Amanda Knox speaks out to UC Law community about wrongful conviction

In 2007, American college student Amanda Knox famously made headlines across the globe when she was wrongfully convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while studying abroad in Italy. Knox, just 20 when she was arrested, spent nearly four years in an Italian prison until she and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were acquitted of the crime.

Knox, one of the world's most high-profile exonerees, spoke to University of Cincinnati College of Law students Thursday about her experiences with a flawed and unfair legal system, the perspective she gained during her ordeal and life after her wrongful conviction.

Even after her acquittal, Knox’s judicial saga was far from over. Although another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted in 2008 of murdering Kercher based on physical evidence found at the scene, the Italian Supreme Court in 2013 ordered Knox and Sollecito to stand trial a second time. The pair, who always proclaimed their innocence, were convicted again in 2013, and ordered to serve more than 25 years in prison each. Finally, in March 2015, the Italian Supreme Court overturned Knox and Sollecito’s convictions, citing an “absolute lack of biological traces” of Knox and Sollecito at the crime scene, and the pair were finally cleared of all murder charges.

Today, the author of the best-selling memoir “Waiting to be Heard” hosts The Scarlet Letter Reports, a VICE/Facebook series about the public vilification of women. Knox also works with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using DNA evidence to free wrongfully convicted people from prison and death row.

While the widely publicized Knox case is remarkable for its ability to titillate audiences worldwide, it’s hardly unique. The Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, one the most active and successful innocence projects worldwide, regularly fields requests from thousands of inmates who claim to have been wrongfully convicted.

Since its launch in 2003, the OIP has helped to free 27 wrongfully convicted inmates who've collectively served nearly 500 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Some of the questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

What was that first night in prison like?

My first night in Capanne prison was immediately after my interrogation. I was entering into a prison environment not even aware it was a prison.  I was told I was a witness and I was being taken to a holding place for my own protection. I know it sounds crazy, because I had been brought there in handcuffs.  I had been fingerprinted.  I had been stripped naked and photographed by male police officers. You’d think they wouldn’t treat a witness this way, but that’s what they were telling me.  I was so scared and bewildered that I did not know what to think otherwise.

And so walking down that hallway to my cell for the first time was extremely confusing. It was extremely cold. It was very silent. It was this long hallway with cement floors with these thick metal doors along the hallway that were all closed that looked they were from an insane asylum and I had no idea if anyone was behind them or if I was alone. They brought me into my cell. It was stripped down for solitary confinement, which meant that I had a bedframe, a foam mattress, a wool blanket and that was it. And then I was left there.  I was told it would only be for a few days. I was told I would get to talk to my mother. I was told lots of things. The only thing that actually happened was that I got locked up. I didn’t leave there for 1,428 days. If it were up to my prosecution, I would have never left. 

How did the media coverage of your case impact the work you do now?

I am a journalist now, which may seem insane after being put through the gauntlet of the media myself.  My case was in the news all over the world. It was an insane misrepresentation of absolute fabrication and also misconstrued out-of-context fact. I was rendered completely two-dimensional. My sexuality, both real and imagined, as rendered as depraved, so that I was [involved in] a sex game gone wrong.  One thing I’d like to point out, I could have been a professional dominatrix and it shouldn’t have mattered. It was insane that the fact that I had no history of violence, no history of criminal behavior, no history of mental illness and zero DNA placing me at the scene of the crime didn’t matter in response to people speculating about whether or not I did cartwheels, people speculating about whether I cried or didn’t cry at the right time, people speculating about what I was wearing, how I was doing my hair, who I was looking at, if I was smiling, if I was not smiling. People were looking at me in the present moment as if that told a story about what happened to Meredith that night and it didn’t. Everyone was looking at me when they should have been looking at the evidence.

It’s not that the media started it. My prosecutors decided before any evidence was on the table that I was guilty. The investigators had their own tunnel vision and then the media, instead of doing its job by parsing through the information and figuring out what the real story was, tagged along. They had this great, compelling story of some slut whore who raped and murdered her roommate, and that was more compelling than the really ugly messy truth, which was these guys just made a mistake early on and didn’t want to admit it.  It’s fascinating to me that for all the media attention this case has received, very few people have ever heard of the actual killer. We know who did it, but people still fixate on me.

On her return to the U.S. after her conviction was overturned…

I was acquitted after four years of imprisonment and I came home [to] immense love.  Yes, I knew that people had heard about my case. Was I expecting hundreds of people to show up at the airport holding signs saying, “Welcome home, Amanda?” No. I was not expecting that nor was I prepared for it. I really just wanted to see my family at the time, but it meant a lot. Meanwhile, I was stalked by paparazzi for months and months after I got home. They were camped out on my parents’ front lawn. They chased me wherever I went. They shouted things at me like, “Do you think Meredith has been forgotten?” And the irony of that, that they were holding me accountable for their own coverage of the case was beyond them.  

So many people approach this case like there was only one victim possible. And if I was a victim then that meant that Meredith couldn’t be a victim. And that is patently absurd, but people felt that way for some reason. And so they also felt entitled to treat me as not someone who had been through something horrible, but someone who deserved hatred and punishment and to have their suffering be treated as entertainment.

I went back to school, and some classes were great.  Big classes, students were taking pictures of me and posting them online alongside some very unkind commentary.  There were legitimate trolls sending me death threats online talking about how they were going to electrify me and cut out my eyes and carve Meredith’s name on my body.  And there was a persistent dehumanization that was maybe even worse. A lot of people were so attached to the idea that this was an exciting controversy, and furthermore that I didn’t exist outside of it. The idea that I would have a life outside of the case was beyond so many people. Anytime I attempted to establish my life in any public way – I wrote a memoir, I had a social media account, I had an Instagram – I was called a narcissist and a liar.  Even though I was one small voice in a cacophony of voices who claimed to be able to author my experience.

On not being able to mourn the loss of her friend Meredith…

I think I can count the number of times on one hand someone has said, “I’m sorry you lost your friend.”  The loss is seen as not my own to grieve. Every time I’ve ever expressed any sentiment about Meredith, I’ve been criticized... It’s become a very private thing, and I think that this is something that’s very common with exonerees, that there’s this idea that there’s this automatic adversarial nature between you as a victim and your friend or your lover or your wife or that stranger as a victim, and therefore there cannot be grief because people hold you as these opposing entities. And it’s hard to not have permission to grieve. I hope that I can visit her grave one day, but I’m not going to do so until her family invites me to, and I don’t know if that will ever happen.

How did the experience change you?

When I first came home, I did not want to be Foxy Knoxy. I did not want to be the girl who was accused of murder, the girl was acquitted, because this was something that happened to me, it was not something that I did. It was not something that I deserved. I felt like my identity had been stolen from me and that I had to reclaim it by going back to what I was, and then I slowly realized that I wasn’t the same person who went into prison. That person didn’t exist anymore. But the person who I was after coming out of prison was a real person. I’m not just that girl who was wrongly accused of murder. I'm the girl who survived it, too. And I didn’t really realize that until I met someone who had been through what I had been through.  There was no Innocence Project in Italy.

The Idaho Innocence Project director reached out through my mom… She told me there was an Innocence Network conference that was happening down in Portland… and my mom was like, “We’re going.”  I remember being incredibly nervous, because at that moment in time that I was first invited to the Innocence Network conference I had actually been reconvicted of murder in Italy in absentia.  I didn’t even know if I belonged, because I wasn’t technically an exoneree. I was shaking when I walked into a room full of hundreds of people who would know my name… and the first thing that happened was two exonerees rushed up to me, one of whom was Antoine Day, and Antoine immediately embraced me and said, “You don’t need to explain anything. We know, little sister.” And I was so humbled. This was a room full of hundreds of mostly black men who actually saw me and understood me better than most people anywhere. I became a part of this community that this Innocence Project accidentally made of exonerees. It introduced me to a world where this made sense, that it wasn’t just random, it wasn’t just me, there’s a systemic way where people get screwed and there’s a systematic way where we’re trying to save them and fix it.

After the Netflix documentary “Amanda Knox” came out, what kind of response did you receive?

I didn’t know what people would think. My hope was that people would actually go, “She’s actually a person. Maybe I should think carefully about this.” What ended up actually happening was I received hundreds and hundreds of messages online from people who were apologizing to me for their individual role in treating me like a monster and treating my suffering like entertainment.  I was not expecting it.  I had forgotten that people could do that. That also uplifted my perspective.

On her life and goals now...

The most recent journalism I’ve been doing is Scarlet Letter Reports. I interview other women who’ve been vilified by the media. It’s so easy to render someone as human because you just have to be in a room with them. You have to work hard at stripping someone of their humanity. That’s work. I wasn’t sure if anyone was going to respond to it — Oh, Foxy Knoxy interviews what’s-her-train-wreck-face. I wasn’t certain anyone would care, but surprisingly people did. The most-viewed video has more than four million views, which is incredible. It means we’re entering into a time where people are demanding better. We’re interested in real people and real information. I feel very fortunate to be accepted as someone who has something to say about it.   

Featured image at top: Amanda Knox during her speaking event at the UC College of Law on September 13, 2018. Photography by Andrew Higly/UC Creative Services