Amanda Knox’s story is one of the most infamous and controversial criminal cases in recent memory. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, she was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was convicted and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated in 2015. Her wrongful conviction was a media spectacle that sensationalized every aspect of her life.
In March 2024, Hulu announced an eight-episode limited series about Knox’s story, with Knox joining Monica Lewinsky as an executive producer. Notably, this is one of the rare times Knox has been offered a say in the way her story is told by others.
In October, Knox spoke with Reason‘s Billy Binion about her role in one of the first modern true crime stories, the psychological impact of being imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit, and what she calls “the single victim fallacy.” She hosts a podcast called Labyrinths with her partner, Christopher Robinson. Her book Free is set to be released in March 2025.
Reason: You were arrested and imprisoned in November 2007. Two years later, you were found guilty of a murder that you would ultimately be exonerated for. We know wrongful convictions happen across the world. There is someone, somewhere, right now in a similar situation. What would you say to that person if they were sitting in front of you?
Knox: I never want people to think that you can rely on the truth ultimately coming out. That is not something that we can count on necessarily. I can’t promise that justice will ultimately result in any of these cases.
There’s no telling how it’s going to work out. There’s a lot of factors that go into that. There’s luck. There’s the right people showing up at the right time. There’s the evidence coming through. There’s technology that becomes available. All of that plays into whether or not an innocent person is going to get out of prison and then successfully reintegrate into society. The thing that they always need to know, though, is it is entirely up to them to figure out how to be their best selves in these circumstances. That is their power, and no one can take that away from them.
But prison is pretty horrible, is it not?
It’s 100 percent a horrible place. When I was in that space, I woke up sad, I spent the whole day sad, and I went to bed sad. That was just my emotional default setting, which was very new to me. I was a very happy person up until this circumstance happened. That didn’t change the fact, though, that there was always something that I could do in any given day that would make it worth living. And it might be something really simple like writing a letter to my mom. It might be reading a book and educating myself. It might be doing as many sit-ups as I possibly could. There were always things that I could find that were meaningful to me, even in their humble ways that made at least life in that moment worth living.
Do you find that that’s transferable to people experiencing tragedies that have nothing to do with wrongful convictions?
Yes, I think it’s applicable to anyone going through a horrendous circumstance. I really thought that this experience I was going through was very unique and it made me feel very ostracized from the rest of humanity. That was part of the sadness—feeling like I didn’t belong to the rest of humanity anymore. I slowly, over the course of years, have realized that we are all carrying our own private tragedies and we all can feel like we don’t have agency. And my message to people is, regardless of where you are and where you belong, there is something that you can do that matters to you. Find that and do it.
You’ve written about some of the more dramatic indignities that you experienced—constantly being solicited for sex and harassed by people in positions of authority, a cellmate attacking you and not being able to defend yourself because it would’ve hurt your chances in court. Because you were ultimately exonerated, many people would be horrified on your behalf. But they should be horrified even if someone is guilty, right?
Absolutely. The indignities that so many people face in prison—guilty or innocent alike—are not doing any of us any good. A lot of the people that I met in prison were sitting there feeling victimized and feeling like they could not wait to get back out and make the same mistakes over and over again. It’s a little bit “fuck off.” There was this feeling of “I’m not sitting here becoming a better person. I’m sitting here being victimized all over again.”
So many of the women that I was imprisoned with had been victims of crime long before they had ever committed crimes themselves. They were swimming in a world where crime was a part of the rhythm of life and so was prison. Their sense of who they were and how they belonged to the rest of humanity was corrupted by a sense of victimization.
I think that some people might argue that vengeance is the point. It’s just the point of justice to make people suffer who made other people suffer. That’s the goal. And if that’s the goal, if that’s what you really think our society needs, then sure, we’re doing it right. But if what you want is a society that is safer, that is attempting to address the causes of crime in the first place and is attempting to mitigate circumstances that might lead to crimes, then you have to take a step back from that righteous indignation you feel toward a person who committed a crime and instead say, “What is it that works?” And what we’re doing right now is not working.
The “evidence” in your case was extremely spurious—mishandled DNA evidence, law enforcement lying under oath, and most importantly, a coerced confession where you implicated your boss at the time, Patrick Lumumba, after several days when you were screamed at for hours in a language you did not speak fluently. You were slapped several times. You got your period during the interrogation and weren’t allowed to use the restroom. What do people not understand about what effect that has on the mind?
It’s the biggest obstacle I feel to justice in so many of these wrongful convictions cases. Coercive interrogations and what happens behind closed doors with authority figures who are hell-bent on getting what they want out of witnesses or suspects: That side of the criminal justice system is very dark and very scary. A lot of people like to think that, if they were in my shoes, nothing short of being beaten with a rubber hose or dangled out a window would get them to implicate themselves or others in a crime that they knew they were innocent of. Obviously, the research speaks otherwise. But speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that I have never been put in a position of doubting my own sanity like I was in the hands of those police officers.
I was made to believe that I had repressed all memories of having witnessed a traumatic event but that now I was being forced to unearth repressed memories or else I would never see my family again. I was put in an impossible position where they reshaped my understanding of reality through lies and manipulation so that I felt like there was no possible answer besides the one that they eventually coerced me into signing onto—which was that I had witnessed my boss commit a horrific crime and I was so traumatized by it that I could not even remember it. That was the story that they wanted me to tell. And once they had it, they latched onto it.
I think they were under a lot of pressure to come up with answers. Because there is this resistance to appreciating psychological coercion and torture, there was a resistance once the evidence was at hand. They saw, “Oh, this guy [named Rudy Guede] who has a long history of breaking and entering, his DNA is all over the crime scene. Maybe that’s the guy who did it.” They held onto, “Well, Amanda confessed, so she must have witnessed something. Maybe she got them confused, or maybe she’s a mastermind and she’s cunningly subbing in one person for another.” There was complete resistance to the idea that they had just gaslit a 20-year-old into not even knowing what was the truth or not anymore.
I still remain wrongly convicted of a lesser charge, which is slander. After I signed those statements, and it turned out that my boss obviously was completely innocent and had nothing to do with this crime, even after I retracted those statements, I was accused of having maliciously and intentionally slandered him in order to divert the course of justice. I was found guilty of that crime, and I was sentenced to three years in prison for that crime. And technically, in Italy, they say that I served rightfully three years in prison for the outcome of that interrogation. I’m still fighting that to this day.
The press uncritically recycled information that the police and prosecutors would feed them. What do you make of that when the job of the press is supposedly to hold the government to account? Do you still think that’s a problem today?
Yes. I think that’s actually the thing that the Netflix documentary filmmakers were really good at pinpointing. I was shocked until I realized that the people who are writing those headlines and publishing those headlines are being rewarded for that behavior. They are being paid by us when we click on those headlines. And they are giving us exactly what we seem to want, which is not well-researched, thoughtful, balanced, something that takes time and consideration and expertise. It’s being first. It’s being loudest. And it is tapping into that deep part of ourselves that loves schadenfreude and that enjoys the sort of lewdness and shamefulness of other people’s stories and gets gratification out of that.
How has that affected your media consumption and how you see the world?
I am very skeptical when I see even things that are not just obviously scandalous headlines, but just little two-second blips of “This person said this.” And I’m like, “Hmm, that context is probably being stripped away for that sound bite.”
That said, I do think there is a certain amount of media literacy entering into the broader public because we all are now content creators. In a weird way, now that we’ve seen a little bit how the sausage gets made, we’re more aware of how the bigger sausages get made. I think that’s a really interesting turn. It’s not that we demand higher standards—we demand higher transparency. You came to this crazy outlandish conclusion, well, fine, but tell me how you got there. I’m here for the ride. Just show your work.
I read something in The New York Times written after your memoir was released. The article concluded like this: “The injustice very likely done to [Amanda Knox] pales beside the brutal truth of Kercher’s death, and no plea for sympathy will ever bridge the difference.” What do you make of that?
It is a common response, and it’s so common that I actually came up with a term for it: the single victim fallacy. This idea that in any given morality narrative, there’s only room for one victim. So either you care about Meredith’s tragedy or you care about my tragedy; you’re incapable of caring about both. And this is a logical fallacy. You absolutely can care about the fact that young women get murdered when they are in their own homes studying abroad. The real tragedy of what happened to Meredith is that this was a common thing that happens to women all over the world. We are targeted and brutalized by men, treated as objects, and then thrown away. And that is a horrific reality that I almost faced, and that a person that I lived with experienced.
In learning about your case, I came to the conclusion that Italy’s criminal justice system is a hot mess. You weren’t read your rights during your interrogation. You were denied a lawyer despite asking for one. You were held without charge. The prosecution withheld a lot of evidence from the defense. And your jurors weren’t screened for bias. What perspective did that give you on the U.S. criminal justice system?
Well, I didn’t really know anything about criminal justice systems when I left for Italy. And so when I came home to the U.S., I didn’t really have much insight into how similar or different it was to what I had experienced in Italy. It was only when I met other wrongly convicted people who had spent time in prison here in the U.S. that I got an education about what problems we have. And in some ways, it made me appreciative of certain things that they did in Italy.
For instance, appeals are guaranteed in Italy in ways that they are not really guaranteed here in the U.S. And it was shocking to me that the average number of years that a wrongfully convicted person here in the U.S. spends in prison is like 14—and I spent four in Italy.
I think a lot of people find themselves in situations where they don’t even know what their rights are, and they don’t know that they should have legal counsel there to educate them about their rights. And that’s how a lot of people end up getting into trouble, because our criminal justice system partly relies upon our own ignorance and the fact that we don’t know what our rights are.
What do you think the criminal justice reform movement in the U.S. is doing well? And what do you think it’s doing not so well?
I think something that it is doing well is also the thing that it’s not doing well, depending on what criminal justice person you’re talking to. I do not think that it helps to make more enemies than you already have. The things that I have seen that have worked the best, that have really benefited the most people, have been when criminal justice advocates and defense attorneys have found some kind of common ground and common purpose with the law enforcement community and the prosecutors. Trying to find the places where we agree is actually a really important fundamental step.
I’m a practical person. I want to have an effective impact on the world that’s actually going to accomplish my goals to live in a world where we can trust each other and feel safer and be able to trust our authority figures. I feel like there are lots of different ways to approach this. One thing that I really care about, that I advocate for, is banning police use [of] deception when they are interacting with witnesses or suspects.
Right now, police can just lie to you. They can lie to you, and there’s no consequences. And I think that is incredibly damaging to their relationship with the rest of us. I also think it leads the police officers to have false self-confidence in what is true or not. They have this false sense of being able to tell if someone’s lying or not lying because they have been trained to lie. The research shows that they don’t, and that’s dangerous.
I think if we work together, we can help more people faster. And so when I see criminal justice advocates quietly or loudly attempting to find common ground with “the enemy,” that makes me feel really reassured.
True crime has had a place for centuries, but with the perfect storm of new social media, extremely salacious allegations, and all these things that were tailor-made to grab people’s eyes, Amanda Knox essentially kicked off the true crime craze of the modern era. What are your thoughts on the popularity of the genre, and is there a way to tell those stories in a respectful and decent way?
I get into a lot of that on a miniseries that I did for [my podcast] Labyrinths, called “Blood Money.” I was curious about the history of it. I was not a true crime person before I became the subject of a true crime phenomenon. So a part of me didn’t quite get it. The more I looked at the history, the further I saw it go back. True crime has been of immense interest as far back as even before the printing press. People were writing about crimes, about salacious crimes. Crimes that were abnormal, that rose above just the tragedy. And this endless fascination with justice. What does justice look like? Does it look like a person burning at the stake? Does it look like the victims finally getting to have a say in the courtroom? What is justice?
What troubles me is that the worst experiences of people’s lives are not talked about for the sake of journalistic integrity. It’s infotainment. And so often, the people who have the most at stake in whether and how those stories are told have absolutely no say about it. And there’s no qualms about it even by content creators.
I have rebelled against this idea that someone like me has nothing valuable to say or to offer when it comes to how my own story is told. A lot of people come to me and want me to help them tell their story, and that comes with an incredible amount of psychological weight for me because I’ve had my story told by other people over and over and over again, and I have felt utterly exploited in so many different ways.
A 2021 movie called Stillwater was inspired by your story. Did they consult you at all?
No, I found out about it the exact same time that everybody else found out about it. They started having headlines like “movie inspired by Amanda Knox’s life.”
You’re like, “Oh, OK, I guess, once again, the worst experience of my life is being used by others for their own profit making.” And it’s not that I begrudge them that impulse because we all are inspired by real life, what came before us, and what is within our eyeline. And unfortunately, my story made headlines around the world for a very long time, so people were aware of it, and they knew that they could sell it because it had sold a million fricking newspapers already.
What made me sad about Stillwater was they said that they had done their due diligence and gone out of their way to speak to the people in rural Vermont—or wherever it was that they were saying Matt Damon was from—so that he could really get into the character. But they were advertising the movie based on me, and no one had ever bothered to reach out to me to ask me about my experience.
One reason why I actually agreed to do the [2016] Netflix documentary was because the filmmakers said, “Hey, we’re not going to do this documentary without you.” I said, “OK, well, I don’t want to do it.” And they said, “OK, we’re not going to do it.” I was like, “Wow, you are the one and only filmmakers I have ever heard who walked away from all this footage and all this vision because they were like, it’s not right to do the story without you.”
Are you involved in the Hulu series coming up?
I am. The one time that Hollywood actually invited someone like me to be an [executive producer]. It’s a really cool flipping of the script, and I think I have to thank Monica Lewinsky in a huge way for that. As someone who has had her worst experiences out there and exploited, she wanted to uplift people who are in my position to actually have a say in telling their own stories. And so I am finding myself in the extremely privileged and rare position of being a subject who has a say. I am taking that very, very seriously. I am really proud of the work we’re doing.
There are still people out there, after all of these years, after all of the evidence being aired, despite all of it, who still think you’re lying. What do you say to them?
I don’t. If somebody thinks I’m lying, I’ve learned that it has very little to do with me and a lot to do with whatever is going on with them, which I don’t have control over. So I don’t really worry about that unless it’s in a courtroom—and then I’m fighting it.
I have given myself the grace to not feel the burden of having to explain myself to every single person out there. That’s in large part due to having met other wrongly convicted people. Before I did, I felt this horrendous obstacle of, “If I’m going to belong to humanity again, I have to explain myself to every single person,” and I have given up on that horrific, impossible task. I do not feel compelled to do that.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Amanda Knox Tells Her Own Story appeared first on Reason.com.
