“If I had not gone through this, I would not be the person I am today,” explains writer, activist and podcaster Amanda Knox. Her new book Free: My Search For Meaning is her account of life after prison, the shadow that a wrongful murder conviction cast over her life and an exploration of whether it’s possible to be “free” when everyone knows you “as the girl accused of murder”.
Knox was a 20-year-old American exchange student in Perugia, Italy when she was jailed for the murder of her friend and housemate, 21-year-old Londoner Meredith Kercher. Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini contended that Knox killed Kercher along with her 23–year-old Italian boyfriend of six days Raffaele Sollecito and a man called Rudy Guede.
In a shocking narrative Mignini claimed the crime was a “murder orgy” involving the three of them despite the fact that there was no DNA evidence linking Sollecito or Knox to the scene. All DNA and other evidence pointed to Guede as the killer - he had also been arrested the previous week in Milan for breaking into a nursery school armed with a knife. Guede was tried and convicted for the murder at a separate hearing.
Rudy Guede killed Meredith Kurcher, but 18 years later the name still most associated with the case is that of Amanda Knox.
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Speaking on the latest episode of the Irish Times Women’s Podcast, Knox recounts her experience to presenter Róisín Ingle. “The police decided from the very get go, that it wasn’t really a break in and that some kind of conspiracy was afoot … that someone in the house was involved in the crime … they thought it was me.”
Dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” by the world’s media - a childhood nickname from her soccer days - she was portrayed as a young woman with a jealous streak and promiscuous past, supposedly enraged and motivated to kill by Kercher’s innocence and purity.
“The narrative that was crafted was one based upon this idea that women are incapable of true friendship. That we are in sexual competition with each other and both Meredith and I were exemplary of the dichotomy of women,” she explains.
“There’s the free-spirited, drug-addled and sexually promiscuous whore. And then there is the pure, virginal, but also judgmental and uptight version. And that was how we were represented in the courtroom and in the media and we were pitted against each other despite the fact that we were both victims, both direct and indirect of this man’s crime.”
“The thing that pains me so much about this case is that the truth of what actually happened to my room-mate, to Meredith, got completely lost in the entire scandal...”
Knox spent two years in prison awaiting trial before she and her then boyfriend Sollecito were found guilty of “conspiracy to murder”. Knox was sentenced to a further 26 years in prison. After four years in custody, her and Sollecito’s convictions were overturned. Knox immediately returned home to Seattle. But their ordeal was not yet over.
In the years that followed, Knox and Sollecito were tried in absentia, and convicted again, before finally being definitively acquitted in 2015, by Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation.
Life for Knox has taken many unexpected turns since her release. Her experiences in prison led to activism - Knox now works with other wrongfully convicted people as part of the global Innocence Project. She has also since married and started a podcast, Labyrinths, with her husband Christopher Robinson. The couple have two children, a girl called Eureka and a boy called Echo. In another surprising twist, she also went on to befriend her prosecutor Mignini in the hope of getting an apology.
“I reached out to my prosecutor eventually after everything because in a big way I was just sort of asking myself that unenlightened question, ‘why me?’ … what is it about me that this guy just looked at a 20-year-old traumatised girl and thought: there’s a sex monster?”
“I really truly believed that my prosecutor had genuinely noble intentions even though he was committing harm. And I wanted him to know … that I was actually innocent.” After a couple of years emailing back and forth, she travelled to Italy to meet Mignini face to face, a decision her family, especially her mother, could not understand.
“My mom was 100% against it, she thought that he [Mignini] was lying to me all this time, that he was setting a trap that he was going to arrest me again.” The eventual encounter which took place in 2022, forms a gripping part of her new book.
In this wide ranging discussion, Ingle and Knox discuss how the memoir, which centres around such an unusual life experience, contains universal messages about coping with life’s challenges.
She explains how in her journey to self acceptance and healing she was inspired by figures such as concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl and stoic philosopher Seneca: “I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent - no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you,“ Seneca wrote.
This she says, “doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t feel negative emotions when we encounter misfortune and adversity in our lives. It does mean that we shouldn’t feel only negative emotions”. Despite what she’s been through Knox describes herself as “a very joyous person”, with “a lot of hope and drive in my life”.
Her new book follows on from her 2013 memoir, Waiting to be Heard. Back then she says she was trying to prove her innocence but with Free “this is where I feel my story truly begins”.
You can listen back to this conversation in full, in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
