March 16, 2021 • 43 mins
Amanda knows about living inside other people’s preconceptions. When she was 22 years old, she was sentenced to 26 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. In 2007, on a study-abroad program in Perugia, Italy, Amanda’s roommate Meredith Kurcher was raped and murdered. The police and the tabloids pinned it on “Foxy Knoxy,” calling Amanda a sex-crazed murderer. After spending almost a decade in the labyrinth of the Italian criminal justice system, Amanda was fully exonerated. Today, she lives in her hometown of Seattle and, with her husband, has a podcast called Labyrinths about the mazes we find ourselves in.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Hear's the Thing
from iHeart Radio. In two thousand and nine, Amanda Knox
was sentenced to twenty six years in prison for a
crime she didn't commit. You probably remember her case. Amanda
was a foreign exchange student in Perugia, Italy in two
(00:23):
thousand and seven when her roommate Meredith Kercher was raped
and murdered. Despite a lack of physical evidence linking her
to the crime, Knox spent almost a decade of her
life stuck in the maze of the Italian criminal justice system.
Amanda Knox is thirty three now and lives in Seattle.
(00:43):
Last year, she and her husband launched a podcast called Labyrinths.
In December, they put out a special episode to mark
the release from prison of Meredith Kircher's actual killer, Rudy Gaday.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Well, thank you for being here on this labyrinth with me.
Should he have gotten a life sentence, I don't think so.
I would not wish an unreasonably harsh sentence on anyone.
I would wish them only true rehabilitation. Gooday's lawyers say
(01:17):
he's well along that path. Maybe so, But I do
know one thing. So long as he refuses to admit
his crimes to show true regret, I will continue to
unjustly bear his infamy, be held accountable for the Kircher's grief,
be shamed for not showing remorse for good Day's crime.
(01:40):
He could end all that in a second.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Amanda Knox knows what it's like to be stuck inside
someone else's preconception of you.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So the work that I'm doing now is I'm a podcaster,
I'm a journalist. I very often, especially in my journalism
and focusing on on criminal justice issues, not just wrongful
conviction issues, but more broad criminal justice issues. I'm on
the board of the Frederick Douglass Project, which is working
to build bridges between the incarcerated population and the non
(02:13):
incarcerated population. So I'm deeply interested in that divide. But
my podcast work, and Labyrinths being the podcast that I've
devoted so much energy and love into this past year,
is about how people navigate being lost. We just had
(02:34):
a twelve episode season that concluded on January first with
an interview with LeVar Burton, which was super fun and.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You discussed what with him. For example, we.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Talked about his career and how he could have done
a lot of different things, how he was on the
path to becoming a Catholic priest except that this one
thing happened, and then he very well could have gone
into politics except that this thing happened. So we had
this really fun and we actually had a lot of
fun with that episode because Chris and I decided to
(03:04):
become super nerdy and go sci fi, and we created
alternate dimensions where like we talked to Catholic priest LeVar
Burtons and politician LeVar Burton.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
He's so talented.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, he's a sweetheart. He was so nice.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
But we cover a lot of ground in the in
the season, and we go from anywhere from like super
super dramatic stories, like we interviewed Samantha Geimer, who was
the fourteen year old girl who was raped by Roman Polanski. Yeah,
and how like interestingly speaking of you know, people using
individual human beings like worst experiences of their lives as
(03:41):
entertainment that they're entitled to and as a profit making machine.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Like that was her story.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And she didn't react the way or didn't want the
things that people expected a rape victim to want, and
so they vilified her because she actually wanted some kind
of amicable result with Polanski, and they themselves found ambicable
resolutions behind closed doors, while the rest of society was
(04:09):
still trying to churn up this like victim and villain narrative.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
What's the name of the podcast Labyrinths Labyrinths.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
There's actually a really awesome comic that was drawn and
came out shortly after I got out of prison, which
showed me escaping the labyrinth of the Italian criminal justice system,
and I felt that that was a really beautiful metaphor.
And what I've found is that not only is my
(04:38):
own case, you know, it's remarkable and unique in a
lot of ways, but it's also totally not remarkable and
unique in the sense that it has all the telltale
signs of wrongful convictions that happen here in the United States.
But also like the feeling of going through that experience
of being lost and feeling like there's this overpowering force
that's like you can't actually navigate and you're sort of
(05:01):
like on this journey and you don't know how it's
going to end. That's an experience that lots of people have.
I remember going back to school and taking a poetry class,
and there was a girl in my poetry class who
was really clicking with my poetry. And I wasn't, you know,
writing explicitly like I'm Amanda Knox. I was in prison
for crime I didn't commit. It was more just like
(05:22):
very emotional. And eventually one day she figured out who
I was and she said, oh my god, you're Amanda Knox.
And I was like, oh, no, Like what Google rabbit
hole has she gone down now? And instead she said, no, No,
you don't understand. I was gang raped when I was sixteen,
and the feeling of what you went through feels like
(05:44):
what I went through when I was gang raped at sixteen.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
And I was like wow.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So the fact that like I sit in this very
weird position where I'm a not very usual wrongfully convicted
person in what way, Well, I'm female, for one thing.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Who's usually wrongfully convicted.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
People who are usually wrongfully convicted tend to be, especially
in this country, tend to be young men from impoverished
backgrounds and young men of color.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
And that's because they can't afford a good defense.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
I mean, that's part of it.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
There's also a lot of biases that go into it.
There's a lot of sort of hysteria around youth culture,
like even just issues with like gangs. That's an issue
where it's like, you know, a lot of people don't
understand that kids just by virtue of living in a
neighborhood are sort of associated with gangs, even if they
(06:41):
have never committed a crime. And so suddenly you're like
in a gang book and you're identifiable as a gang member.
But that's only because you happen to live in that neighborhood,
and you happen to associate with a number of people
who also live in that neighborhood. You know, those kinds
of things. But the major thing is that the criminal
justice system is a system that was built by men
(07:02):
for men, because the vast majority of people who are
committing crimes are men, and for someone like me to
be put through the criminal justice system as a defendant
is highly unusual. I come from a middle class background,
I come from an educated background. I have no history
of you know, behavioral problems or anything like that. Like
(07:24):
I'm usually what I mean, actually, usually the victims of
crimes also happen to be young men of color. But generally,
when you think of someone like me the media presents
someone like me as a crime victim, and for me
to be in a position of being able to both
sympathize with what it is like to be a young
(07:45):
woman who is victimized by a man, and to be
able to sympathize with the experience of young men who
are being put through this incrediblely unfair criminal justice process
that puts me in a unique position to like build bridges,
and I kind of view my work as bridge building
(08:06):
as like acknowledging the complex humanity of people on both
sides of the equation and being able to bring nuance
back into the true crime genre, which I tend to
feel has been more dominated by scandalous, salacious, black and
white presentations of stories as opposed to more complicated ones.
(08:28):
And a lot of times, like a lot of people
reach out to me thinking that I am going to
be able to understand their humanity in a way that
other people just don't or refuse to, and so a
lot of the stories that I end up talking about
are just people who've reached out to me.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
So you're not somebody who people are coming to you
and going I need you to fix this for me.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I mean a lot of people reach out to me
asking me to fix things for them, But the truth
of the matter is, I'm not a lawyer, So like
a lot of the people who would love for me
to be able to do something about some one's case,
like I usually end up being the person who like
directs them towards the Innocence project that is like closest
to their location. What I end up doing is I
(09:12):
try to give a voice to the people who have
felt like their voice has been stolen from them. And
once again, it isn't necessarily someone who's been wrongfully convicted.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Did you come out of this experience when you finally
were free, did you come out of this with some
divine ability to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
No, I don't think anyone has that ability. No, they don't,
absolutely not. I think that what it gave me was
a perspective that I wouldn't have had otherwise, but also
a sensitivity to when I view people as being scapegoated,
(09:52):
whether they did something or not. I am very sensitive
to when people become ideas of people and not actual people,
and I can see that happening on a day to
day basis.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
What was the most consistent idea that you represented the people.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
That Foxynoxy was a drug adult, sexually promiscuous young woman
who manipulates men to do her bidding. Like there's this
idea of I think there was also this sense of
like female jealousy that was imbued in me. So basically
everything that is stereotypically bad about being a woman was
(10:30):
sort of put on me. I was made to be
this like jealous, sexually promiscuous, manipulative, druggy woman, and I
came to embody that in the minds of people. And
on the other hand, I also was, you know, portrayed
as this like saint like damsel in distress, and even
(10:52):
in the courtroom, people were, you know, presenting me as like,
on the one hand, she has the face of an angel,
on the other hand, she's really like devil. And it
was like, how about I'm neither. I'm just a young
person who, like my roommate was murdered and I had
no idea what was going on. And everyone was speaking
(11:12):
an Italian really fast, and I had no idea what
was going on, and I got scared and here I am.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
So how much time did you spend in the Italian
prison total four years.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
My god, So from age twenty to twenty four, I
spent in a foreign prison.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And everybody in there with you was Italian.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Actually, the vast majority of the people who were in
there were either Nigerian or Roma.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I mean, there were plenty of Italians in there, and
a lot of them were very very poor Italian people
who had ties to the drug trade and stuff like that.
A lot and a lot of people in for drug offenses,
whether they were drug mules or drug dealers.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Amanda Knox, if you like crime drama where the defendant
is falsely accused, that listened to my conversation with filmmaker
Joe Berlinger. Berlinger directed the Paradise Lost series of documentaries
about the trial of the West Memphis three.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
I mean, here you have allegedly a crime by three
teens who are not professional killers, who brought, according to
the prosecutor, three little boys out into the woods and
slaughtered them to death in this savage beating, and yet
there was no blood found at the crime scene. And
then you look at the confession, and the confession is
riddled with inconsistencies and problems coaching and coaching. So within
(12:37):
months we knew that something was amiss.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Hear more of my conversation with Joe Berlinger at Here's
the Thing dot Org. After the Break, Amanda Knox describes
the toll that her long wait for justice had on
her family. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
(13:04):
the Thing. After her release from prison, Amanda Knox wrote
a memoir titled Waiting to be Heard. A few years later,
Netflix released a documentary called Simply Amanda Knox. However, she's
resisted offers to participate in a feature film based on
her experience.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
I actually very much pushed back against that. I mean,
there's kind of a film that's sort of a narrative
version of it.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
It's not worth watching. It's really bad.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
I Mean, what I thought that the documentary did that
a film couldn't do was it allowed everyone to sort
of present their own thoughts in perspective about what happened.
And it didn't claim to be Like, it didn't have
a scene where I either kill or don't kill Meredith
(13:55):
Kircher right, Like the problem with having a film be
about it is you're making some sort of you're taking
some stance about reality that is built up of a
lot of claims of reality, but not necessarily reality, And
in a situation where so much judgment is attached to that,
I found that that was inevitably going to be flawed.
(14:20):
Whereas a documentary that genuinely allows everyone to portray what
they experienced and what they think about what.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
They experienced and the facts as they know.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
And the facts as they know them is going to
be closer to the truth and also is going to
present the crux of this issue, which is that people
are making claims about reality that they can't actually you know,
like sustain with evidence, what do we actually know? I
want to preserve this sense of like, well, you know,
(14:53):
the person who actually committed this crime, Rudy Gaudet, who
no one ever talks about, is not someone and who's
forthcoming with what actually happened. We have the evidence of
him at the crime scene, of him interacting with Meredith's
body and leaving his fingerprints and footprints in her blood.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
We know that.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Do we have a camera on the wall where we
see him doing it or we're in his mind nor.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
He confesses, right, And the imagine for you you want
to avoid that where they're going to leave it Gray
whether you really killed this girl or not. You know,
a feature film is always going to be like, well,
you know, yeah, that's a fear I would have.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
That's the unfortunate thing about true crime in general is
there is this sort of temptation to treat it fundamentally
as an entertainment product. And due to that, like the
thing that is most entertaining is when people can walk
away from the movie and just argue about it. You know, like,
if I feel this way about the case, you feel
(15:53):
that way about the case, and you know, now we
can argue about it because it's unclear. And I think
one of my big frustrations with my own case was
that the prosecution, first of all, but also just people
in general, always wanted to have this attitude of well,
the defense says this, and the prosecution says that, and
(16:15):
so you know, there must be some sort of truth
in between. Amanda must be guilty of something. We're not
quite sure what it is, but she must be guilty
of something. And that's actually like one of the major
reasons why I was retried and reconvicted. I don't know
if you knew that or maybe you followed that in
the documentary, but like in Italy, the double jeopardy laws
(16:38):
aren't the same.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
And so when the.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Sort of whole forensic case against me came crashing down
after my acquittal, I was retried again but on behavioral evidence.
So basically the prosecution said, sure, we can't actually place
her at the crime scene, but she just.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Didn't act like an I was.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah, was just something like, we can't be totally wrong,
so like something's got to be there. And I was
reconvicted on that, like just on that sort of sense
that there must be something there.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, we don't have the evidence yet, but we're going
to find it, trust me.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, like there's some you know, I just got a
vibe and they bought that. And it wasn't until the
Supreme Court and I was on trial for eight years,
and it wasn't until the court swooped in and was like,
where's the evidence.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
There's literally no evidence.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Explain to people who don't know what are the extradition
arrangements between Italy and the United States that they try
to have you extra died it because when you were
convicted again.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
You didn't go back right.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So the way that it worked was that there is
an extradition treaty between the United States and Italy, and
so while I was in trial there, I was in prison,
and then I was acquitted and I was allowed to
go home, but I was still on trial, like they
still pursued a case against me, and I was retried
in absentia, so they had a whole trial without me
(18:00):
in Italy while I was here living in the United States.
And while that was going on, I was meeting with
lawyers here to see, depending on the outcome of this
new trial, do I want to make a case to
at least potentially serve my sentence here in the United
States so it's less of a burden on my family.
So here I am like trying to go to college
(18:23):
and go to school, but also making plans to potentially
turn myself into the cops in case there's a bad
outcome in this case, which there was, and I'm trying
to plan to how am I going to fight my
case in court here in the US, to just see
if I can try to serve a sentence here in
the US as opposed to being trucked all the way
(18:44):
back to Italy like that was my twenties.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
That doesn't exist, so you can't serve your time in
the US for a crime in Italy.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Can you Well, the US has discretion over whether or
not it actually will fulfill that extradition treaty. It can
always say, you know what, I don't really care to
extradite her.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
She's going to stay here in the US.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
But because we want to appease the Italian justice system,
we're going to hold her here in the US.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
She'll serve her sentence.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Really, I didn't know that. I went through a divorce
in California what's been re christened the Parents' Rights movement.
It was the father's rights movement. Women were favored so
clearly in courts about custody and so forth. And that's
slowly changing. But in an analysis that different organizations I
worked with did, California was ragged at the bottom of
(19:35):
men's rights. I mean, it was a really, really, really
because and that breaks down to basically two the haves
and the have nots. I was in court, and if
the guy that walks in the room is a gardener
and he's getting divorced from his wife, the divorce proceedings
are over in fifteen or twenty minutes. There's no money
for lawyers to mine and pump out of that situation.
(19:59):
If a famous whatever, actor, writer, musician, doesn't matter, government official,
if somebody prominent who was presumed to have the resources
comes into court, it's like this is a big business.
So they say to you, Alec Baldwin, your daughter who
back then she was five years old, she's on the
other side of this six foot concrete wall. Here's a
(20:19):
paper clip, start digging, and you're going to start digging
because if you're a normal human being who has a child,
you want to be with that child, you want to
parent that child. I know many people drop out and
they give up and they write it off and go,
I'm going to go start another family because they're so
abused by that system. And so abused was I by
that that I wrote a book. So I wasn't wrongfully
(20:43):
convicted of murder in an Italian courtroom. But I was
somebody who did everything they asked me to do, and
they just kept punishing me because they knew I was
going to keep coming. I'm wondering in your case, was
they're just this driving need for you to share with
other people what I went through and the lessons of
(21:04):
that and how you can avoid what I went through.
Was there some of that?
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Well, first of all, I just want to say that
I'm really sorry that you went through that. And I
was going to point out, like, you know exactly what
it's like to be made to be the center of
a morality play that people feel like they can just
you know, keep taking and like profiting from and profiting
from and profiting from. And I'm sure the tabloids have
(21:29):
their cut of the pie too, Like I get it,
Like it's easy to be made the villain of a story,
especially when you're on trial, especially when you're accused. Yeah,
like all of the sort of prejudices and stereotypes that
we associate with people, but we don't say in polite company.
As soon as you're accused of something and you're in court,
(21:49):
like everyone feels comfortable bringing those stereotypes and prejudices to
the table, like it's no, it's always now we're allowed
to say she's a whore right now?
Speaker 1 (22:00):
When you went to prison, what was the.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Sentence The first time I was convicted, I was sentenced
to twenty six years, And when I was reconvicted and resentenced,
I was sentenced to twenty eight and a half years.
But to your point previously. I think that especially when
we're talking about someone like you being in court for
not you know, a murder, right, like, this is a
(22:25):
situation where it's and I think it points to the
fact that, like, this issue is not just about wrongful convictions.
It's broader than that. It's about judgment. It's about mob
mentality and mob profit off of an individual human being,
and it's about the dehumanization of individual human beings for profit.
(22:47):
That is something that has repercussions, not just in wrongful
convictions cases where like the stakes are highest because you
know the prosecutor ultimate.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Cancel culture, right, the ultimate cancelation. Yes, you're going to
go to prison for twenty eight and a half years for.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
A crime you did not commit.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Amanda Knox. If you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep it
to yourself. Tell the world and be sure to subscribe
to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Amanda talks about returning to Italy for the first time
(23:28):
since her release. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
Here's the Thing. When Amanda Knox was released after four
years in prison. She returned to Seattle. It took time
for her to rebuild her life. Last year, on February
(23:51):
twenty ninth, she married writer Christopher Robinson.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
He's a novelist, he has two master's degrees in poetry.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
He's but you know, he's my partner DNA expert. Yeah no, no, no,
not at all. In fact, nothing to do with that.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
No, if anything, I've sort of like dragged him into
this world and that he you know, didn't really have
that much of a perspective on He was just like
a philosophy poetry guy. But we have a really great
dynamic because of that, because you know, he he can
bring his sort of analytical self. I bring my emotional,
experiential self, and then we put that together into what
(24:30):
we hope is a really complex, nuanced, heartfelt, you know
journey that we put people on to your experience with
paparazzi is something that you know, one of the things
that people would tell me when I came home was
they would say things like, I feel really bad for
you because it's not like you're a celebrity, it's not
like you asked for it. You just get you know,
(24:52):
people chasing you down the street.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Do they do that to you now today?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
No? But when I first came home, and for many
many men months afterwards, and actually the entire time, I
was still on trial, so like I was still in
I was in freedom for four years, but still on trial.
Like any time something happened with the case, there would
be people outside of my apartment building.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
But that's subsided now.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Yes, it's all finished.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Now the Supreme Court in Italy definitively acquitted me in
twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
So it's over.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Like it's over in the sense that I was definitively acquitted.
It's not over in the sense that, like my entire
life and identity is now associated with a crime that
I didn't commit, that is still an ongoing reality.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Do you feel that way? Do you go places and
do you? I mean not now? Maybe it's died down
and where you live is it's home, and maybe you
fitted and people are much more, you know, kind of
polite toward you if you will. But I mean, I'll
walk into restaurants and you just see that look in
people's eyes. Someone's eating with a crowd of people. They
smack the person next to them, they look at you,
(25:57):
they look at them, they talk, everyone huddles up, they lie,
and then all of them look at you at the
same time. Five heads go slap. Then they'll come back
into the home and start laughing. And you are this
fodder for them in this kind of gossipy, tabloidy way.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Well again, you're an idea of a person, right like
they've had you as an idea of a person in
their mind this whole time. And the way that I
feel when I'm moving through the world is that I
have this sort of doppelgang or version of me that
sort of stands in front of me, and everywhere I go,
I see people seeing her, and I have no idea
(26:33):
what they're actually seeing because what the vision of me
that they're actually seeing was constructed out of probably just
a lot of media, but what media and who? And like,
you know, what are the things that they are projecting
onto the name and face Amanda Knox or Foxy Noxy.
You know, there's a sense of sort of entitlement because
(26:56):
we are not, like I don't think our brains are
even really well adapted to understand that a human being
that we've seen but never encountered is a real human being.
Like back in you know, hunter gatherer days, if you
ever heard of a human being who you had never
actually met before in your real life, they were a god.
(27:19):
Like that's that's the only person that you would ever
have heard of that you've never encountered on day to
day life.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
And the king would be a god.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
And so this like idea of a person is actually
something that is very difficult for people to like genuinely understand.
So I don't know if that's you know, something that
can help you process or you know, console yourself or
find peace. Is like we actually, generally our brains are
really really bad at understanding that a human being that
(27:48):
we've heard of but never encountered before is a human
being like I am.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I always tell people the worst thing in life is
to be misunderstood. Like I'll sit there and say, kind
of only people really knew who I was. I just
don't feel to think people you know what we do,
and you know my wife and I what we do
philanthropically and all those silly things that you wind up
having to resist, the desire to point your finger that
underline that when I do this, and here's.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Another thing, you know, I'm a human being. Look, there
are multiple sides of me.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
But that's the trap that you lunge in that way
and you start to advertise, and you start to respond
and say to people, well, I'm really this great guy,
and you don't get me. You get deeper in the
quicksand unfortunately when you do that. But my point is
is that in your case, you're wrongfully convicted. But there
are people who do these crimes. Someone killed Meredith Kercher.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
His name is Rudy Gaday. He was actually recently released
from prison.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
He was I mean, without getting into any ugly details,
can you share with us just one moment of when
you really, really when you were in prison and you
just hit rock bottom and you thought, what the am
I gonna do? What was that feeling like for you
as a person who didn't belong there.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, there are a number of moments that come to mind. Unfortunately,
So first of all, I should describe what was the
default setting. The default setting for me in prison was
I had like I had been the sort of like cheerful,
just like having a good life kind of person, and
my new emotional default setting was reset to sad. Oh,
(29:32):
so I woke up sad, I lived through the day sad.
I went to bed sad, and that was just like
my new emotional default setting.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
And I just sort of like lived that and I
became numb to it, even like I was just sad
and that.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Was just normal.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
What an amazing answer.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
But on top of that, like there were moments where,
you know, depending on the various places that we were
in the case, Like very shortly after I was convicted,
two years into my imprisonment, because it took that long
for the trial to go do its whole thing, my
dad came in to visitation and he had just had
(30:11):
like a conversation with the lawyers about potentially how long
it was going to take for the appeals process, and
you know, he had to share with me, you know,
maybe it's going to be you know, another several years.
It could be five years, it could be ten years.
We're not quite sure. And I at that moment, you know,
(30:33):
during my visitations, I would very very I tried very
very hard to be cheerful and to like have just
like this positive moment with my family members because those
moments were precious, right.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
I didn't want to upset my dad. I'm here wrongfully
convicted of murder, facing a twenty six year sentence in
an Italian prison. But you know, I really really don't
want to upset dad.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
I don't want to upset Dad because it's like we
only have some we only have six hours a month
that we get to see each other. So like this
is my one hour with my dad, and I just
couldn't hold it together and I started sobbing. And then
I did the thing that is like the worst thing
that I did in prison, which is that I begged
my dad to save me, even though I knew that
(31:16):
he was doing everything he could already and there was
nothing more that he could do.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
So you were saying to him, you got to get
me out of here.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
I was like, please save me.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
And what did he say?
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I mean, he couldn't say anything.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
He just started well, he started crying, and it was
the first time I'd ever seen my father cry. It
really really solidified for me how bad the situation was,
because I had never seen my dad cry before in
my entire life.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Is that the point where you started to consider at
least that you weren't going to get.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Out of there absolutely, And you know, that was the
period of time where I was writing in my jour ernals,
trying to imagine what a worthwhile life would look like
if it took another five years, or another ten years,
or another twenty years, or if I got out as
an old woman, Like what was I going to do
(32:14):
to make my life worth living? So that was the
kind of things that I was thinking about as a
twenty two year old.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
And when did the sun come out again and you
started to have hope that you were going to get
out of the labyrinth.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Well, like I said, I was afraid to hope all
the way leading up to my acquittal.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
You were prepared for it to go the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I was prepared for it to go the wrong way.
And the moment I was acquitted.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
I lost it.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
In fact, I lost it so hard that people who
were escorting me thought, like the police, thought that I
had misunderstood the verdict.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
They were like trying to tell me, no, you got
to quit it, and I was like, I know.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
And that was the moment of like, oh my god,
it's over.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
And the great irony of that is that it wasn't over.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
And I entered into a whole new version of this
labyrinth where I thought I had got out and yet
here's this yet another four years of labyrinth ahead of me.
And like the sort of true moment of feeling like
I'm no longer being hunted anymore was after I was
definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court. Throughout my entire trial,
(33:22):
when everything was just getting worse and worse and worse,
I kept believing that it was inevitable that I was
going to be found innocent, because I was like, there's
just some horrible misunderstanding and eventually the truth is going
to come out. The jury's going to see through all
this bullshit that the prosecution is saying, and I'm going
to be released. So I was convinced the day that
I was convicted that I was going to be acquitted.
(33:45):
And then once that happened and the world turned upside
down and everything I thought was true about reality was
turned upside down. I no matter how good it was
getting throughout my acquittal, my appeals trial leading up to
my acquittal, I was afraid to hope because I couldn't
allow myself to be crushed again. And so even when
(34:08):
there was like big news that like, you know, the
independent experts are calling bullshit on all the prosecution's forensic evidence.
I was afraid to hope, yeah, because I knew that,
like I was innocent the first time, like what stopped
them from acquitting me, you know, last time. So like
for me, those are the hard moments. The sort of
(34:30):
true moment of feeling like I'm no longer being hunted
anymore was after I was definitively acquitted by the Italian
Supreme Court. And honestly, one of my first true experiences
was actually when I first met Chris. I was doing
arts correspondence for a local newspaper. He wrote his debut novel.
I reviewed it for the paper, I asked for an interview.
(34:51):
I interviewed him and his co author. They were two
best friends who wrote a novel together, and I had
this great experience interviewing. We drank Scotch, we watched Star Trek,
We wandered around the neighborhood into the night. And at
the end of like hanging out with these two guys
who I'd never met before, Gavin, his best friend and
co author, gave me this big bear hug and Chris
(35:13):
shook my hand and said we should be friends. And
I was like, oh my god, I can just make
friends with people again, Like I can just like meet
people and make friends now, Like I don't have to hide.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Anymore, have a normal life.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Right, and like, you know, my life is not normal,
But I was restored that that feeling that like I'm
no longer being hunted, I no longer have to fear
people that I don't know in the same way anymore.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Another thing that occurs to me about this is to
have Civics classes taught to teach people about what are
the things we need to do, one of which is
jury participation, in jury selection. To use your story as
a kind of a of a template here, Let's say
that girl, let's say she slept with everybody in the
Perugia phone directory. That doesn't make her a murderer.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Doesn't make her a murderery.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, I could have been a professional dominatrix and it
shouldn't have mattered because the evidence wasn't there.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Yeah, I mean that's what bothers me.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
I actually think Civics would be really, really good to
teach in schools. And part of that civics course would
be not just your civic responsibilities, but also your rights.
So I didn't know what my rights were going into
the interrogation room. I didn't know how to recognize that
I was being interrogated as a suspect. They certainly didn't
(36:37):
tell me that. They certainly refused me a lawyer costing that.
So you know, like, so there are a million ways
that we are set up to be ignorant in the
face of these bigger societal structures that have enormous power
over our individual lives. And I think that it's an
(36:58):
atrocity that we aren't more empowered with the knowledge of
how we have power over those structures and also how
those structures have power over us.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
I'm always filled with joky versions of this, but I
have this feeling like, you get out of prison, you
do the four plus years in prison, and you could
have been in prison for decades, and you get out.
How is your relationship with your parents now? Because it
was like my joke version, as you call your mom
and go, Mom, I really miss you. Can we have lunch?
And she's like, I'm sorry, baby, I have tennis tomorrow.
(37:28):
Where are you at with your parents now?
Speaker 3 (37:30):
I mean we've always been super super close.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Can I talk about a joke though that I really
appreciated that first of all, I loved you on thirty Rock,
and one of the first nice jokes about me was
on thirty Rock that I encountered. Oh, good God, maybe
there's some nice jokes out there, But most of the
time I found when I first came out, that people
were making jokes at my expense, of course, And the
(37:55):
first time that I heard a joke that was not
at my expense was Kristin on thirty Rock saying it's
not hard to be famous. Amanda Knox is famous for
not killing someone, and that was like, Oh.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
You can make a joke and not at my expense.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Thank you, Thank you, Kristin Shaw. But things are good
with your family, absolutely, and they appreciate you and hold
you close because you could be over there right now,
in an alternate universe. You could be over there now,
just really really struggling.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Absolutely, And their lives all came to a stop when
everything happened to me. So it's not like my life
was sort of trapped in a hole and theirs went on.
Like everyone in my family, their whole lives just came
to a stop. And this was especially difficult on my
younger sisters. I have three younger sisters and One of
them was eight years old at the time has happened,
another was thirteen, one was just going into college. Their
(38:50):
lives stopped, like everything all my entire family became about
saving Amanda. Save Amanda. And it was until I was
able to come home that we've all been able to
restart our lives. And of course we all live within
walking distance of each other, and it's always been that way.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Have you been back to Italy?
Speaker 3 (39:11):
I have been back to Italy.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
So I was invited by the Italy Innocence Project, which
did not exist while I was in prison, to come
and speak at their first ever annual conference about trial
by Media. And I felt that, like, of all of
the ways to return to Italy, that was the best
(39:34):
way possible. Like, you know, I had struggled with the
idea of like how am I going to go back
and see the people who supported me and thank them
and like to try to do that process. And I
returned and the press called it, you know, Amanda's familiar
dance with the with the paparazzi, and it's like, actually,
I'm being assaulted by them, like I can't move because
(39:57):
they're throwing themselves at me and my my partner, the country.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
That originated the word paparazzi, by.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
The way, yep, Yeah, that was a crazy experience. I
had many many good moments.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Were you scared to go there? Were you terrified to
go there?
Speaker 3 (40:11):
I was absolutely scared to go there.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
You're braver than I would never go back there again. Ever.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Well, Like the crazy thing is, these things happen everywhere, right, Like,
it's not like there's anywhere where you're safe from being judged,
you know, like misunderstood and misjudged and mistreated.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
You're in as much danger here as you are in Peruja. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
The one difference being that like here in the US,
there's more of a nuanced sentiment towards me, whereas in
Italy there's more of a she's the oj Simpson of
Italy kind of thing. And I was surprised, Like the
big surprise that I had was when I gave my speech,
I was fully prepared to get arrested again, like to
(40:55):
like get shanked, get booed, like all of that.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Do you say shanked a prison term? You just put
a chill in my back to get shanked. What a
reveal that was? You really did do four years in prison?
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Yeah shit.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
I was surprised when people gave me a standing applause
for my talk, and granted, these are the kind of
people who are going to show up, who are interested
in criminal justice issues, who are interested in the Italy
Innocence Project, who are going to show up anyway, so
they I was a more accommodating audience, but I was not.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
I was not ready for it.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Like I I remember like being whisked away because I
had have personal security while I was there, Like it was,
it was not an easy process, and this like personal
security guard sort of whisked me away down the stairs,
down the hallway in underground where I had this like
secret sort of underground dungeon bunker thing where I sort
of lived throughout.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
The entire conference.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
And as soon as we got down the stairs, he
gave me a little squeeze and said parfeto and I
just started bawling. And it was a really great moment
where I was like, Wow, maybe I'll be given a chance,
not even a second chance, like a chance.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
In Italy.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Journalist, public speaker and podcaster Amanda Knox, I, I'm Alec Baldwin,
and this is here's the thing. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Carrie Donahue, and Zach MacNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Hear's the Thing
from iHeart Radio. In two thousand and nine, Amanda Knox
was sentenced to twenty six years in prison for a
crime she didn't commit. You probably remember her case. Amanda
was a foreign exchange student in Perugia, Italy in two
(00:23):
thousand and seven when her roommate Meredith Kercher was raped
and murdered. Despite a lack of physical evidence linking her
to the crime, Knox spent almost a decade of her
life stuck in the maze of the Italian criminal justice system.
Amanda Knox is thirty three now and lives in Seattle.
(00:43):
Last year, she and her husband launched a podcast called Labyrinths.
In December, they put out a special episode to mark
the release from prison of Meredith Kircher's actual killer, Rudy Gaday.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Well, thank you for being here on this labyrinth with me.
Should he have gotten a life sentence, I don't think so.
I would not wish an unreasonably harsh sentence on anyone.
I would wish them only true rehabilitation. Gooday's lawyers say
(01:17):
he's well along that path. Maybe so, But I do
know one thing. So long as he refuses to admit
his crimes to show true regret, I will continue to
unjustly bear his infamy, be held accountable for the Kircher's grief,
be shamed for not showing remorse for good Day's crime.
(01:40):
He could end all that in a second.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Amanda Knox knows what it's like to be stuck inside
someone else's preconception of you.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So the work that I'm doing now is I'm a podcaster,
I'm a journalist. I very often, especially in my journalism
and focusing on on criminal justice issues, not just wrongful
conviction issues, but more broad criminal justice issues. I'm on
the board of the Frederick Douglass Project, which is working
to build bridges between the incarcerated population and the non
(02:13):
incarcerated population. So I'm deeply interested in that divide. But
my podcast work, and Labyrinths being the podcast that I've
devoted so much energy and love into this past year,
is about how people navigate being lost. We just had
(02:34):
a twelve episode season that concluded on January first with
an interview with LeVar Burton, which was super fun and.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You discussed what with him. For example, we.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Talked about his career and how he could have done
a lot of different things, how he was on the
path to becoming a Catholic priest except that this one
thing happened, and then he very well could have gone
into politics except that this thing happened. So we had
this really fun and we actually had a lot of
fun with that episode because Chris and I decided to
(03:04):
become super nerdy and go sci fi, and we created
alternate dimensions where like we talked to Catholic priest LeVar
Burtons and politician LeVar Burton.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
He's so talented.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, he's a sweetheart. He was so nice.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
But we cover a lot of ground in the in
the season, and we go from anywhere from like super
super dramatic stories, like we interviewed Samantha Geimer, who was
the fourteen year old girl who was raped by Roman Polanski. Yeah,
and how like interestingly speaking of you know, people using
individual human beings like worst experiences of their lives as
(03:41):
entertainment that they're entitled to and as a profit making machine.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Like that was her story.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And she didn't react the way or didn't want the
things that people expected a rape victim to want, and
so they vilified her because she actually wanted some kind
of amicable result with Polanski, and they themselves found ambicable
resolutions behind closed doors, while the rest of society was
(04:09):
still trying to churn up this like victim and villain narrative.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
What's the name of the podcast Labyrinths Labyrinths.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
There's actually a really awesome comic that was drawn and
came out shortly after I got out of prison, which
showed me escaping the labyrinth of the Italian criminal justice system,
and I felt that that was a really beautiful metaphor.
And what I've found is that not only is my
(04:38):
own case, you know, it's remarkable and unique in a
lot of ways, but it's also totally not remarkable and
unique in the sense that it has all the telltale
signs of wrongful convictions that happen here in the United States.
But also like the feeling of going through that experience
of being lost and feeling like there's this overpowering force
that's like you can't actually navigate and you're sort of
(05:01):
like on this journey and you don't know how it's
going to end. That's an experience that lots of people have.
I remember going back to school and taking a poetry class,
and there was a girl in my poetry class who
was really clicking with my poetry. And I wasn't, you know,
writing explicitly like I'm Amanda Knox. I was in prison
for crime I didn't commit. It was more just like
(05:22):
very emotional. And eventually one day she figured out who
I was and she said, oh my god, you're Amanda Knox.
And I was like, oh, no, Like what Google rabbit
hole has she gone down now? And instead she said, no, No,
you don't understand. I was gang raped when I was sixteen,
and the feeling of what you went through feels like
(05:44):
what I went through when I was gang raped at sixteen.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
And I was like wow.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So the fact that like I sit in this very
weird position where I'm a not very usual wrongfully convicted
person in what way, Well, I'm female, for one thing.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Who's usually wrongfully convicted.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
People who are usually wrongfully convicted tend to be, especially
in this country, tend to be young men from impoverished
backgrounds and young men of color.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
And that's because they can't afford a good defense.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
I mean, that's part of it.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
There's also a lot of biases that go into it.
There's a lot of sort of hysteria around youth culture,
like even just issues with like gangs. That's an issue
where it's like, you know, a lot of people don't
understand that kids just by virtue of living in a
neighborhood are sort of associated with gangs, even if they
(06:41):
have never committed a crime. And so suddenly you're like
in a gang book and you're identifiable as a gang member.
But that's only because you happen to live in that neighborhood,
and you happen to associate with a number of people
who also live in that neighborhood. You know, those kinds
of things. But the major thing is that the criminal
justice system is a system that was built by men
(07:02):
for men, because the vast majority of people who are
committing crimes are men, and for someone like me to
be put through the criminal justice system as a defendant
is highly unusual. I come from a middle class background,
I come from an educated background. I have no history
of you know, behavioral problems or anything like that. Like
(07:24):
I'm usually what I mean, actually, usually the victims of
crimes also happen to be young men of color. But generally,
when you think of someone like me the media presents
someone like me as a crime victim, and for me
to be in a position of being able to both
sympathize with what it is like to be a young
(07:45):
woman who is victimized by a man, and to be
able to sympathize with the experience of young men who
are being put through this incrediblely unfair criminal justice process
that puts me in a unique position to like build bridges,
and I kind of view my work as bridge building
(08:06):
as like acknowledging the complex humanity of people on both
sides of the equation and being able to bring nuance
back into the true crime genre, which I tend to
feel has been more dominated by scandalous, salacious, black and
white presentations of stories as opposed to more complicated ones.
(08:28):
And a lot of times, like a lot of people
reach out to me thinking that I am going to
be able to understand their humanity in a way that
other people just don't or refuse to, and so a
lot of the stories that I end up talking about
are just people who've reached out to me.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
So you're not somebody who people are coming to you
and going I need you to fix this for me.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I mean a lot of people reach out to me
asking me to fix things for them, But the truth
of the matter is, I'm not a lawyer, So like
a lot of the people who would love for me
to be able to do something about some one's case,
like I usually end up being the person who like
directs them towards the Innocence project that is like closest
to their location. What I end up doing is I
(09:12):
try to give a voice to the people who have
felt like their voice has been stolen from them. And
once again, it isn't necessarily someone who's been wrongfully convicted.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Did you come out of this experience when you finally
were free, did you come out of this with some
divine ability to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
No, I don't think anyone has that ability. No, they don't,
absolutely not. I think that what it gave me was
a perspective that I wouldn't have had otherwise, but also
a sensitivity to when I view people as being scapegoated,
(09:52):
whether they did something or not. I am very sensitive
to when people become ideas of people and not actual people,
and I can see that happening on a day to
day basis.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
What was the most consistent idea that you represented the people.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
That Foxynoxy was a drug adult, sexually promiscuous young woman
who manipulates men to do her bidding. Like there's this
idea of I think there was also this sense of
like female jealousy that was imbued in me. So basically
everything that is stereotypically bad about being a woman was
(10:30):
sort of put on me. I was made to be
this like jealous, sexually promiscuous, manipulative, druggy woman, and I
came to embody that in the minds of people. And
on the other hand, I also was, you know, portrayed
as this like saint like damsel in distress, and even
(10:52):
in the courtroom, people were, you know, presenting me as like,
on the one hand, she has the face of an angel,
on the other hand, she's really like devil. And it
was like, how about I'm neither. I'm just a young
person who, like my roommate was murdered and I had
no idea what was going on. And everyone was speaking
(11:12):
an Italian really fast, and I had no idea what
was going on, and I got scared and here I am.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
So how much time did you spend in the Italian
prison total four years.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
My god, So from age twenty to twenty four, I
spent in a foreign prison.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And everybody in there with you was Italian.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Actually, the vast majority of the people who were in
there were either Nigerian or Roma.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I mean, there were plenty of Italians in there, and
a lot of them were very very poor Italian people
who had ties to the drug trade and stuff like that.
A lot and a lot of people in for drug offenses,
whether they were drug mules or drug dealers.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Amanda Knox, if you like crime drama where the defendant
is falsely accused, that listened to my conversation with filmmaker
Joe Berlinger. Berlinger directed the Paradise Lost series of documentaries
about the trial of the West Memphis three.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
I mean, here you have allegedly a crime by three
teens who are not professional killers, who brought, according to
the prosecutor, three little boys out into the woods and
slaughtered them to death in this savage beating, and yet
there was no blood found at the crime scene. And
then you look at the confession, and the confession is
riddled with inconsistencies and problems coaching and coaching. So within
(12:37):
months we knew that something was amiss.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Hear more of my conversation with Joe Berlinger at Here's
the Thing dot Org. After the Break, Amanda Knox describes
the toll that her long wait for justice had on
her family. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
(13:04):
the Thing. After her release from prison, Amanda Knox wrote
a memoir titled Waiting to be Heard. A few years later,
Netflix released a documentary called Simply Amanda Knox. However, she's
resisted offers to participate in a feature film based on
her experience.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
I actually very much pushed back against that. I mean,
there's kind of a film that's sort of a narrative
version of it.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
It's not worth watching. It's really bad.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
I Mean, what I thought that the documentary did that
a film couldn't do was it allowed everyone to sort
of present their own thoughts in perspective about what happened.
And it didn't claim to be Like, it didn't have
a scene where I either kill or don't kill Meredith
(13:55):
Kircher right, Like the problem with having a film be
about it is you're making some sort of you're taking
some stance about reality that is built up of a
lot of claims of reality, but not necessarily reality, And
in a situation where so much judgment is attached to that,
I found that that was inevitably going to be flawed.
(14:20):
Whereas a documentary that genuinely allows everyone to portray what
they experienced and what they think about what.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
They experienced and the facts as they know.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
And the facts as they know them is going to
be closer to the truth and also is going to
present the crux of this issue, which is that people
are making claims about reality that they can't actually you know,
like sustain with evidence, what do we actually know? I
want to preserve this sense of like, well, you know,
(14:53):
the person who actually committed this crime, Rudy Gaudet, who
no one ever talks about, is not someone and who's
forthcoming with what actually happened. We have the evidence of
him at the crime scene, of him interacting with Meredith's
body and leaving his fingerprints and footprints in her blood.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
We know that.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Do we have a camera on the wall where we
see him doing it or we're in his mind nor.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
He confesses, right, And the imagine for you you want
to avoid that where they're going to leave it Gray
whether you really killed this girl or not. You know,
a feature film is always going to be like, well,
you know, yeah, that's a fear I would have.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
That's the unfortunate thing about true crime in general is
there is this sort of temptation to treat it fundamentally
as an entertainment product. And due to that, like the
thing that is most entertaining is when people can walk
away from the movie and just argue about it. You know, like,
if I feel this way about the case, you feel
(15:53):
that way about the case, and you know, now we
can argue about it because it's unclear. And I think
one of my big frustrations with my own case was
that the prosecution, first of all, but also just people
in general, always wanted to have this attitude of well,
the defense says this, and the prosecution says that, and
(16:15):
so you know, there must be some sort of truth
in between. Amanda must be guilty of something. We're not
quite sure what it is, but she must be guilty
of something. And that's actually like one of the major
reasons why I was retried and reconvicted. I don't know
if you knew that or maybe you followed that in
the documentary, but like in Italy, the double jeopardy laws
(16:38):
aren't the same.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
And so when the.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Sort of whole forensic case against me came crashing down
after my acquittal, I was retried again but on behavioral evidence.
So basically the prosecution said, sure, we can't actually place
her at the crime scene, but she just.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Didn't act like an I was.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah, was just something like, we can't be totally wrong,
so like something's got to be there. And I was
reconvicted on that, like just on that sort of sense
that there must be something there.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, we don't have the evidence yet, but we're going
to find it, trust me.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, like there's some you know, I just got a
vibe and they bought that. And it wasn't until the
Supreme Court and I was on trial for eight years,
and it wasn't until the court swooped in and was like,
where's the evidence.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
There's literally no evidence.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Explain to people who don't know what are the extradition
arrangements between Italy and the United States that they try
to have you extra died it because when you were
convicted again.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
You didn't go back right.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So the way that it worked was that there is
an extradition treaty between the United States and Italy, and
so while I was in trial there, I was in prison,
and then I was acquitted and I was allowed to
go home, but I was still on trial, like they
still pursued a case against me, and I was retried
in absentia, so they had a whole trial without me
(18:00):
in Italy while I was here living in the United States.
And while that was going on, I was meeting with
lawyers here to see, depending on the outcome of this
new trial, do I want to make a case to
at least potentially serve my sentence here in the United
States so it's less of a burden on my family.
So here I am like trying to go to college
(18:23):
and go to school, but also making plans to potentially
turn myself into the cops in case there's a bad
outcome in this case, which there was, and I'm trying
to plan to how am I going to fight my
case in court here in the US, to just see
if I can try to serve a sentence here in
the US as opposed to being trucked all the way
(18:44):
back to Italy like that was my twenties.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
That doesn't exist, so you can't serve your time in
the US for a crime in Italy.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Can you Well, the US has discretion over whether or
not it actually will fulfill that extradition treaty. It can
always say, you know what, I don't really care to
extradite her.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
She's going to stay here in the US.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
But because we want to appease the Italian justice system,
we're going to hold her here in the US.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
She'll serve her sentence.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Really, I didn't know that. I went through a divorce
in California what's been re christened the Parents' Rights movement.
It was the father's rights movement. Women were favored so
clearly in courts about custody and so forth. And that's
slowly changing. But in an analysis that different organizations I
worked with did, California was ragged at the bottom of
(19:35):
men's rights. I mean, it was a really, really, really
because and that breaks down to basically two the haves
and the have nots. I was in court, and if
the guy that walks in the room is a gardener
and he's getting divorced from his wife, the divorce proceedings
are over in fifteen or twenty minutes. There's no money
for lawyers to mine and pump out of that situation.
(19:59):
If a famous whatever, actor, writer, musician, doesn't matter, government official,
if somebody prominent who was presumed to have the resources
comes into court, it's like this is a big business.
So they say to you, Alec Baldwin, your daughter who
back then she was five years old, she's on the
other side of this six foot concrete wall. Here's a
(20:19):
paper clip, start digging, and you're going to start digging
because if you're a normal human being who has a child,
you want to be with that child, you want to
parent that child. I know many people drop out and
they give up and they write it off and go,
I'm going to go start another family because they're so
abused by that system. And so abused was I by
that that I wrote a book. So I wasn't wrongfully
(20:43):
convicted of murder in an Italian courtroom. But I was
somebody who did everything they asked me to do, and
they just kept punishing me because they knew I was
going to keep coming. I'm wondering in your case, was
they're just this driving need for you to share with
other people what I went through and the lessons of
(21:04):
that and how you can avoid what I went through.
Was there some of that?
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Well, first of all, I just want to say that
I'm really sorry that you went through that. And I
was going to point out, like, you know exactly what
it's like to be made to be the center of
a morality play that people feel like they can just
you know, keep taking and like profiting from and profiting
from and profiting from. And I'm sure the tabloids have
(21:29):
their cut of the pie too, Like I get it,
Like it's easy to be made the villain of a story,
especially when you're on trial, especially when you're accused. Yeah,
like all of the sort of prejudices and stereotypes that
we associate with people, but we don't say in polite company.
As soon as you're accused of something and you're in court,
(21:49):
like everyone feels comfortable bringing those stereotypes and prejudices to
the table, like it's no, it's always now we're allowed
to say she's a whore right now?
Speaker 1 (22:00):
When you went to prison, what was the.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Sentence The first time I was convicted, I was sentenced
to twenty six years, And when I was reconvicted and resentenced,
I was sentenced to twenty eight and a half years.
But to your point previously. I think that especially when
we're talking about someone like you being in court for
not you know, a murder, right, like, this is a
(22:25):
situation where it's and I think it points to the
fact that, like, this issue is not just about wrongful convictions.
It's broader than that. It's about judgment. It's about mob
mentality and mob profit off of an individual human being,
and it's about the dehumanization of individual human beings for profit.
(22:47):
That is something that has repercussions, not just in wrongful
convictions cases where like the stakes are highest because you
know the prosecutor ultimate.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Cancel culture, right, the ultimate cancelation. Yes, you're going to
go to prison for twenty eight and a half years for.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
A crime you did not commit.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Amanda Knox. If you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep it
to yourself. Tell the world and be sure to subscribe
to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Amanda talks about returning to Italy for the first time
(23:28):
since her release. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
Here's the Thing. When Amanda Knox was released after four
years in prison. She returned to Seattle. It took time
for her to rebuild her life. Last year, on February
(23:51):
twenty ninth, she married writer Christopher Robinson.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
He's a novelist, he has two master's degrees in poetry.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
He's but you know, he's my partner DNA expert. Yeah no, no, no,
not at all. In fact, nothing to do with that.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
No, if anything, I've sort of like dragged him into
this world and that he you know, didn't really have
that much of a perspective on He was just like
a philosophy poetry guy. But we have a really great
dynamic because of that, because you know, he he can
bring his sort of analytical self. I bring my emotional,
experiential self, and then we put that together into what
(24:30):
we hope is a really complex, nuanced, heartfelt, you know
journey that we put people on to your experience with
paparazzi is something that you know, one of the things
that people would tell me when I came home was
they would say things like, I feel really bad for
you because it's not like you're a celebrity, it's not
like you asked for it. You just get you know,
(24:52):
people chasing you down the street.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Do they do that to you now today?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
No? But when I first came home, and for many
many men months afterwards, and actually the entire time, I
was still on trial, so like I was still in
I was in freedom for four years, but still on trial.
Like any time something happened with the case, there would
be people outside of my apartment building.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
But that's subsided now.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Yes, it's all finished.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Now the Supreme Court in Italy definitively acquitted me in
twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
So it's over.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Like it's over in the sense that I was definitively acquitted.
It's not over in the sense that, like my entire
life and identity is now associated with a crime that
I didn't commit, that is still an ongoing reality.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Do you feel that way? Do you go places and
do you? I mean not now? Maybe it's died down
and where you live is it's home, and maybe you
fitted and people are much more, you know, kind of
polite toward you if you will. But I mean, I'll
walk into restaurants and you just see that look in
people's eyes. Someone's eating with a crowd of people. They
smack the person next to them, they look at you,
(25:57):
they look at them, they talk, everyone huddles up, they lie,
and then all of them look at you at the
same time. Five heads go slap. Then they'll come back
into the home and start laughing. And you are this
fodder for them in this kind of gossipy, tabloidy way.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Well again, you're an idea of a person, right like
they've had you as an idea of a person in
their mind this whole time. And the way that I
feel when I'm moving through the world is that I
have this sort of doppelgang or version of me that
sort of stands in front of me, and everywhere I go,
I see people seeing her, and I have no idea
(26:33):
what they're actually seeing because what the vision of me
that they're actually seeing was constructed out of probably just
a lot of media, but what media and who? And like,
you know, what are the things that they are projecting
onto the name and face Amanda Knox or Foxy Noxy.
You know, there's a sense of sort of entitlement because
(26:56):
we are not, like I don't think our brains are
even really well adapted to understand that a human being
that we've seen but never encountered is a real human being.
Like back in you know, hunter gatherer days, if you
ever heard of a human being who you had never
actually met before in your real life, they were a god.
(27:19):
Like that's that's the only person that you would ever
have heard of that you've never encountered on day to
day life.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
And the king would be a god.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
And so this like idea of a person is actually
something that is very difficult for people to like genuinely understand.
So I don't know if that's you know, something that
can help you process or you know, console yourself or
find peace. Is like we actually, generally our brains are
really really bad at understanding that a human being that
(27:48):
we've heard of but never encountered before is a human
being like I am.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I always tell people the worst thing in life is
to be misunderstood. Like I'll sit there and say, kind
of only people really knew who I was. I just
don't feel to think people you know what we do,
and you know my wife and I what we do
philanthropically and all those silly things that you wind up
having to resist, the desire to point your finger that
underline that when I do this, and here's.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Another thing, you know, I'm a human being. Look, there
are multiple sides of me.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
But that's the trap that you lunge in that way
and you start to advertise, and you start to respond
and say to people, well, I'm really this great guy,
and you don't get me. You get deeper in the
quicksand unfortunately when you do that. But my point is
is that in your case, you're wrongfully convicted. But there
are people who do these crimes. Someone killed Meredith Kercher.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
His name is Rudy Gaday. He was actually recently released
from prison.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
He was I mean, without getting into any ugly details,
can you share with us just one moment of when
you really, really when you were in prison and you
just hit rock bottom and you thought, what the am
I gonna do? What was that feeling like for you
as a person who didn't belong there.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, there are a number of moments that come to mind. Unfortunately,
So first of all, I should describe what was the
default setting. The default setting for me in prison was
I had like I had been the sort of like cheerful,
just like having a good life kind of person, and
my new emotional default setting was reset to sad. Oh,
(29:32):
so I woke up sad, I lived through the day sad.
I went to bed sad, and that was just like
my new emotional default setting.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
And I just sort of like lived that and I
became numb to it, even like I was just sad
and that.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Was just normal.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
What an amazing answer.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
But on top of that, like there were moments where,
you know, depending on the various places that we were
in the case, Like very shortly after I was convicted,
two years into my imprisonment, because it took that long
for the trial to go do its whole thing, my
dad came in to visitation and he had just had
(30:11):
like a conversation with the lawyers about potentially how long
it was going to take for the appeals process, and
you know, he had to share with me, you know,
maybe it's going to be you know, another several years.
It could be five years, it could be ten years.
We're not quite sure. And I at that moment, you know,
(30:33):
during my visitations, I would very very I tried very
very hard to be cheerful and to like have just
like this positive moment with my family members because those
moments were precious, right.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
I didn't want to upset my dad. I'm here wrongfully
convicted of murder, facing a twenty six year sentence in
an Italian prison. But you know, I really really don't
want to upset dad.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
I don't want to upset Dad because it's like we
only have some we only have six hours a month
that we get to see each other. So like this
is my one hour with my dad, and I just
couldn't hold it together and I started sobbing. And then
I did the thing that is like the worst thing
that I did in prison, which is that I begged
my dad to save me, even though I knew that
(31:16):
he was doing everything he could already and there was
nothing more that he could do.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
So you were saying to him, you got to get
me out of here.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
I was like, please save me.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
And what did he say?
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I mean, he couldn't say anything.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
He just started well, he started crying, and it was
the first time I'd ever seen my father cry. It
really really solidified for me how bad the situation was,
because I had never seen my dad cry before in
my entire life.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Is that the point where you started to consider at
least that you weren't going to get.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Out of there absolutely, And you know, that was the
period of time where I was writing in my jour ernals,
trying to imagine what a worthwhile life would look like
if it took another five years, or another ten years,
or another twenty years, or if I got out as
an old woman, Like what was I going to do
(32:14):
to make my life worth living? So that was the
kind of things that I was thinking about as a
twenty two year old.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
And when did the sun come out again and you
started to have hope that you were going to get
out of the labyrinth.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Well, like I said, I was afraid to hope all
the way leading up to my acquittal.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
You were prepared for it to go the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
I was prepared for it to go the wrong way.
And the moment I was acquitted.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
I lost it.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
In fact, I lost it so hard that people who
were escorting me thought, like the police, thought that I
had misunderstood the verdict.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
They were like trying to tell me, no, you got
to quit it, and I was like, I know.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
And that was the moment of like, oh my god,
it's over.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
And the great irony of that is that it wasn't over.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
And I entered into a whole new version of this
labyrinth where I thought I had got out and yet
here's this yet another four years of labyrinth ahead of me.
And like the sort of true moment of feeling like
I'm no longer being hunted anymore was after I was
definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court. Throughout my entire trial,
(33:22):
when everything was just getting worse and worse and worse,
I kept believing that it was inevitable that I was
going to be found innocent, because I was like, there's
just some horrible misunderstanding and eventually the truth is going
to come out. The jury's going to see through all
this bullshit that the prosecution is saying, and I'm going
to be released. So I was convinced the day that
I was convicted that I was going to be acquitted.
(33:45):
And then once that happened and the world turned upside
down and everything I thought was true about reality was
turned upside down. I no matter how good it was
getting throughout my acquittal, my appeals trial leading up to
my acquittal, I was afraid to hope because I couldn't
allow myself to be crushed again. And so even when
(34:08):
there was like big news that like, you know, the
independent experts are calling bullshit on all the prosecution's forensic evidence.
I was afraid to hope, yeah, because I knew that,
like I was innocent the first time, like what stopped
them from acquitting me, you know, last time. So like
for me, those are the hard moments. The sort of
(34:30):
true moment of feeling like I'm no longer being hunted
anymore was after I was definitively acquitted by the Italian
Supreme Court. And honestly, one of my first true experiences
was actually when I first met Chris. I was doing
arts correspondence for a local newspaper. He wrote his debut novel.
I reviewed it for the paper, I asked for an interview.
(34:51):
I interviewed him and his co author. They were two
best friends who wrote a novel together, and I had
this great experience interviewing. We drank Scotch, we watched Star Trek,
We wandered around the neighborhood into the night. And at
the end of like hanging out with these two guys
who I'd never met before, Gavin, his best friend and
co author, gave me this big bear hug and Chris
(35:13):
shook my hand and said we should be friends. And
I was like, oh my god, I can just make
friends with people again, Like I can just like meet
people and make friends now, Like I don't have to hide.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Anymore, have a normal life.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Right, and like, you know, my life is not normal,
But I was restored that that feeling that like I'm
no longer being hunted, I no longer have to fear
people that I don't know in the same way anymore.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Another thing that occurs to me about this is to
have Civics classes taught to teach people about what are
the things we need to do, one of which is
jury participation, in jury selection. To use your story as
a kind of a of a template here, Let's say
that girl, let's say she slept with everybody in the
Perugia phone directory. That doesn't make her a murderer.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Doesn't make her a murderery.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, I could have been a professional dominatrix and it
shouldn't have mattered because the evidence wasn't there.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Yeah, I mean that's what bothers me.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
I actually think Civics would be really, really good to
teach in schools. And part of that civics course would
be not just your civic responsibilities, but also your rights.
So I didn't know what my rights were going into
the interrogation room. I didn't know how to recognize that
I was being interrogated as a suspect. They certainly didn't
(36:37):
tell me that. They certainly refused me a lawyer costing that.
So you know, like, so there are a million ways
that we are set up to be ignorant in the
face of these bigger societal structures that have enormous power
over our individual lives. And I think that it's an
(36:58):
atrocity that we aren't more empowered with the knowledge of
how we have power over those structures and also how
those structures have power over us.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
I'm always filled with joky versions of this, but I
have this feeling like, you get out of prison, you
do the four plus years in prison, and you could
have been in prison for decades, and you get out.
How is your relationship with your parents now? Because it
was like my joke version, as you call your mom
and go, Mom, I really miss you. Can we have lunch?
And she's like, I'm sorry, baby, I have tennis tomorrow.
(37:28):
Where are you at with your parents now?
Speaker 3 (37:30):
I mean we've always been super super close.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Can I talk about a joke though that I really
appreciated that first of all, I loved you on thirty Rock,
and one of the first nice jokes about me was
on thirty Rock that I encountered. Oh, good God, maybe
there's some nice jokes out there, But most of the
time I found when I first came out, that people
were making jokes at my expense, of course, And the
(37:55):
first time that I heard a joke that was not
at my expense was Kristin on thirty Rock saying it's
not hard to be famous. Amanda Knox is famous for
not killing someone, and that was like, Oh.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
You can make a joke and not at my expense.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Thank you, Thank you, Kristin Shaw. But things are good
with your family, absolutely, and they appreciate you and hold
you close because you could be over there right now,
in an alternate universe. You could be over there now,
just really really struggling.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Absolutely, And their lives all came to a stop when
everything happened to me. So it's not like my life
was sort of trapped in a hole and theirs went on.
Like everyone in my family, their whole lives just came
to a stop. And this was especially difficult on my
younger sisters. I have three younger sisters and One of
them was eight years old at the time has happened,
another was thirteen, one was just going into college. Their
(38:50):
lives stopped, like everything all my entire family became about
saving Amanda. Save Amanda. And it was until I was
able to come home that we've all been able to
restart our lives. And of course we all live within
walking distance of each other, and it's always been that way.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Have you been back to Italy?
Speaker 3 (39:11):
I have been back to Italy.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
So I was invited by the Italy Innocence Project, which
did not exist while I was in prison, to come
and speak at their first ever annual conference about trial
by Media. And I felt that, like, of all of
the ways to return to Italy, that was the best
(39:34):
way possible. Like, you know, I had struggled with the
idea of like how am I going to go back
and see the people who supported me and thank them
and like to try to do that process. And I
returned and the press called it, you know, Amanda's familiar
dance with the with the paparazzi, and it's like, actually,
I'm being assaulted by them, like I can't move because
(39:57):
they're throwing themselves at me and my my partner, the country.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
That originated the word paparazzi, by.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
The way, yep, Yeah, that was a crazy experience. I
had many many good moments.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Were you scared to go there? Were you terrified to
go there?
Speaker 3 (40:11):
I was absolutely scared to go there.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
You're braver than I would never go back there again. Ever.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Well, Like the crazy thing is, these things happen everywhere, right, Like,
it's not like there's anywhere where you're safe from being judged,
you know, like misunderstood and misjudged and mistreated.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
You're in as much danger here as you are in Peruja. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
The one difference being that like here in the US,
there's more of a nuanced sentiment towards me, whereas in
Italy there's more of a she's the oj Simpson of
Italy kind of thing. And I was surprised, Like the
big surprise that I had was when I gave my speech,
I was fully prepared to get arrested again, like to
(40:55):
like get shanked, get booed, like all of that.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Do you say shanked a prison term? You just put
a chill in my back to get shanked. What a
reveal that was? You really did do four years in prison?
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Yeah shit.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
I was surprised when people gave me a standing applause
for my talk, and granted, these are the kind of
people who are going to show up, who are interested
in criminal justice issues, who are interested in the Italy
Innocence Project, who are going to show up anyway, so
they I was a more accommodating audience, but I was not.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
I was not ready for it.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Like I I remember like being whisked away because I
had have personal security while I was there, Like it was,
it was not an easy process, and this like personal
security guard sort of whisked me away down the stairs,
down the hallway in underground where I had this like
secret sort of underground dungeon bunker thing where I sort
of lived throughout.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
The entire conference.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
And as soon as we got down the stairs, he
gave me a little squeeze and said parfeto and I
just started bawling. And it was a really great moment
where I was like, Wow, maybe I'll be given a chance,
not even a second chance, like a chance.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
In Italy.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Journalist, public speaker and podcaster Amanda Knox, I, I'm Alec Baldwin,
and this is here's the thing. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,
Carrie Donahue, and Zach MacNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Thanks for listening.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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