Frank escape from a hospital after Pilgrim puts a bounty out on him.
Cloak & Dagger
While she doesn't physically appear in the series, she is mentioned in the episode "Blue Note". Tyrone can be heard reading an article aloud, entitled "Luke Cage in Harlem Rumble", which Karen published.
Daredevil: Born Again
Karen briefly appears in the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, where she, Foggy, and Matt celebrate Cherry's retirement at Josie's. Karen discovers that Foggy and the other patrons are being targeted by Poindexter as the killer named Bullseye. A year after Foggy's death, she has moved to San Francisco and reunites with Matt in the face of Poindexter's life sentence for his crimes, leaving Matt with a broken horn from his suit.
Trivia
- She was portrayed by Ellen Pompeo in the 2003 Daredevil film.
- Charlie Cox has described Karen as the love of Matt Murdock's life.[1]
Gallery
Photography
Production Images
Screenshots
References
- ↑ "Charlie Cox and Krysten Ritter Talk ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Season 2 at NYCC" (October 20, 2025).
External links
v - e - d  | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
v - e - d  | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|