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Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Amanda Knox says she is GRATEFUL she was wrongly convicted of Meredith Kercher's murder - because it helped her 'know herself' better
Amanda Knox has insisted in a new interview she actually feels gratitude for being wrongly convicted of murdering student flatmate Meredith Kercher. The US writer and broadcaster, 37, who served four years in an Italian prison for the British student's killing, made the claims while promoting her new memoir - saying she now feels she knows herself better. Ms Kercher, a 21-year-old from Coulsdon in south London, was found stabbed to death in her bedroom at the apartment she shared with Ms Knox in the Italian hilltop town of Perugia on November 2 2007. American student Ms Knox, 20 at the time, and her Italian boyfriend Sollecito, who was 23, were arrested four days later and went on to be convicted at trial twice. Both convictions were overturned due to a lack of any evidence linking them to the crime and the pair were ultimately exonerated by Italy 's highest court in 2015. Police also arrested Rudy Guede, who ran a local bar - and his bloody fingerprints and DNA found at the crime scene ensured his conviction for murder, before he served 14 years of a 30-year prison sentence then was freed in 2021. Ms Knox has now written a new memoir, called Free: My Search for Meaning, that she has been publicising. And she opened up about her feelings about her experiences on former newspaper editor Andy Coulson's Crisis, What Crisis? podcast. He highlighted a phrase in her new book saying: 'I wouldn't wish my wrongful conviction on anyone, but nor would I trade it for the world.' Ms Knox expanded further by quoting ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, as she replied: 'I am who I am today because of what I went through. 'And there's this great stoic saying by Seneca where he says, basically paraphrasing, "I have pity for you if you have never gone through misfortune, because you do not know what you are capable of". 'And so I know as a result of having gone through this experience, both my greatest weaknesses and my greatest strengths. 'I know myself in a way that I would not have otherwise been able to know myself. And for that, I am grateful.' Ms Knox also told how she felt lucky to be alive, crediting her then-relationship with Mr Sollecito for being away from her student property when Guede broke in and attacked her flatmate. She said: 'I'm grateful to be alive today because, you know, if I had not met my at the time boyfriend and then eventually co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito five days before this crime occurred, I would have been home when this person broke into our house and I might have been raped and murdered too. 'So the very fact that I'm alive today to tell the tale, that I survived my own study abroad is a result of some fluke luck. 'And the fact that I spent four years in prison instead of 40 - I know people who have spent longer in prison as an innocent person than I have been alive. 'The fact that I get to have a family and have children when so many women who are wrongly convicted come out and it's too late and they lost that opportunity.' She met her now-husband Christopher Robinson in 2015 and they have two children - daughter Eureka, born in 2021, and son Echo, born in September 2023. Ms Knox added: 'There are so many things that I have that at one point in my life I thought I had lost - and just the experience of gratitude is kind of overwhelming 'It's not something that I have to remind myself of when I'm feeling down - it's very present in my life. 'And that's another reason to feel grateful, that I just have the kind of disposition that makes feeling gratitude for what I have in my life easy for me - that is not necessarily easy for other people.' Ms Kercher's family and their lawyers have been critical of Ms Knox and she acknowledged their antipathy - while also praising her student friend. Ms Knox told the podcast: 'This was a person I knew, who was kind to me, who I had pizza with and who I went dancing with and baked cookies with. And she was a very, very lovely person.' A dedication in the new book states: 'To Meredith, rest in peace, whose legacy I will never stop honouring, and her family, because I still hope we can share our grief one day.' Ms Knox said in the Crisis, What Crisis? podcast interview about Ms Kercher's family: 'I don't push. I've not pursued aggressively a relationship with them, because I know that they have to confront a lot of trauma just to even think about me, much less have a relationship with me or communicate with me or meet with me. 'So I try to be very sensitive to that. At the same time though, the day that Rudy Guede broke into our house and raped and murdered Meredith, all of our lives were destroyed, mine too, and we have a lot more in common than I think they realise. 'And I blame the prosecution and the media and especially their attorney, who I think has been extremely irresponsible, for making it impossible for that kind of connection to happen.' Ms Knox has previously released a bestselling memoir called Waiting to Be Heard, in 2013, and five years later started hosting a television series which examined the 'gendered nature of public shaming'. A Netflix series was also released in 2016 telling her story and she has been working on an upcoming show, Blue Moon, with Monica Lewinksy, to air on Hulu. Ms Knox described in her latest podcast appearance how she has tried to explain her prison past in an 'age-appropriate' way to her three-year-old daughter. She said: 'One of those amazing consequences of sharing your story is how someone responds - and my daughter responds almost like I've told her a fairytale. 'And she'll want to play pretend when mommy goes to Italy. So when we go to the park, if there's bars somewhere, she'll get behind the bars and be like, "Look, I'm mommy. Let me out".' Earlier this year Ms Knox broke down in tears after her conviction of slandering her former boss was upheld by Italy's highest court. She was found guilty of slander after she wrongly accused her then-boss Patrick Lumumba of murdering Ms Kercher - and in January lost her appeal to have the slander charge overturned, leaving her with a permanent criminal record in Italy. Ms Knox, who did not attend court but followed the hearing from the US, shared a video of herself weeping after the conviction was upheld, saying it was 'disappointing' that she will have a 'criminal record forever for something I didn't do'. Her defense team said she only accused Lumumba, a Congolese man who employed her at a bar in Perugia, during a long night of questioning and under pressure from police, who they said fed her false information. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided a translator who acted more as a mediator. Reached by telephone following the latest court decision in January, Mr Lumumba said he was satisfied with the verdict. He added: 'Amanda was wrong. This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life.' In March this year Ms Knox revealed details about her unlikely friendship with the Italian prosecutor who convicted her of murder - revealing she sees it as a form of 'therapy' that helps the other feel 'absolved'. Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and Knox forged a bond in the years after her conviction was overturned, with the lawyer stating previously he now has a 'good opinion' of her. The former adversaries have grown close despite Mr Mignini believing Knox was at the scene of the crime and declaring that Ms Kercher 'did not get justice'. Ms Knox's correspondence with Mr Mignini began when she wrote him letters, delivered by go-between priest Don Saulo Scarabattoli, before moving to the messaging platform WhatsApp and eventually meeting again. They now share personal news, family photographs and send holiday greetings to each other, after developing a friendship. Ms Knox told the Guardian: 'As much as I want him to absolve me, I think he wants me to absolve him more. 'The one time in my life where I felt unstoppable was when I realised that it wasn't about what I was going to get from him, it was about what I was going to give him.'
Globe and Mail
09-05-2025
- Globe and Mail
In new memoir, Amanda Knox looks for the sweet spot between anger and peace
Amanda Knox is still angry. When the writer, podcaster and advocate for the wrongly accused reflects on her experience, she still feels the tug of fury at what the system put her through: Her arrest as a college student in Perugia, Italy, for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. A trial and conviction. An appeal that saw this conviction overturned. A second trial and conviction in absentia. And a final, complete exoneration by Italy's supreme court in 2015. Knox spent four years in Perugia's Capanne prison prior to her first conviction being overturned in 2011, at which point she went home to her family in Seattle, where she was finally able to indulge in the luxury of rage at her situation. Books we're reading and loving: Globe readers share their picks 'Rage is an emotion that can make you vulnerable, ultimately. It makes you a little off kilter. It makes you impulsive,' she says over a Zoom call. 'I went very numb to those kinds of feelings when I was in prison.' It's a bit strange to hear Knox talk this way. In conversation, the 37-year-old exoneree, activist, wife and mother of two appears grounded and sanguine, quick to laugh even as she is describing the kind of harrowing experience most people could not imagine enduring. The kind of easy forthrightness Knox exudes is also apparent in her second book, Free: My Search for Meaning, which describes her prison experience, life after her release and attempts to reclaim her own identity following a legal ordeal that also saw her become front-page tabloid fodder internationally. In one respect, the media frenzy that surrounded Knox and turned her into a public figure in her early 20s was predictable given the elements the case threw up. There was the pretty, young American abroad searching for adventure and experience; her Italian boyfriend of five days, Raffaelle Sollecito, who became her co-defendant and was similarly convicted, and subsequently exonerated, for Kercher's murder; the prosecution's accusation that the killing was the result of sex games gone awry. So focused did the media become on Knox and the persona they created for her, they more or less ignored the figure of Rudy Guede, whose fingerprints and DNA were all over the crime scene and who was convicted in a fast-track trial for the sexual assault and murder of Kercher. Knox's resentment toward the media establishment is fervid, and justified to the extent that the media did not act as a locus of sober analysis so much as a vehicle to cash in on the most salacious and prurient elements of the story. 'They did not care what the truth was. They were just crafting a story and perpetuating it because it made money,' Knox says. 'Journalism itself is in a moment of crisis because content is so cheap and opinions are so cheap. But actual investigations and objective truth come at too high a cost.' Sex has always sold, and the notion of a crime that centred on an attractive white woman fed into persistent stereotypes of the Madonna-whore dichotomy that continue to dominate a supposedly more enlightened, post-#MeToo era. 'There's this idea that all women hate each other and are secretly in sexual competition with each other and you're either a free-spirited whore or an uptight virgin and ne'er shall the twain meet,' Knox says. 'A deep part of ourselves don't question it when we see that story presented to us.' Questioning deeply entrenched beliefs – about freedom, justice and society – is something that has been forced upon Knox by her experience. This condition is at the heart of her new book, which takes its subtitle from Viktor Frankl, the late psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor whose book Man's Search for Meaning Knox read while incarcerated. Frankl's text helped inform the attitude Knox adopted both inside prison and once she was released, an attitude that recognizes what she has gone through and does not try to deny or minimize it but instead use that experience to develop psychological strength and resilience. 'It is to provide a methodology for encountering the challenges that we face in life and not feel like they are meaningless and just live in a state of utter despair because of them,' Knox says. 'Ultimately, that feeling of being trapped in your life and having things happen to you that you didn't deserve, then having to make meaning out of those things, is a universal experience.' Her attempt to take some measure of control while inside found her reaching out to fellow inmates, many of whom were illiterate, to read and translate legal documents and other correspondence. After her incarceration, Knox took up a position on the board of the Innocence Center, a California non-profit dedicated to advocating for the wrongfully accused. In each instance, she has positioned herself as a support worker advocating for the kind of justice she wishes the legal establishment had shown her. 'I very much am in the business of calling out injustice when I see it,' she says. 'That's where rage is useful. Because rage is the signal to me that something unjust is happening.' One of those injustices is very close to home: the continuing accusations that Knox is exploiting her experience at the expense of her dead friend's memory. 'One of the most difficult things I've encountered since coming home is affirming that my life matters too,' Knox says. 'That what I experienced does not take away from the traumatic thing that happened to Meredith.' Knox credits Christopher Robinson, her husband and the father of her two children, with providing her room to deal with her post-traumatic stress and, importantly, not expecting her to be perfect. 'I do not feel that kind of pressure in my own home,' she says. 'My husband can see me when I'm angry and can hear me vent, knowing that once I have been able to express my rage to myself, I can then approach the world in the way I want to, which is not with rage at the forefront.' Which is not to deny these negative emotions, which Knox understands will probably stay with her for the rest of her life. But the sense one gets from speaking to her is that she is now able to channel her anger into more positive avenues, including her children, her family and her activism. She finds empowerment in locating common ground with others, even those who seem antagonistic. To that extent, she describes in her book a trip she took back to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor who led the case against her in court. It seems like an act of radical empathy to extend an olive branch to the man who was responsible for sending her to prison, but it also appears to be a central part of her character. The final result of all Knox's attempts to wrest meaning from her experience, to find a calm centre in her life's chaos, is not rage but something altogether more surprising. When asked if she is happy, Knox is unequivocal. 'I'm very happy. I feel very, very lucky. I have a beautiful home and a beautiful life and I'm alive and I feel very purposeful and at peace with the way things are.'
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
From ‘Foxy Knoxy' to Amanda Knox: How I regained control over my story
I wrote my memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, a year after I was released from prison, at the age of 25, while I was still on trial. There were already thousands of news articles, dozens of books, and even a TV movie about what people thought had happened to me in Italy. A chorus of strangers had been authoring my experience for years, and I thought by adding my lone voice to that chorus, I might finally be able to move on. I was done being a tabloid staple, eager to return to my life as an anonymous college student. If I'm consistently good at anything, it's being naive. Waiting to Be Heard was my attempt to dispel the big lie – created by my prosecutor and furthered by the media– that I was a sexual deviant who had murdered my roommate, Meredith Kercher. But I've realised, as the years have passed and that haunted feeling has remained, that Waiting to Be Heard still wasn't really my story. It was the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did. The problem was, back then, I hadn't done much. Or at least, that's what it felt like. I had survived prison – that's no small thing. But in the world of 'freedom', I stumbled a lot trying to reintegrate, knowing 'Foxy Knoxy', the false version of me in the public imagination, was walking into every room before I entered. I still didn't feel like the protagonist of my own story. My life was still the product of other people's mistakes. No matter what I did, the world treated me like a killer or dismissed me as tabloid trash. I was lost. I was stuck in a tragic narrative that afforded me only two possible roles: villain or victim. And I feared that nothing I would ever do could define me more than the worst thing that ever happened to me. I just wanted my old life back, but that life no longer existed. I didn't feel 'free'. What I've only recently realised is that freedom is not a state of being. It's a practice. And for the last few years, I've been making meaning out of my misfortune. I've been creating my own freedom. If Waiting to Be Heard answered the question 'What?!', Free answers the question 'So what?' It is a roadmap of my personal evolution as I directly confront the existential problems I've faced ever since I was first arrested and charged for a terrible crime I didn't commit: could I ever be anything more than 'the girl accused of murder'? Would I ever be truly 'free'? Trying to answer those questions led me to study stoicism, Zen Buddhism, and research on resilience and post-traumatic growth. And it led me to do something terrifying, risky, and complicated: to extend an olive branch to the man who sent me to prison, Giuliano Mignini. To travel back to Perugia and meet him face to face, to see if the man who had been my greatest adversary could become an ally. That journey helped me to truly understand how to transform my greatest trauma into a source of strength, how to find agency in this long saga, and finally do something that truly speaks to who I am. I know that my experiences are extreme, but you don't have to be stuck in a prison cell to feel trapped in your own life. I hope that my readers will come away feeling less alone and better equipped to handle the inevitable misfortunes and injustices they encounter. I hope they feel more peaceful and optimistic about the world. I see people feeling more disconnected and ill at ease than ever, and while it's true that terrible things can happen at any time to any of us, and we must carry our grief and trauma for the rest of our lives, it's also true that the world is full of positive potential. I've learned that if you treat people as bad as you think they are, they will rarely surprise you, but if you treat them as good as you hope they can be, they often rise to the occasion. I hope readers come away from this book pleasantly surprised with who I am, and with who they can be. I hope it helps them to feel more free.
