Latest news with #WaitingtoBeHeard
Express Tribune
21-05-2025
- Express Tribune
Amanda Knox JRE: False imprisonment, friendship with prosecutor, and entire saga
Listen to article Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully imprisoned in Italy for four years over the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, has revealed details of an unexpected connection with her former prosecutor during a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Knox, an American student, was convicted alongside her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in a case that captured global attention. After years of legal battles, including an initial acquittal, a retrial, and a final exoneration by Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation in 2015, Knox was fully cleared of all charges in 2016. During the podcast, Knox discussed how psychological insight helped her survive the ordeal and how she eventually reached out to Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who once sought to imprison her. Knox described a deliberate approach to opening a dialogue with Mignini, acknowledging that both had experienced pain and trauma but emphasising the challenge in starting a non-adversarial conversation. Knox said, 'What could I and my prosecutor have in common? I didn't know this man. I didn't know what his history was, what his background was. But I did know that he, like me, people who have been hurt… the challenge is that people who hurt other people don't like to be confronted with that fact. And so, how do you start a conversation that's not going to immediately become adversarial?' Since returning to the United States, Knox has rebuilt her life as an activist, journalist and author. Her memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, published in 2018, detailed her experience and attracted international attention. Now a mother of two, Knox has spoken openly about her ongoing communication with Mignini. In a previous interview on NewsNation's Banfield, Knox revealed that Mignini had reached out to her with messages expressing a desire for friendship and concern for her wellbeing. While he did not apologise or admit fault, he reportedly acknowledged, 'You are not the person that I thought I was prosecuting.' The nature of Knox's relationship with her former prosecutor has sparked debate, with some suggesting it may be a case of Stockholm syndrome. Knox has dismissed such claims, describing her outreach as an effort to understand why the events happened to her and to seek closure. The 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a British student in Perugia, Italy, shocked the world. Knox's four years in prison under a 26-year sentence was widely criticised, with US forensic experts pointing to inconsistencies in the evidence used to convict her. Knox's recent revelations provide a rare insight into her psychological survival and the complexities of forgiveness in the face of trauma.
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 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.
