Amanda Knox: 'I Have Felt Utterly Exploited' by True Crime

Amanda Knox falsely confessed to murder after law enforcement subjected her to "psychological torture." Now she wants to stop it from happening to others.

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Amanda Knox: 'I Have Felt Utterly Exploited' by True Crime

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Today's guest is Amanda Knox, an activist, writer, and host of the podcast Labyrinths. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, Knox was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was convicted and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated in 2015. Her case was a media spectacle that sensationalized every aspect of her life.

Reason's Billy Binion talks with Knox about her views on true crime after her story became one of the biggest examples of the modern era. They also discuss the psychological impact of being imprisoned for something she didn't do; what Knox thinks the U.S. criminal justice system gets right and wrong; and how she reacts to people who still believe she's lying. What's more, she shares a fascinating tidbit about her relationship with the lead prosecutor on her case—something that will be featured more in her new book Free, which is available for preorder.

0:00—Introduction
1:10—Coping with a wrongful conviction
6:29—Life in prison
15:28—Knox's coerced confession
19:52—Knox's second conviction and failed retrial
25:55—The attempt to find "normalcy"
31:45—"Foxy Knoxy" and the vicious press
34:40—The need for greater media literacy and transparency
39:54—'The Single Victim Fallacy' and grieving Meredith Kercher
49:19— Italian vs. American criminal justice systems
53:26—The criminal justice reform movement
55:27—Police deception should be banned
58:36—Unrepentant prosecutors and Sandra Hemme
1:04:13—Prosecutor of Knox's case and her new book Free
1:08:11—Knox's relationship to True Crime
1:18:05—Knox's podcast Labyrinths and skeptical approach

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

Comments

[Chumby]

Consider this a lesson from the school of hard knox.

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

And to think, all she wanted was Amanda Huginkiss.

[Commenter_XY]

Amanda attended Screw University, AKA Screw U.

[Nobartium]

what Knox thinks the U.S. criminal justice system gets right and wrong

Considering that she wasn't convicted in the US, I suspect that we will learn very little from her opinion.

[InsaneTrollLogic (Factio Democratica delenda est 5/30/24)]

The biggest thing to learn here is, don’t go and visit Italy.

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

Pretty much.

[Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt]

The lessons will apply to "western" media. The UK press really took this story and ran with it. Knox was convicted in the court of public opinion in all of Europe before ever standing trial. Similar happens here, although not on the same sordid level as the sLimey tabloid media.

[Marshal]

The best section is the media criticism where she discusses how they uncritically repeated what authorities told them without any verification or balance. The media simply does not work as its advocates claim. The media claims to press authorities for truth and seek the full story. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any media representative acting like this would immediately lose access and then inevitably their job.

We can see this works the same for the media in this country.

[But SkyNet is a Private Company]

Well, it depends on who is doing the telling.
Team Orangeman could say “the sky is blue” , and the pushback would be massive

[Quo Usque Tandem]

Gist of this story is what we already know; media sucks, never mind the state.

[But SkyNet is a Private Company]

Maybe Reason should look into Gen. Mike Flynn’s guilty plea

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

That’s (D)ifferent.

[Minadin]

" . . . prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong . . . "
Didn't he actually claim that it was a satanic / witchcraft sex ritual or some such baloney?

[SIV]

Ms. Knox's conviction for slander still stands. Like many women. she thought she could escape justice by falsely accusing a Black guy.

[Idaho-Bob]

Coercion by the Italian pigs.

"The police threatened me with 30 years in prison, an officer slapped me three times saying 'Remember, remember'," Knox, 36, said.

"I'm very sorry that I wasn't strong enough to withstand the pressure from the police," she added, speaking in Italian.

"I never wanted to slander Patrick. He was my friend, he took care of me and consoled me for the loss of my friend (Meredith). I'm sorry I wasn't able to resist the pressure and that he suffered."

[Harry Jones]

He is black not Black. And no OJ was not falsely accused. Nor is there some epidemic of white women thinking they can falsely accuse black men. This is you spinning up bs to justify your narrative and own lazy ideas.

[mad.casual]

Whose idea is/was it to give Binion a 'casting gig? The guy has a voice for print media. He manages a fairly normal intro, but clicking through the entire interview, he sounds like someone punched 1995's Alicia Silverstone in the throat.

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

Yikes.

[Minadin]

Nick is apparently unavailable this week.

Billy actually did a pretty nice job with the interview, IMHO.

You can dislike his voice or whatever - I didn't find it particularly off-putting (I was more struck by the hair-under-the-hat-brim look) but I watched the entire 80+ minutes, and it's very clear that he did a lot of homework so that he could ask intelligent questions to provoke interesting answers and further discussion. They covered a lot of topics.

Amanda seemed genuine in her responses and discussion, and a heck of a lot more graceful than I think I would have been, given what she's been through. It was worth watching.

[mad.casual]

You can dislike his voice or whatever – I didn’t find it particularly off-putting (I was more struck by the hair-under-the-hat-brim look)

The whole effect is not good. I am/was more aggravated that he seemed fairly tolerable in the intro, which means he knows and/or has learned how to talk into a microphone and then turns into Bobcat Goldthwait when doing the interview.

I have relatively little interest in Knox. The whole thing generates a Liam Neeson meets Brittney Griner sensibility in me. Sorry your roommate died, sorry your parents are morons about raising you, keeping you safe, and teaching you how to keep yourself safe, but not really sorry that Italian police and your Under The Tuscan Sun summer didn't work out the way you thought it would. Maybe read something other than a romance novel before deciding to move to Europe next time. I know it's probably a bit anti-libertarian white supremacist of me, but I don't blame Europe for not conforming to your expectations. Hit it, Dave.

[Dilan Esper]

It’s worth noting there’s a fair amount of evidence of her guilt, and a very significant amount of evidence that even if she isn’t guilty, she deliberately lied to police and was at the crime scene when the murder took place. This– and not brutal Italian cops or a sex-obsessed prosecutor– is why she was prosecuted by the Italians.

There’s evidence of her DNA at the crime scene, including mixed with or on the same objects as the victim’s blood. There’s physical evidence, including compelling evidence of a staged break-in plus evidence that she was in the room where the body was found (her lamp was found there). There’s evidence that she participated in a clean-up of the apartment– a witness placed her purchasing cleaning supplies and the apartment was partially cleaned up and smelled of bleach. And of course, she reaffirmed her statements placing herself at the crime scene (as well as falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of the crime), and even the courts that have found in her favor have rejected her claims that she was hit by the police.

And as for the true crime genre– she exploited it herself. She has made her entire career out of being The Woman Falsely Accused of Murder. You can compare her to someone like Casey Anthony, who also beat a murder rap where there was significant evidence of guilt, and the difference is clear. We know very little about Anthony because she just went out and lived her life quietly, giving very few interviews and not revisiting the case much. Knox, on the other hand, hired a PR team, sought publicity, and has built an entire public persona based on her murder case. She has even joked about the case (in which her roommate, who she claims she was fond of, died– a very serious matter indeed) on Twitter.

If Knox wants her case to go away and for the true crime discussions to abate, SHE would have to go away. But that’s the last thing she wants. Because it has always been all about her.

[voluntaryist]

D.E.: If you had ever been wronged, victimized by the system/people paid/trusted to "protect & serve" you, then you might understand why Amanda is still suffering PTSD, e.g., "...it has always been all about her" because you can't feel the pain of others as deeply as they feel it. Moreover, I speculate that you are involved in law enforcement, directly or indirectly, and that blocks empathy. To see her side, her needless suffering due to the injustice of the system is discomforting. So, you avoid it by attacking her.

[mad.casual]

TL,DR: Go fuck yourself you dishonest, virtue-signalling, progressive piece of shit.

If he’s the cop, why are you the one asserting who attacked whom and who’s suffering from PTSD decades later to random people on the internet?

Dilan Esper is correct and this sort of thing continually gets (selectively*) omitted in Reason’s ACAB narrative style and pointed out, it’s not like the Italian police just snatched her up as a suspect out of nowhere, well after the roommate had moved out (as often happens on this side of the pond), and to pretend they’re just some sort of ethereal malevolence doesn’t help things any one way or the other.

* Selectively as in, when you point out that the majority of violent crimes are committed by people who know each other, it’s just an objective fact and you’d be stupid to question the FBI’s statistics. When you point out that it makes Knox or someone else wrongly accused similarly, an ab initio suspect, it’s false. When you point out independent victim surveys and criminal analyses agreeing with the FBI’s findings, it goes back to “Well, duh.” When you *then* point out that means that interpretations showing immigrants commit crimes on par with natives *with an inherent bias towards stable, native, familiar persons* means immigrants are actually committing a lot of crime for strangers, then it’s back to being false.

[Dilan Esper]

it’s not like the Italian police just snatched her up as a suspect out of nowhere

Right. She has reasonable doubt arguments-- it was a murder case, after all, and plenty of things about what happened to Kircher are very murky. But the narrative of her and her fans-- that the Italian police just decided it would be fun to frame the American exchange student and concocted a case on no evidence, that an Italian prosecutor then decided to try, making up a lurid tale of how the crime took place even though there was "no" evidence, and a couple of Italian courts actually bought this and convicted her beyond a reasonable doubt-- that's just not supportable on the record.

She was arrested and put on trial because there was a bunch of circumstantial evidence tying her to the crime (I didn't even mention the forensic evidence that Kircher was held down and thus there were at least 2 murderers-- the only 2 possible accomplices of Guede are Knox and her then-boyfriend Sollecito).

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

Her case isn’t really comparable to US prosecutions, given the significant differences in both civil rights, and the Italian. and US court systems. Especially as Italy doesn’t have double jeopardy.

[Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt]

Do you know anything at all about this lunatic Italian prosecutor? This wasn't even the first time he tried to frame someone up for alleged satanic/sex rituals or whatever he called it.

"Monster of Florence", *multiple* allegations of prosecutorial and investigatory misconduct spanning his entire career. Fact is, we'd like to hope a guy like that wouldn't have that job any longer than one elected term in the US.

[Dilan Esper]

You know ad hominem attacks against the prosecutor doesn’t refute the evidence in the case.

Ken Starr was a bad guy but Bill Clinton was still lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

[Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt]

And this "evidence" of her being held down and there being 2 murderers? WHAT?!

[Dilan Esper]

The wound pattern of Kircher was inconsistent with her being attacked by one person-- there would have been a lot more defensive wounds as Kircher fought her attacker. Instead, the wound pattern was consistent with someone being held down by one person and stabbed by another.

It's worth noting this evidence was extremely important to Knox's legal team and they went to great lengths to try and refute it (and failed to). Because there's no other person who could have logically assisted Guede other than Knox or Sollecito. So it means it is very likely that at least one of them was involved.

[Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt]

I would bet $1,000 that you're a Limey.

[Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt]

Provide a link to this testimony of purchasing cleaning supplies, a cleanup attempt and bleach, please.

[Dilan Esper]

I won't do your research for you (there are books and extensive records on the case and people can see what the testimony is) but this website contains a comprehensive database of the evidence if anyone is interested:

https://themurderofmeredithkercher.net/#:~:text=This%20website%20(%22MMK.net,in%20Perugia%20in%20November%202007.

[Incredulous]

This a completely batshit crazy take on the case. Almost everything you stated is bullshit. They have overwhelming evidence (including ample DNA) that somebody else, a known criminal guilty of similar break-ins, sexually assaulted and murdered Ms. Kercher. He was tried and convicted but was treated leniently by the incompetent Italian legal system. To suggest that a previously law abiding college student and her boyfriend aided and abetted this sociopath but miraculously left no DNA in the murder room is beyond ridiculous and irresponsible.

[questioner7]

"There’s evidence of her DNA at the crime scene" -- which was her apartment that she shared with the victim, so of course her DNA was all over it.

[voluntaryist]

Amanda notes the hypocrisy of law enforcement that routinely uses immoral/impractical methods,
supported by many who are “willfully blind”, political zombies, worldwide, in varying degrees, living unfree and in denial. Why?
Their mass psychosis probably started when they were programed to unquestionably obey all authority, value it over themselves, their mind, their reality. They defer to an aristocracy automatically, under the spell of “The Most Dangerous Superstition” by Larken Rose.

[Dilan Esper]

It's probably worth noting one other thing. There's no reason to call her by her first name. This is reminiscent of discussions about the allegations against Michael Jackson-- his fans never say "Jackson". They always say "Michael". Similarly people who argued OJ Simpson was innocent would always say "OJ" or "Juice" rather than "Simpson".

It's a really weird tic to call someone who isn't your friend or familiar by their first name, and one of the few places I see it is with people acquitted of very serious crimes they are suspected of committing.

[squarooticus]

I am impressed that Reason managed to find an interviewer with an even more annoying voice than Ezra Klein. Bravo.