‘I call us the Sisterhood of Ill Repute': Amanda Knox on bonding with Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Bobbitt
Before Italy, I was only vaguely aware of that ancient stereotype that all women secretly hate one another, that we are incapable of true friendship. Some call it 'venimism'; others refer to 'mean girls'. In 1893, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote: 'Due to women's latent antipathy for one another, trivial events give rise to fierce hatreds; and due to women's irascibility, these occasions lead quickly to insolence and assaults.' The source of our latent antipathy? Sexual jealousy, of course. We hate one another because we are ever competing for male attention.
I always thought this misogynistic myth was obviously false. I had lots of girlfriends, from school and soccer; so did my sisters, my mom, pretty much every girl I knew. But, then again, I also thought my innocence was obvious … And, clearly, the stereotype found its way into my courtroom, where a cross hung on the wall and my devoutly Catholic prosecutor accused me not merely of being a murderer, but of being a dirty, drug-addled, woman-hating slut.
'Meredith was astonished that Amanda had started a relationship with a boy after just arriving in Perugia … that Amanda owned condoms and a vibrator,' explained Dr Giuliano Mignini. 'It is possible that Meredith argued with Amanda … because of her habit of bringing strange men into the house … [So,] under the influence of drugs and probably also alcohol, Amanda decided to involve Meredith in a violent sex game … For Amanda, the time had come to take revenge on that 'simpering goody two-shoes' – so she must have thought.'
With these words, which echoed through the global media, Mignini inducted me into a not-so-secret society of women. You know who I'm talking about. The women who've been the subject of TMZ headlines, Saturday Night Live skits and David Letterman's top 10 lists. The women who've been turned into Halloween costumes and found themselves referenced in rap lyrics. The women we treat like punching bags and punchlines. The women whose broken bodies, broken relationships, most vulnerable moments and worst experiences we consume like candy. I call us the Sisterhood of Ill Repute. I didn't even realise I belonged to this club until I met another member: Monica Lewinsky.
It was shortly before my first-ever speaking event in January 2017, at a private conference in Seattle. Monica was one of the other speakers. I had an hour to fill, and I was terrified. After crafting and polishing my talk, I'd rehearsed a half dozen times leading up to the event. I knew that to really tell my story, I would have to break my own heart in front of the audience, so I went to the places that still hurt. But saying those words in my living room was nothing like standing in front of a crowd of hundreds who might believe all sorts of falsehoods about me.
Before the event, Monica invited me up to her hotel room to chat. She had gone through the gauntlet of public shaming in the worst possible way when I was just a kid. I remember eating dinner with my family and listening to them discuss the news. It was the first time I'd heard the term 'oral sex', and when I spoke up to say that I couldn't understand why everyone was so upset about people saying sexy things over the phone, my entire family keeled over with laughter. In the years after that, I, too, casually absorbed the image of Monica presented by the tabloids. I didn't dig into the story, I didn't educate myself, and if you'd asked me about it in high school, I probably would have said, 'Oh yeah, Monica. The blowjob lady.'
But, after getting the tabloid treatment myself, I humbly withdrew the conviction that I could ever trust the image presented to me by the media of who any person really is. And when Monica gave her Ted Talk, The Price of Shame, she opened my eyes not only to who the real Monica was, but who she had always been. I'd followed her closely since then, reading all her writing for Vanity Fair, feeling utterly validated when she described her experiences of being ruthlessly shamed in the press, humiliated and demonised for the sake of other people's entertainment and political gain.
I expected to be starstruck when I walked into that hotel room. Instead, what I found, almost immediately, was a big sister.
From the first moment, she was warm and kind. She made me a cup of tea. We sat by the windows, overlooking downtown Seattle, and talked about my speech. She gave me some invaluable pointers about mental preparation and self-care, but most of all we talked about processing trauma. How you're never really done with it, and how talking about it publicly is both triggering and healing. She gave me the rundown of which kinds of therapy had worked for her, which hadn't, and why. (I have yet to meet anyone more committed to therapy.) But perhaps what struck me the most was what wasn't said. You're that girl from Italy! What was prison like? What's it like to be famous? All those conversational notes, ranging from cringey to offensive, that popped up whenever I met a stranger who thought they knew who I was because they'd absorbed a decade of media coverage, were absent. And it wasn't because Monica had been unaware of all that. She'd read about 'Foxy Knoxy' just like millions of others, but it was Amanda she'd invited for a cup of tea.
I walked away from that meeting feeling truly seen. Here was someone to whom I didn't have to explain the trauma of prolonged, widespread public shaming. I had been grappling with my status as a public figure since I came home – the invasion of my privacy, my impotence to fight slanderous statements in the press – and seeing her surviving it, and thriving even, gave me hope that I could as well. A strong sense of empathy can form a bond between people with vastly different life experiences, but it's a lot easier to make such connections when the other person has been in your shoes. That's why support groups exist, and it's why I left that meeting inspired to connect with other publicly shamed women.
When I was producing a podcast called The Truth About True Crime, I did a live episode with Lorena Bobbitt (now Gallo) at a true-crime convention in Washington DC. Like Monica, Lorena had been ducking her head for 20 years in the face of reputational damage that could never be undone. But she agreed to meet me on a stage and talk in front of a live audience about how we have lived our lives in the crosshairs of public shaming. Most people remember that John Wayne Bobbitt's penis was cut off, but they forget that Lorena claimed she was a victim of domestic violence and marital rape, and that her own violent act was done in a moment of mental instability. That doesn't excuse her actions, but it is crucial context that is often left out.
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The morning of that event, Lorena and I met up at a local TV news station to promote it. I got there early, and I was in the green room waiting for Lorena to arrive, when a comedian from New Jersey came in. He had just finished his on-air segment, and we chatted briefly. When he asked what I was going to be talking about, I told him I was interviewing Lorena, and he said: 'What about? Which knives are best for slicing sausage?'
'No,' I said. 'Actually, we'll be talking about how people still reduce her to a penis-chopping joke when she is, in fact, a complex human being who advocates in support of victims of domestic violence.'
To his credit, the comedian replied: 'Oh, I get it. She's not the monster. I am!'
But as much as we are all responsible for the media we consume, I don't want to demonise the audience, the millions of us who casually absorbed skewed and incomplete stories about Lorena, about Monica, about me. Such stories are designed to appeal to our worst impulses. Judgment will always come more easily to us than mercy, understanding, forgiveness, and a nuanced acknowledgment of the complexity that underlies nearly all serious harms. It feels good to hate 'bad' people, and there's a special kind of hate reserved for 'bad women'. The narrative of the 'mean girl', the 'homewrecker' and 'girl-on-girl' crime is titillating precisely because it confirms the stereotype that women are secretly one another's worst enemies. Amanda v Meredith. It distracts from the actual crimes committed against women by men, and even validates them, giving tacit permission for men to hate women, too.
This is an edited extract from Free: My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox, published by Headline, on 25 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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