Latest news with #SisterhoodofIllRepute
Wall Street Journal
26-03-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘Free' Review: Life After Incarceration
In Buddhism there is a teaching: One's antagonists are the best spiritual teachers because they are so good at providing opportunities to practice patience and kindness. It is an idea that Amanda Knox credits for helping her overcome years of torment, living 'in the shadow of the worst thing that I never did.' Ms. Knox is of course famous—notorious, really—for accusations made against her by Italian police and prosecutors. In 2007 she was an exchange student in Italy when one of her three roommates, Meredith Kercher, was found raped and murdered in their flat. Police brought Ms. Knox in as a potential witness—or so she believed. The 20-year-old Seattle native was held for five days without a lawyer. In 'Free: My Search for Meaning' she describes being slapped, browbeaten and coerced into implicating the Congolese owner of a local bar where she worked part time. When her case came to court, the prosecution presented a lurid scenario of sex and violence that sent the tabloids into a swoon. It was alleged that Ms. Knox, a Volpe Cattiva, or wicked fox, had manipulated her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and an Ivorian migrant, Rudy Guede, into violating Kercher and holding her still so that Ms. Knox could 'plunge in the knife.' There was little to connect Ms. Knox or Mr. Sollecito to the crime, and abundant DNA and fingerprint evidence that Guede had been at the scene. In late 2007 the Italian authorities extradited Guede from Germany, to which he'd fled. In July 2008, Ms. Knox, Mr. Sollecito and Guede were charged with murder. Ms. Knox's 2013 memoir, 'Waiting to Be Heard,' recounted the grueling details of her trial and incarceration, written after an Italian appeals court overturned the convictions of Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito in 2011 and she returned to the United States. 'Free' chronicles the author's emotional and philosophical battle to accept the events that befell her and to recognize, with as much grace and as little rancor possible, the contours of her new reality. For 'Foxy Knoxy,' as she'd been known on her middle-school soccer team, there was no stepping back into her old, anonymous life. She had joined what she calls the Sisterhood of Ill Repute. She was, and remains, a public figure and a continued object of fascination and revilement. People who hate Amanda Knox—and there are plenty—really, really, hate her. Even now internet trolls harass her. Even now she gets death threats.
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Free by Amanda Knox review
When Amanda Knox was released from an Italian prison in 2011 after her murder conviction was overturned, her mother insisted she see a trauma specialist. Knox had been jailed along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, in what investigators insisted had been a sex game gone wrong. Four years later, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted. Back home in Seattle, the trauma specialist began by asking Knox how she was doing, prompting her to break down in tears and run away. What was intended as an icebreaker 'felt like the hardest question in the world to answer'. She tried another therapist – though, fearful of having her story sold to the tabloids, she quit after two months. Next, she went on a 10-day silent retreat where she was instructed to do walking meditation in a field, which reminded her of walking in circles in the prison yard. She had a panic attack and fled. After this, Knox gave up on therapy and found other ways to process what had happened to her. She would go out alone, wandering the streets or riding her bike for hours, which brought relief. 'I didn't talk about my trauma as much as you might imagine. I hadn't yet learned that it could be useful, not only to me, but that it could help others, that there was something uniquely healing about finding purpose in that pain.' If her first memoir, 2013's Waiting to Be Heard, documented the road to release, this one shows what freedom looks like for a woman relentlessly maligned and misrepresented, both by Italian judges and in the court of public opinion. Knox is now a paid-up member of what she calls the 'Sisterhood of Ill Repute', a club of women who have been victims of misogyny on a massive scale, caught up in vicious and dehumanising narratives (others include Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Bobbitt). The title of Free may seem like a victory cry but Knox has put in the hard yards to liberate herself from a public image that was part monster, part hussy. The first 50 pages of Free are a summary of the murder case, her early egregious treatment by interrogators and her imprisonment. Initially, Knox was met with hostility by other inmates who didn't welcome a celebrity in their midst ('I would have done anything to blink that media coverage out of existence'). But as she became more fluent in Italian, she began reading documents for prisoners, many of whom were illiterate, becoming their unofficial translator and scribe. By the end of her time in prison, she had found a way to get along with people and show them she wasn't the figure depicted in tabloid headlines. She is still disabusing others of those impressions today. In Free, we learn what happened in the aftermath of her acquittal: her attempts to reintegrate, find a job, have romantic relationships and a family. She reveals how she coped with the films and documentaries made about her against her wishes, the bullying and death threats and the continuing legal nightmares (after her release from prison, she was retried and then exonerated again). Acknowledging the pain of the Kercher family, and the handling of the case that meant it was Knox's name dominating headlines rather than Meredith's, she notes the misconception that there is only one victim when a crime occurs, and that 'acknowledging the suffering of an innocent victim in prison is somehow akin to denying the victimhood of the person who is murdered. It is not.' It's perhaps not surprising that Knox, a former language student, is a fluent writer with a flair for vivid and entertaining prose. She describes her former prosecutor Giuliano Mignini as having 'a round face that sat like a scoop of ice-cream on his suit collar'. Mignini is Knox's bete noire, the villain of Free whom she holds most responsible for her conviction. Startlingly, he is also the man with whom she strikes up an intense and intimate correspondence that culminates in a face-to-face meeting in Perugia. This part of the book reads like a thriller, as Knox and her family wonder if the meeting is a trap to put her back behind bars. Why put herself through it? Knox's thinking is muddled on this: she wants him to admit his mistakes and state her innocence despite knowing he can't and won't. But clear thinking is a lot to ask of someone who has endured all that she has. The Knox we meet in Free is clever, anxious, funny, contradictory, sometimes self-regarding and given to talking about herself in the third person. She is also an unfairly vilified exoneree whose impulse to disappear and live a normal life has been trumped by a desire to rewrite the narrative foisted on her. You long for her to be able to move on, but the path she has chosen, as a public figure and advocate for the wrongfully convicted, makes that impossible. For Knox, being free isn't just about not being behind bars – it is about being seen and understood. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Free by Amanda Knox is published by Headline (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘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. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 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 Delivery charges may apply.
