
Amanda Knox: “I didn’t fucking do it.” (FBF)
Call Her Daddy- 364 views
- 20 Sep 2024
Father Cooper sits down with Amanda Knox. The interview begins with Amanda giving a clear reminder to the world – “I didn’t fucking do it”. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, Amanda was wrongly accused and convicted of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher. Meredith was the victim of a brutal murder. Amanda was the victim of trial by media. Her sexuality was used against her in order to manipulate a story that she was a sex crazed murderer - and that was the story that overtook international headlines. Today, Amanda continues working to detach her name from a murder she did not commit. Tune in as Amanda details the events that occurred on November 2nd 2007, the interrogation process and the four years she spent in Italian prison. This captivating interview highlights Amanda’s struggle to reclaim both her name and her life.
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What is up, Daddy Gang? It is your founding father, Alex Cooper with Call Her Daddy. Daddy Gang. Has anyone ever studied abroad? Maybe you have hopes of studying abroad. Maybe you are planning a trip to a new country with a few friends to study abroad. Picture this. You board a flight your junior year of college, excited to spend a semester in a picturesque Italian town. You find a room in a beautiful hillside home. You have three roommates who you enjoy spending time with. And to top it all off, you meet an Italian boy named Raffaele, who is head over heels for you. It's a dream come true. After a romantic evening with your new boyfriend, you home to shower and change. But when you get there, you discover the front door of your house is wide open. Something is wrong. The police show up, and when they kick down the door to your roommate's bedroom, they find a body. How would you act? What would you say? Police are everywhere, yelling in Italian, and you have absolutely no idea what is going on. You are confused. Whose body is inside? Are they dead? Am I in danger?
Does anyone speak English? The body inside is your murdered roommate, Meredith Kutcher, and you are the prime suspect. This is a true story. This is Amanda Knox's story. On November second, 2007, Amanda's roommate, Meredith Kutcher, was found brutally murdered. Amanda and Meredith were random roommates. They were friends but had known each other for about six weeks. But the media had their own story they wanted to spin. Amanda Knox was a beautiful, blue-eyed, normal college student from Seattle. She could have been you. She could have been any of us. International tabloids exploited Amanda's good looks and manufactured a story that Amanda had murdered Meredith in a satanic sex game, gone wrong. Wrong. This made no sense, but it sold newspapers. A man's semen was found inside Meredith Kutcher's body. His name was Rudy Godet. All evidence pointed to Rudy. But imagining Amanda and Meredith involved in a sex ritual gone wrong appealed more to the media and police. And despite the fact that this made no sense, this is the story they told. And the story you probably know. Headlines plastered across the world: Sex Crazed, Fem fatal, She Devil, Foxy Noxie. They used Amanda's MySpace soccer nickname to sexualize and vilify her.
Daddy Gang, she could have been you. She could have been me. 14 years later, Amanda is still trying to clear her name. And I'm honored to do my part to help her tell the true story of what happened in Italy. Here is Amanda Knox. Hi. Hi, I'm Alex. It's nice to meet you. I'm so excited for you guys to be here. Thank you. Thanks for your- You're- Oh my God. She's beautiful. Thank you. Guys, if you hear a baby, I promise it's not Amanda and it's not me. There is a baby in the room. This is the first time on Call Her Daddy that we have had someone below the age of 18.
Actually, I thought this would be the perfect podcast to note that my most recent episode of my podcast, Leverence, is me giving birth. And oh my God, I don't know if you've ever heard audio of people giving birth, but it sounds like I'm having the biggest orgasm ever. The whole final act of the last episode is me just in labor. And let me tell you, going through hours of audio of me going, Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.
Like, it's Oh my God. Did you hold a microphone up to your mouth? Or who was holding the mic?
Mostly it was my husband, Chris, who was taking care of all of that while I was very distracted.
Distracted, just giving birth to your beautiful new baby. Daddy Gang, I am sitting with Amanda Knox. Thank you for coming. We have, yes, Amanda's husband, and the surprise that Amanda brought her infant, Eureka Muezz-Nox Robinson. Yes. Given the recognition surrounding Nox, did you ever consider leaving it out of eureka's name?
I did. And it's funny. It's the whole question of, do I embrace my identity or do I not embrace my identity? And I've always been a bit stubborn about this, where it's like, there's nothing wrong with me. The world has acted like there was something wrong with me, something wrong with my sexuality above all. And that It's not my problem. I'm pushing back and I'm trying to say, no, it's not my fault. There's nothing wrong with me. And therefore, my daughter can embrace the fact that I'm her mom, even while I'm trying to protect her from all these forces that are ultimately beyond my control, but I can manage.
Did you ever, at any point, consider changing your name?
No, in the same way that I never remotely considered taking a plea deal, because I didn't fucking do it. And so no. No.
The story of your life is unbelievable, but let's start at the beginning. According to the New York Times, your friends and your family described young Amanda as naive, goofy, unconventional, harmless, trusting, sheltered, blunt, and a little bit of a rebel. Did they get it right?
Yeah, that sounds about right. Musical theater freak, yoga lover, someone who didn't have a ton of experience in the world, someone who didn't have a ton of experience sexually. I was pretty sheltered growing up. I was very well meaning. I tried well in school. I tried to appease people. But at the same time, I had this streak of, no, I don't... A pretty girl doesn't have to look like that. She can look like this. I had this perfectly stereotypically Seattle, which is like, Birkenstock granola people.
And how many siblings do you have?
I have three younger sisters.
Okay. And then your parents divorced when you were younger?
Yeah. So I have no memory of my actual dad and my actual mom being married. But I grew up with being a part of their separate households, and we lived within blocks of my dad. So I was back and forth between my mom and dad's house all the time.
What was your most serious relationship in high school?
So I didn't really have a relationship in high school. It's okay.
That's okay.
I was a late bloomer.
No, that's okay. When did you lose your virginity?
In college.
So you went to college close to your hometown. You went to University of Washington. What made you want to study abroad your junior year of college?
So my mom actually grew up. She was born and grew up for a certain amount of time in Germany. So I have a international family. I have aunts who live in Germany right now. So I I was thinking I wanted to have an international experience. Actually, my Oma really wanted me to go study abroad in high school. She wanted me to go live in Germany in high school. And I think my mom was not quite ready to let me go. So instead, it was like everyone acknowledged and accepted that this was a part of our family experience, even, because we didn't just grow up in one small town in America. My mom grew up... She's an army brat, baby. Got it. And so she was like, Germany, Texas, blah, blah, blah, blah, I was in college, I was studying German, I was studying Italian. And because I was actually better at German, I decided that I want to study in Italy. And really, what ultimately decided it is I applied for programs in both countries, and I got accepted to Italy's first. So that ultimately is what brought me to Italy, that and the fact that I didn't know Italian as well as I knew German.
Do you think about that a lot?
That part of it, no. The thing that really haunt me, the thing that haunt me the most is if I had never met Rafael, who was my boyfriend of five days before I was arrested, if I hadn't met him, I would have been home the night that Meredith was murdered, and I could have been murdered as well. So that's the thing that haunt me in my brain. And beyond the fact that one of the things I really love about this This podcast in general is I think it's so, so important to talk about these intimate parts of our lives. And the intimate parts of my life were, first of all, blown way out of proportion and then used to utterly vilify me. And so that aspect of it, I don't even know where to pin that down. Where does that impulse come from to take a young woman's sexuality and turn her into a monster for it? That's That's the other part of it that I'm like, Hmm.
Because I do want to get into that because it's... Yes, I felt sick for you watching them slut-shaming you equated to somehow you murdered someone. And it like the spiral effect, and we're going to get to it, but it was... It's shocking, and I can't imagine living it. And so I'm just happy you're here today. Thank you. Me too. Honestly, it's incredible. So for someone who has never been to Perugia, Italy, can Can you paint the picture of the town you were living in when you got there?
Sure. Okay. So in some ways, it's this totally idyllic Italian hillside town with its beautiful church, and it's one main street, and it's flea market on Sunday, and tons of people just being super Italian and having great shoes. And it's a beautiful, beautiful place. These hole in the wall, like pubs and cafés that are just so beautiful in the sunshine. It was so fucking gorgeous. And the cottage that I was living in was right on top of the hillside, overlooking the valley. There were fig trees in my garden. It was ridiculously beautiful.
It was the perfect... I everyone that envisions going abroad, everyone that's listening, you're like, I want to go abroad for my junior, my sophomore, my freshman year. That is the ideal. You're like, whoa, I made it. And how did you even get that house?
So I went to... I visited Peruja shortly before I moved in, and I was traipsing around, getting my bearings of like, oh, where's the university I'm going to be studying? And trying to get a sense of the space. And when I was out front at the university, just like, oh, look, here's the university I'm going to. A woman was putting up a flyer for a room to rent. And I was like, oh, is that nearby? And she was like, yeah, you want to go check it out? And I was like, yeah. And so I just wandered over there. Again, like kismet. Like, oh, perfect. Great. Yay. We can have coffee. I had coffee them. We ate some figs from the garden. We were like, oh, yeah, let's do it. And we just made it like it was there. It was done. It was right two steps away from the university. It was perfect. Too perfect.
Too perfect. What was the biggest, if any, culture shock moment you remember having after getting off the plane and getting to Italy?
I was not used to this world of really, really aggressive Italian men, honestly. I was expecting to come into a space and it being very under the tuscan sun romantic feeling. And instead, what I encountered was a lot of really, really pushy, if not... I had this one moment where a guy offered to give me a ride home from a bar. And I was like, okay, thank goodness, because it's dark out. You have a little Vespa. You can just drop me off at my house. And he was like, yeah, I'd love to do that. And so he drove right past my house, went right to his house. And I was like, No, can we go back there? And he was like, No, no, just a minute in my house, and brought me, and got to his house. And I was like, No, no, I don't want to be here. And he was like, No, no, just come inside, meet my friends for a bit, and brought me into his apartment. And I was like, No, no, I really need to go. And I didn't even know where I was at this point. I was in the middle of freaking nowhere.
And I was like, I need you to take me home. And he was like, just come to my bedroom for a little bit. So I sat there on his bed, glaring at him, being like, take me home. And he I was like, just a minute, just a minute. Calm down. You want a beer? And I'm like, no. That was a moment where I was like, okay, this is different than what I'm used to.
Because you saying that, honestly, do you feel like you were a little... I don't know if the word is uninhibited. I feel like I'm constantly paranoid of, I don't trust anyone. I can't. And nothing has happened to me to make me think that. But the thought of getting on the back of a man's bike, I'd be like, I- You idiot. I'd be like, No. Do you feel like you had had such a... You just didn't even- It never occurred to me that someone would do that to me, ever.
I was shocked. And I was like, No, do not hear the words that are coming out of my mouth. I want to go home. You said you would take me home. What are you talking about?
So do you feel like you had a lot of trust in people back then? Yes, absolutely. And were you calling your family throughout these first few weeks and gushing about how much you loved it?
Yeah. So it was a little bit difficult because I didn't I only ever... It was a 2007, so it's a little bit... I didn't have Internet in my house, so I had to go to an Internet cafe in order to send emails and stuff like that. But I kept in touch. I told my family about how everything was just so idyllic and beautiful and wonderful.
Let's Tell me about your living situation. Can you describe your roommates? Sure.
So I was in a cottage that was two levels. And in the bottom level, it was a totally separate apartment where four young guys were hanging out. They also were students, and that their apartment. And I was upstairs with three other girls. Two of them were Italian, and they were slightly older than us. They were in their late 20s. And then there was Meredith, who was 22, and there was me, 20.
Were you close at all to the two Italian girls?
I mean, as close as I was to Meredith, I had just met them when I arrived in Italy. And so I knew them for several weeks ahead of this. And we would go out to dinner together. We would go dancing together. We went and did grocery shopping together. But we were still in the Getting to know each other face.
You literally just met these people. Did they speak English?
So Laura spoke better English than Philomena. And of course, Meredith spoke English because she's from Britain. But I actually tried my best to speak Italian at home, and it was very cute.
So you hung out with them in the beginning days, but you were closer to Meredith?
Yeah, just because she was closer to my age, we had more in common. We were going to school, and they were interning at law offices. Got it.
Looking back, when you think about Meredith, what do you remember about her?
I remember that we... So I got up early once to go to this. There was, again, these beautiful things. There's this chocolate festival in Perucia, and what they had So these early in the morning, they took refrigerator-sized blocks of chocolate, and then a sculptor would come and sculpt the chocolate. And then people would gather chunks of the chocolate that came off of the sculpture and just hand it out to people in the crowd. There We're chipping away, chipping away. And then a giant chunk falls off. And the person who is collecting it, grabs it, and then is scanning the crowd to see who wants it, and then plops it right into my arms. It's as big as a tombstone. And I'm carrying this tome of chocolate home. I clunk it on the kitchen table, and I'm like, who wants to make cookies? And so Meredith and I went and got ingredients to make cookies and then make cookies at home. So stuff like that.
Fun, enjoyable, we're abroad, we're roommates, let's make the best of it moments. Yeah.
She was like, she loved to read on the little terrace that overlooked the valley. And so sometimes I would take my guitar out there and play on my guitar while she was reading, that stuff.
What do you think Meredith thought about you?
I mean, she was always really nice to me. I think she definitely went out of her way to make me feel welcome. At certain times, she would come to... I started working at a local bar. She would come and check in on me and be like, hey. It was a slow bar that get a lot of people coming by, so she would come by and check it out and be like, hey, how's it going?
In the early days of your trip, you met an Italian boy, Raffaele. Is it Raffaele?
Raffaele.
Raffaele. How did you meet him? What did you think about him?
So Raffaele stood out to me precisely because he did not come across all of the other Italian men that I was meeting. He was actually quite shy. And I met him not in the context of like, going clubbing or something like that. I went to a classical musical recital at the University, and me and Meredith went together. And then Meredith had to leave and meet her friends at intermission. And so he came and sat in her seat. And then we just had me speaking bad Italian, him speaking bad English, connection.
That versus what you're describing as the Italian men that you were like, what the fuck is this culture? This is wild. I wasn't expecting this. He had, apparently, it seems like more of a warmth to him.
He had a warmth, and he It felt like it was just a safe person.
So week one into your new hot Italian romance, which I feel like is every single girl's dream. It's like you get there and you meet him and you're like, oh, my God, now we're running around Italy together. What do you remember about November first, 2007?
Yeah. So it was obviously the day after Halloween. I had been working half the night, and then I met up with Rafaela. I was dressed like a I didn't really have a costume. I drew a cat face on me, and we just were hanging out outside, getting drinks and things like that. The morning, I remember that Meredith woke up late. She liked to sleep in, so that wasn't unusual. And she had dressed up like a vampire, and she still had a little bit of a little fake blood dribble on her chin. And she was like, oh, I'm going to get dressed and take a shower. I'm going to go hang out with the girls. She had gone to the British Girls had had their own little Halloween party together. And so she showered, she changed. She was like, okay, I'm going to go hang out with the girls. I'll chat at you later. And that was it. I was just like, okay, bye. I vividly remember her throwing a purse over her shoulder and going out the door like it was just any other day. And that was the last I saw of her. And that particular moment, I don't feel like I've been asked about since the trial, honestly, because they were very particular about wanting to know what she was wearing.
I think because of the evidence that was in her bedroom, she had been found naked. But of course, there were clothes on her bed or something like that. And so they wanted to know what color purse was she wearing. And I think it was a a tan or a peach colored purse, if I recall correctly. Anyway.
So she leaves. And then what do you do the rest of the day?
So I ended up hanging out with Raffaele, deciding. So it was November first. It was right before the weekend, and we had been deciding like, oh, what do we want to do for this holiday weekend. And we decided that we wanted to go to a nearby town called Gubio, which is famous for truffles. Raffaele was really big on being a very good Italian host. He wanted to show me everything and get me an Italian perfume and make me feel like a very special, officially Italian lady. So he was very big into that. We went over to his place. We cooked dinner. We were hanging out. We were reading. We watched a movie. We smoked a little pot. We had sex. And we went to bed. It was just a really chill day.
The next day, November second, 2007, you wake up, you get coffee. What do you do that morning?
The first thing that I did was I went home so I could take a shower and change my clothes. I wanted to get into a cute outfit. I got a cute little white skirt on, even though it was a little chilly. But I wanted to look pretty because I was going on basically a date weekend with Rafaele. So I came home and I found that the front door was open. And I thought, that's odd. The front door shouldn't be just wide open. But I also knew that the lock was a little bit broken. And so maybe someone had not closed the door and locked the door properly. And maybe that's what happened. So I come into my house and I'm like, Is anyone here? Are we okay? And no one answered. So I thought, Okay, that's odd. But all right, close the door, lock the key, go in, get undressed, go to take a shower. And when I was in the bathroom, cleaning up, brushing my teeth, taking a shower, I noticed there are some speckles of blood in the sink, and there is a dirty splash of blood on the bath mat. And again, I'm like, that's odd.
At first, I thought when I saw the speckles in the sink, I was like, oh, my God, are my gums bleeding? But no, it was not my... Or were my ears... I just got my ears pierced, where I was like, oh, my God, am my ears bleeding? No, no. Everything's fine. That's odd. I guess maybe someone is having their period or something. I don't know. So I get changed. I get dressed. I go into the the other bathroom to blow dry my hair. And that's when I noticed that there was feces in the toilet. And I was like, then I got the creepy feeling of like, oh, my God, is there someone in the house with me? None of my roommates would have done that. So I immediately gathered my things, went over to Rafael's house, and started calling my roommates, basically being like, Hey, is everything okay? It looks like maybe someone left the house in a hurry. Like, what's going on? And I didn't hear back from Meredith. I didn't hear back from Laura. And I was only ever able to get in touch with Philomena. And Philomena said, well, no, I've been out with my boyfriend all night.
I don't know what happened. Meet me at the house. We're going to figure out what's going on. And so Raphael and I go back to the house. We do a little bit more snooping around. We noticed that Philomena's room has a broken window and has been looked like it's been ransacked. Like, weirdly, the main living room area that we had, nothing looked touch. We looked into Laura's room, spotless. Like, the bed was perfectly made. It was Philomena's room that was all like, crazily askew. And we go into my room. My room seems And I didn't look, search it very thoroughly. But my computer was there, and I was like, okay, if my computer wasn't stolen, maybe it's okay. But then we go to Meredith's room and her door is locked. And we were like, huh? That's odd. I wasn't sure if Meredith was in the habit of locking her door or not when she left the house. I didn't think so. So I knocked on her door and I was like, Meredith, are you in there? Meredith, Meredith. And no answer. Finally, I get concerned enough that I'm like, Rafael, can you maybe try to kick down the door?
Because I don't know if maybe she's hurt in there or something's wrong. He tries kicking the door down, doesn't succeed. So he calls the cops. And he's like, hey, there's been a break in. We don't know what's going on, but one of our roommates is not answering her cell phone and her door is locked, blah, blah, blah, blah. While he's explaining all of this to the cops, a pair of cops actually walk up. And they are here because they don't know anything about our phone call. We thought, oh, wow, that was really fast. Were you just around the corner? You answer our phone call? No. They were already on their way because someone had found Meredith's cell phones just thrown into a garden, someone's random garden. And they had been ringing because I had been calling Meredith, looking for her. And so they were ringing, ringing, ringing. And the person who lived in the house was like, what is that ringing coming from my backyard? She goes and finds these phones and then delivers them to the police. And so the police finally arrived, comes full circle, And they're like, whose phones are these? Whose phones are these?
It says the SMS card was in Philomena's name. And I was like, oh, weird. Philomena, she's on her way. But I just talked to her. She has her cell phone. And then Philomena And I arrived and said, no, I gave a card to Meredith. Those are Meredith's phones. And we were like, okay, but where is Meredith? Why doesn't she have her phones? And I'm like, well, her door is locked. And Philomena is like, her door is locked. Someone kicked down her door. And then the police kicked down her door, found the crime scene, and kicked everyone out of the house.
So you weren't in the house when they kicked the door down?
I was in the house, but I was not in the hallway. It was a narrow hallway that led into her, to my room and then her room. I was in the kitchen area waiting, and I was talking to the other... There were two police officers, and I think I was talking with one of the other police officers while one of them went and kicked down the door with Philomenas and And her boyfriend's help.
Which is also interesting later for the story to know Philanana was also gone and has a boyfriend. So there's two sets of couples that had the same exact dynamic. You have your boyfriend, you're not home, you're sleeping at your boyfriend's. Philamena is also at her boyfriend's. And so it's like, Wait, why you?
Well, that's a good question. And I actually thought about this earlier yesterday because... What day is today? Is today the third? Yeah. So yesterday, the second, the anniversary of discovering her body, I was thinking about why me and why not Philamena, right? And I think one of the big things is they focused on my behavior in the immediacy of the discovery of this crime scene. But the difference between me and Philamena was Philamena saw into Meredith's room. She saw Meredith's body with her own eyes, and I did not. And so immediately coming... Philomena starts screaming her head off and crying, and everyone starts yelling in very rapid Italian. So I'm like, What the fuck is going on? We're ushered out of the house, and I'm left shell shocked, going, What's going on? What's going on? And hearing weird straps of things that I can understand. And so I'm outside of the house going, What's going on? What's going on? And Philanana is crying hysterically. And so immediately, the cops are looking at the two roommates, Philanmena and me. One of them is crying, the other one is not. That was maybe the moment things started to go very, very wrong.
And for understandable reasons, because they're looking at two young women, one of them is clearly distraught and one of them is clearly confused. But very different reactions. And Philamena's reaction was the expected one. Mine wasn't. And I don't think that the cops, when they made their gut intuition about me and about whether or not I was involved in this crime, I don't think they actually realized that I didn't really understand what was going on. I just was talking to Rafaela and going, Wait, what are they saying? What happened? What did they find? And at first, they're telling me really confusing things. They saw a foot, and it's like, A foot? Are you talking about a severed foot? What are you talking about? And then somebody's yelling about a wardrobe and how they found a body in a wardrobe. And I'm like, Well, what body? Where's Meredith? Is it Meredith? What is going on here?
Philanthropy understands is Italian. Oh, yeah. And you're like, hello. When after you were all escorted out of the house, when did you know it's Meredith? That it was Meredith.
I think It was half an hour, an hour into this that like, Rafaele was going and poking around and talking to people and going, okay, they think it's Meredith. There was a body under a sheet or under a blanket, and they think it's Meredith, and that they think that she's been stabbed because there was blood everywhere.
And where the fuck is Philamena? Are you two not speaking?
So I'm like, the cops are taking us all apart to question us. And so me and Rafaele were apart because we had discovered the crime scene together. Meanwhile, Philamena and her boyfriend were apart answering questions to the cops. And so we're just standing there. And then eventually, we all get taken to the police office to answer even more questions and do that for days on end.
And then from that point, your life changed forever. There were paparazzi, yes, outside of the house. And I want to talk about that because they're taking photos, they're taking videos of you. And in that moment, you knew, obviously, something was wildly wrong, but you're saying you didn't even know that Meredith was dead. And if there was a body in there, you still didn't know for sure that it was Meredith. What did the media say about how you were reacting?
What didn't they say?
Yeah. Yeah. To anyone that's not familiar with the case, just to summarize.
Every derogatory term that you can come up and imagine for a woman was thrown at me over the course of these trials and this decade of coverage of the case.
But in that specific video that came out of you outside of the house, people were annoyed and disturbed by your reaction. Yes.
So there was a specific three-second clip that kept getting over the years shown over and over again, slow motion in loop. And it was a three-second clip of Rafaele looking at me and giving me a kiss and then like, hugging me, basically. And this clip was depicted as, look at these two psychopaths who can't even keep their hands off of each other outside of a murder scene. What was in fact happening was I was scared, and Rafaela was like, It's okay, girl. I got you. That was it.
Do you think if you were sobbing hysterically, you would have had a much different outcome?
Yes, I do. That's the stereotypical response that people have or people expect people to have when they hear something so incredibly dramatic, like your friend has just been murdered. But for me, at the time, I feel like I almost got deer in headlights, like deer in headlights. Like, this cannot be real, almost surreal, like surreal. Like, this can't be happening. And thinking, selfishly, perhaps, that, oh, my God, I'm alive. Thank God I'm alive. Like, thank God I was at Rafaele's house. Like, oh, my God.
There's so many people that had an opinion on your reaction. Who made the rules of how you're supposed to act in traumatic situation. People are like, she should be sobbing.
The fact that I was hungry at a certain point during my interrogations and I asked for food, they were like, if you really cared about your roommate, you wouldn't even be able to eat. And it's like, what are you talking about? What this goes to show, though, is that once you have a gut feeling about somebody, whatever they do, they cry, they don't cry, they eat, they don't eat, it's all through the lens of suspicion. So I feel like at a certain point, whenever that point happened, when these investigators had their investigative intuition that I was somehow involved, there was nothing that I could do that was right.
I agree. Because even if you were like, I'm not hungry, they're like, Look, she's a psychopath. She doesn't even need food. Exactly. And then to see how it spiraled of the lack of emotion that everyone was so focused on, where I'm like, I see a girl in shock.
I was not expecting to come home and find a crime scene that day. I was expecting to take a shower, get dressed in a cute outfit, and go out with my boyfriend for a fun weekend. That was what I was expecting. I never, ever, ever, ever thought. Even when I was like, a lot of people are like, well, you saw blood in the bathroom. It's like, one, it was not all that much blood. And two, even if there was blood, you don't automatically... I don't live in true crime land where you come home to a murder scene. That's just not what I was thinking.
If I saw blood in my bathroom, I would think, Is it real blood? You just told me that it was Halloween. She had face blood the day No, I didn't immediately be like, Oh, there's blood on the sink. Someone's murdered in this house. What do you think of now when you do look at that video? Is it triggering?
I mean, it is in the sense that I've just seen that moment of my life replayed over and over and over again in order to vilify me. But I know what I was feeling in that moment. In that moment, I was just like, this cannot be happening. And I I almost feel bad for me at that time because I had no idea that I was already strapped to the tracks, and there was a train that was coming, and I had no idea.
The power of a moment, a 20-year-old, having a reaction that- And that defines who you are for everyone's life forever.
And it's like, first of all, a single moment. And also, however anyone wants to see that moment is how they're going to define you. So you basically are a blank slate onto which anyone can project whatever fucked up ideas they have about you. And to go back to how sexuality became such a huge part of this, for me, I can't help but feel like, one, I can't help but get rid of that creepy feeling that maybe some of these Italian dude detectives had weird, sexy vibes towards me. And then they decided to translate that into, oh, this is my gut instinct that somehow I'm like, my mind is attracted to this person, so maybe that's what it's coming from. But also the fact that this whole case, the whole case that was built up, the whole story that was built up was essentially a vilification of female sexuality, because we're looking at, like there were two women in this case. There was Meredith, who was made into this virgin, invisible, ideal victim, and never talked about again. And then there was the violent, sexually depraved lustful whore, and let's just burn her. And there also was evidence.
There was evidence in this case that pointed to a guy who had a rap sheet and no one cared about him. It was all about taking a woman who was sexual and vilifying the shit out of her.
The man that killed her, no one even knows his fucking name.
Yeah. I think I read... Someone was looking at even just maybe Daily Mail headlines from a time period between 2007 and 2011, which was when I was on trial and then my first appeal. And they looked at the number of times, one, Meredith's name was in the headline. It was like 30 something. How many times Rudy Godet's name was in the headline? Zero. How many times was Foxy Noxie in the headlines? A hundred 57 times. That goes to show what this case ultimately came to be about. It wasn't about Meredith. It wasn't about the person who killed her. It was about vilifying a young woman's sexuality.
Where did Foxy Noxie come from?
Oh, soccer nickname. It was like prepubescent soccer nickname. You played soccer. So top of the diamond. That was my position. And so I squirled around and stole the ball from people like a fox would steal chicken eggs. And it rimes with Nox.
And then it was used in a sexual way. Yes, it was like every fucking headline was like foxy-noxy, et cetera. And it was like you were this sex-crazed woman.
And a woman who was so sex crazed. So basically, the prosecution's depiction of events was that Meredith was a pure virginal person who basically slut-shamed me, and I decided to rape and kill her in response to being slut-shamed by her. And it was just like, who imagines this?
And then they find semen of Rudy inside of Meredith, and they're like, no, but still, Amanda. Yeah.
People really, really latched on to this idea. They really, And what bothers me is that, okay, I want the authorities to be held accountable for making up a story and not allowing the evidence to guide their investigation. That's one aspect. But then there's the aspect of the media The role of the media is to hold authorities accountable to the people. It's an information tool that is in the service of the people. It is in the public interest. And instead of doing that, instead of holding the authorities accountable to the truth, they latched on to every salacious possible made up detail that they possibly could and then made bank. And also, Meredith's murderer is getting away with it. Oh, wait. We talk about like, okay, yes, it was fucked up for me, and I will talk all day long about how it was fucked up for me. But also, one of the things that Meredith's family has always pointed out is, when did this become the Amanda Knox show? Isn't this about justice for our daughter? And they make a good point. The media decided that they could make a villain narrative, and it didn't matter what the truth was to them anymore.
It didn't matter what happened to Meredith. What mattered was sex, game, violent, foxy-noxy.
Beautiful American girl. Your picture everywhere.
And also, Meredith was a beautiful person. Absolutely. So it's like, oh, now we can look at these two beautiful women and imagine them having a fucked up sexual encounter. And also, someone else pointed this out to me. I forget who it does. But they were talking about the number one hit in porn is debasing and humiliating beautiful women. And so it felt like this was almost a pornographic enterprise of like, oh, let's just imagine Imagine, first of all, this violent sexual encounter that we can feel all moralized about, all scandalized about. But at the same time, just have this pornographic interest in Amanda Knox's imagined and real sex life and pitch her as this ultimate sex villain. And there's this perfect example of this. There was this one English talk show where they were saying, Oh, this psychopath woman, would you? Would you do it with her? And it's like, so you all are just like, you all just want to fuck and punish me. And I'm a 20-year-old girl who's just... I've had maybe seven total sexual partners in my entire life, and I'm just learning about who I am and what my experiences are.
I've never been in an orgy in my entire life. And yet I am the stand-in for everyone's most fucked-up sexual Yeah, imaginings.
Why didn't you go home right after you couldn't?
So I could. At any point, I could have gone home. I didn't because the cops said that I was there to help them. They told me... My mom was like, Come home immediately. My aunt, who was in Germany, was, Come and stay with us until they catch the killer, because we don't want you in a city where there's a killer running loose. And I was being brought in for questioning every day to answer questions like, Look at pictures. People were bringing pictures from Halloween, and like, Do you recognize that person, that person? They were telling me I'm an important witness, and that I needed to stay so that they could do their investigation. And so, believing them, I stayed. I had no idea that they had tapped my phones. I had no idea that they were going to be bringing... Instead of questioning me, they were actually interrogating me. And I was never, ever, ever informed. Even the first time I understood and explicitly told, You are a suspect in this case, was in front of a judge after I had spent three days in prison already. That was the first time that I truly had expelled out to me, This is what is happening to you.
How did the Italian police conduct the interrogation? Because I know it was a grueling process, and you don't have to go crazy into detail, but just giving an idea of it.
Yeah. So again, I was... Rafaele was actually called in for questioning. They didn't call me in. But I was staying with Rafaele, and I didn't want to be home alone because what just happened. So I followed him to the police office, and I was just sitting there in the lobby waiting for him. But while I was sitting there, some cops came by, and they were like, What are you doing here? And I was like, Well, Rafael is being questioned. And they were like, Well, if you're here, you might as well be questioned, too. And I was like, Oh, all right. I was trying to do my homework, but okay. They brought me into a room, and they started asking me to recall everything that I could remember from the last time I had seen Meredith over again, because I'd already answered these questions again. And so I was going through it again. And basically what they did was they tried to find fault with everything that I was saying. So they were like, well, what time exactly did you have dinner? And it's like, well, I don't know. It was around nine, I guess. Maybe we had made dinner.
And then we ate and we watched the movie afterwards. And they were like, well, did you or did you read a book afterwards because you said you read a book earlier and now you're watching a movie. And it's like, well, I did a little bit of both. What can I say? And so they kept pushing at me like, oh, maybe what you're thinking is wrong, making me feel like my memories were confused. And, oh, are you sure you didn't do that the night before? And that wasn't this night? We really need to know. And meanwhile, Rafael is being interrogated. After a few hours of this, they come in and tell me, Rafael says you weren't with him that night. And I'm like, what the fuck? No, that's not true. I was with him that night. And they were like, well, your cell phone says that you made an appointment to see Patrick. Who's Patrick? Are you sure you didn't meet up with Patrick? And are you sure that Patrick didn't rape and kill Meredith? And are you sure that you are remembering everything? Because what if you're traumatized? What if you witnessed something horrible and you don't even remember it?
And then, meanwhile, this one police officer was saying, I was once in a car accident, and it was so dramatic. I broke my leg or something, and I don't remember a thing. I blacked out. Do you think that that's what happened to you? Did you black out? Are you not remembering correctly? And after hours of this and then yelling at me and telling me that I'm never going to see my family again, and slapping me on the back of the head, telling me, remember, remember. I finally was like, okay, maybe you're right. Maybe I totally don't remember anything. Maybe I met my boss, Patrick. Maybe, maybe. I don't know, but I'm confusedly trying to remember what you're asking me to remember. So I sign these statements with the police right up for me, and then they finally stop yelling at me, leave me alone for a second. I am allowed to close my eyes for a single moment. I close my eyes for a half an hour. I get some rest. And then when I wake up, I'm like, Oh, no. What have I done? I sign these statements. I did not go out and see Patrick that night, and I tell them, I can't.
All of that is wrong. I was just confused and scared. It's all wrong. And they're like, No, no, no, you'll remember. You'll remember. And so I'm sitting there begging them to listen to me. Finally, I asked for a piece of paper, and I'm like, Look, I can't. I basically recant. I write down, I'm recanting, basically. I give that to them, and they say, Okay, well, whatever. We need to fingerprint you. We need you to strip down naked so we can take photographs of you. You're an important witness. Sorry, we have to put these handcuffs on you, but it's only a formality. We're taking you to a holding place for your own protection. You'll see your mom soon.
Mentally, after you realize and you're going into jail?
Yeah, I didn't even know that I was going to jail, though. They didn't tell me I was going to jail. They told me that I was going somewhere safe. That's what they told me. And then I said I would see my mom soon.
Were they speaking to you in Italian?
They were speaking to me in Italian, yeah. And so, again, also a part of this was I was feeling like all of this was my fault because maybe my Italian wasn't good enough. Maybe I wasn't understanding them. Maybe they weren't understanding me. Maybe this is all a huge misunderstanding. And I kept thinking, I just want to talk to my mom. I honestly just wanted to talk to my mom. And my mom, I had my cell phone there and they confiscated my cell phone But they put it on the table in front of me. And my mom, who was due to arrive that day, arrived in Rome and started calling me. And my phone was buzzing and buzzing and buzzing. It was her. I knew it was her. And I was like, can I please answer the phone? My mom is calling me, and she is going to think that something bad happened to me if I don't answer the phone. And they're like, no. I was like, my mom thinks that I'm dead. I don't know what to do. And shortly thereafter, I'm arrested. It's big headlines like, case closed. The police were saying, case closed.
We figured it out in just five days. We figured out who murdered Meredith. It's Amanda and her boss, Patrick Lumumba, and maybe Rafael is involved. Case closed. And And my mom's like, oh, my God, my daughter's in jail.
This could be anyone. You're in a foreign country. You don't fully understand what these people are saying to you. And it's in the biggest moment of your life where there was someone murdered and you're potentially now about to be put in jail for murdering someone. And you're like, I don't even fully understand what the fuck you're saying. Can I please just talk to my mom?
I'm actually very grateful that you put it that way, because that's not the way a lot of people like to frame my experience. I've had the experience of people saying, oh, you're just this cute girl who got away with it. You just decided to implicate an innocent person because you just didn't want people to look at you. And it's like, Dude, that is not what interrogations are like. If you think I had any control over what was happening in that interrogation room, you have obviously never been in an interrogation room.
And it also goes back to your reaction. There's people that have, one, never been in an interrogation room. They have never experienced the type of trauma that you walk into a house and your roommate is dead. How How do they know how you're supposed to react and respond? There's other cases where people literally have just admitted something in an interrogation room because it's like you are beaten down, and they're almost like brainwashing you to give them an answer that they want. Right.
But a lot of people, again, have decided everything I do, no matter what it is, is evidence of guilt.
How did the interrogation end?
So, yeah, I'm brought into prison. It sounds bizarre that I didn't understand what was happening to me because it's like, okay, the handcuffs. Oh, they photographed me naked. Oh, like an Italian dude has to look at my junk.
It's just like- Put his fingers inside of your vagina.
Well, what they said they were doing was checking for signs of rape. And I'm just like, what? I never said anyone raped me. What are you talking? But of course, at that point, I'm like, I'll do whatever you say. And so they bring me into jail, and I'm put into a cell. I'm wondering when I'm going to see my mom. I'm I'm given a wool blanket, and I just lay on this caught and cry. That was the end of that interrogation, just sobbing in a jail cell with nothing in a room but a caught and a wool blanket. I was scared. I was confused. I was in shock. I was in disbelief. I felt disassociated even from what was happening to me. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It was I just wanted my mom. I really just... I needed somebody to not be screaming at me and threatening me and telling me that I had witnessed something horrible and that I didn't know what to do.
Did you ever take a lie detector test?
No, they don't take those. They don't do those in Italy. And they're not good because they don't actually... They're not reliable. What a lie detector your test actually detects is whether or not you're nervous. And you can be nervous for lots of reasons. And also you can be a liar who's not nervous at all.
Do you remember the first time that you saw your photo on the cover of a tabloid?
So in those So in the first days, I was not allowed any access to any media whatsoever. But then, over the course of the investigation, once I was taken out of solitary confinement, I was allowed to see at least what was on the news. And the news was nonstop coverage about me, about the case, that three-second loop on over, over, over again. Nonstop. For the first eight months of my imprisonment, when I was in isolation, it was basically nonstop Stop. Super new evidence comes in, like, oh, some super witness comes in and says that they saw Amanda and Rafaela the night of the murder. And then it's like, oh, well, that actually never happened. And that person just disappears into the ether. But it was this nonstop sense of, oh, what's the next thing? And the next thing? And, Oh, Meredith was drunk out of her mind the night that she was killed. Oh, wait, never mind. Actually, that's because the cops actually took all those samples of her blood, and then they got spoiled because they didn't get stored properly. And so that's why they basically had fermented her blood. And that's why it came across that it had alcohol in it.
And it was like, No, no, no. She's not drunk out of her mind. It's because you didn't store her samples well. It was a shit show.
Were you one of the only American women in the prison?
For a while, I was the only American woman in the I was also one of the only women who had all of her teeth. I was like, plunged into an environment of very, very, very poor, drug-addicted, broken women who had shit for lives, people who were not coming from a place of comfort and warmth and family like I was, who didn't go to school, who had been traumatized from the moment they were born. They were neglected or abused or addicted to drugs, grew up in really bad circumstances and had nothing but bad choices ahead of them. But my first cellmate was a woman who was an incest victim At least that's what I heard. I can't for sure. But for what I heard was that she was an incest victim who had murdered her child, and she was a little out of her mind. She had this fixation with scratching her skin until it lead. And so she was covered with all of these sores all over her face and arms. And that was my first sellee.
Did everyone in the prison know what you were going through?
Yeah, I was the famous one. So everyone had an opinion. Everyone wanted to talk to me about the case. The way that I managed that was I always refused to talk about everything. I didn't want to get into this place of my life and the worst experience of my life is just a part of the gossip mill. I spent a lot of my time trying to be invisible, not talking to a lot of people, and eventually, over the course of this whole experience, figuring out my hustle, which was reading and writing, because a lot of the people that I was in prison with were illiterate. So I was reading and writing their letters for them, helping them do commissary shopping, helping them read their court documents.
Is that what people say if you're in prison? What's your hustle?
I mean, everyone in prison has some hustle because you're part of Well, first of all, you are in a system that basically devalues you as a human being. And so your human potential is very, very limited. You develop with other inmates a social economy, and that social economy is built up of the kinds of things that you can offer to the community. And the thing that I could offer to the community was literacy.
Was there any harassment or abuse?
I never was hurt by any of the other inmates, although I did see violence between inmates. The thing that I experienced was male prison guards. There was one particular guard who was one of the higher ups at the prison, who in those first two weeks brought me into a private office with just him and interrogated me about my sex life and made of suggestions that we might have sex together. And at first I just played dumb. I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't understand you. And then eventually, I was just like, no, no, I just want to go to my cell now. And he was like, you sure you want to go? It was bullshit. He took this private interest in me and eventually cut that out because I rejected all of his advances. Other times in the I was grabbed by a mail guard while I was in the bathroom and other stuff like that. But again, not as bad as some of my friends experiences. I know people who were raped in prison. So it's like, I was never raped in prison. I was never beaten up. I saw violence, but I largely escaped and stayed out of anything that was too horrifically traumatic.
The mental abuse, though, who told you that you had HIV?
That was a doctor at the prison. So I was frequently being brought in for the doctors. They were taking DNA samples and things like that. And one time, they brought me in and they told me that I had tested positive for HIV and that I needed to... Well, they didn't say that, the vice comandante, the man who was sexually harassing me. He said that I should think about all the people that I had ever had sex with to figure out who had done it, who had given it to me. And I was hysterical. I I went back into my cell and cried and was thinking that, again, this is those moments where I'm like, oh, is all the suffering that I'm experiencing now, is this somehow me catching up on all the suffering I'm ever supposed to live is happening in one moment in my life? Am I going to die? Am I never going to have a family? Am I going to be stuck in this? What is happening? So I write down in my diary, which they knew that I was writing in because I was basically... That's all I did, was sit around and write in my diary.
I wrote down the that all the people I'd ever had sex with. And the very next day, my room was... Everything in my room that had my handwriting on it was confiscated by the police and then leaked to the press and depicted me as someone who, in the course of two weeks, had sex with seven different people and was a sex maniac. And clearly, because I'm a sex maniac, I must be also a psychopathic murderer.
You had sex with seven people? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But This is the thing. What are we talking about here?
That's a pretty normal number. By the time you're in college, that sounds about right. Police looking at that and saying, then she had to have probably also been capable of murdering someone.
My orgasms are so great. I just have to stab someone afterwards. What is happening? At the time, I didn't really know how to respond to any of this criticism. I was also very new to my own sexuality, so I didn't really have any perspective or authorship over, am I a normal person? Am I not a normal person? And since coming home and looking back on all of this, first of all, I think it's amazing that there's a podcast like this where people can be super frank about their experiences, and we are all sexual human beings, and that's okay. No one's a psychopath for having sex. And also, I've learned so much I interviewed this dominatrix for my podcast because I was really, really interested to know what the kink community's response to the way that I was portrayed. The idea, I was portrayed almost like this sex maniac dominatrix, femme fatale, who orchestrated very specifically, a sex game, that I was organizing this sex game to rape and murder my friend. That was what was portrayed. And so I was like, okay, What do people who actually organize fun sex times for people think about the fact that their whole lifestyle is being vilified in this moment?
And this really surprising thing that I got from this, I very frankly reached out to a dominatrix and was like, what is your experience with law enforcement? Do you feel like law enforcement is just calling people dominatrixes left and right and just vilifying them? And are you afraid of a cop seeing you and arresting you for a crime you don't commit? And the really surprising thing was the dominatrix, at least she's based in LA, she was like, No, actually, I have a great relationship with law enforcement because law enforcement, at least here in LA, recognizes the difference between kink and abuse. And in fact, what they'll do is reach out to the kink community in order to better understand when people are falsely claiming kink in abuse cases. And so dominatrixes like her will be called in to testify in murder trials when people are falsely claiming that they strangled their girlfriend in a sex game. And they're like, no, no, no, no, So that was like, I remember the moment when she told me this because I was sitting with her. She had invited me to a dominatrix convention. So I went to this dominatrix convention with her as her personal guest to get a glimpse into this kink world.
And she was so kind. And we were sitting at lunch, and she was telling me, it was very frankly like, okay, the reason I'm here, I love that you're so open and welcoming towards me, that you're also being super confidential about me even being here, because can you imagine what the press would do if they found out Amanda Knox goes to a dominatrix convention. So thank you for your warm welcome. I know that I'm an outsider here. The real reason I'm here is because I need to know what your relationship with law enforcement is. And when she told me that they actually had a legit good understanding relationship, I broke down crying because I was like, I thought, was it then just me? Or are they just making up sex villains willy-nilly? And was this an Italian thing? I thought maybe she would get that experience, and instead I still felt alone and isolated. I don't know.
To hear you still searching for answers?
Yeah. Why me? Why my sexuality? Why this unwillingness to admit that you're wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Why? And if anything, what I found over the course of a lot of thinking and also a lot of examination of other people's cases, is that it's really just human nature. People are so, so averse to thinking that they were wrong. Because it's not like we attach values to our own identities on whether or not we're right or wrong. And the idea that I'm wrong means I need to admit something about myself that I don't want to. And so I think that that's what I'm ultimately facing. And it's like, if I think about it that way, I actually feel less alone because we all face that in our lives in some way or another. I just faced it in a really extreme fucked up way.
What kept you going? When you're in jail, was there someone you thought about? Day 300 In '61, in jail, what was keeping you going?
I did 1,428 days. It depended on the day, right? But mostly, this is my rebel aspect of it. I did not want this thing that had nothing to do with me to control my life or to change me in ways that I didn't want to be changed. I looked around me in this prison environment and I saw so many women who had gone through so much shit and a lot of them were bitter and angry because of it. And I did not want that to be me. I understood that my life was fucked and I was living an unfair life, but I did not want that to define who I was. I still felt like the one thing that I still had control over If everything's stripped from you, you realize what you still have control over. And I had control over my own mind. So I spent a lot of time just talking through with myself how I was going to get through one day at a time, because I couldn't I could only think about tomorrow. I could only think about today. And a lot of times, I was able to find reasons to keep existing in a single day.
I had a letter to write to my mom. I had a phone call that was coming up at the end of the week. I could try to beat my record for how many sit-ups I could do at a single time. Really, really humble fucking goals, but still, ones that made me feel like it was worth living. But also we're all doing this all the time anyway. We all only have so much control over our own lives. And I think really embracing that, embracing, first of all, how things could be worse throughout the entire time that I was in that jail cell, I also was very aware that I could be dead. And I was like, okay, I'm not dead.
I could see someone with everything you were going through wanting to be dead.
Well, I definitely imagined it. And I don't like feeling trapped. One of the ways that I've changed in a big way is that I no longer feel comfortable in crowds. I just feel trapped. It reminds me of feeling like I need to know where the exit is. I need to know where the door is. When I was in my prison cell, I couldn't even look at the door because it was all bars, and it made me feel claustrophobic. So I would always look out the window. But when you are limited like that, it forces you into either a place of insanity or of extreme mindfulness, because the only thing you have is the present. And that's the only thing you ever have.
Did you ever feel like you were going insane? How many days can I fucking do this?
You stop thinking that. Really? You start thinking, I have now. Now is the only thing that I can deal with.
So you had suicidal thoughts in the jail?
I thought of ways that I would... It was my escape hatch. If it all comes down to it, here's what I can do.
Did you have suicidal thoughts once you got out?
No, I did not. To be clear, being outside of prison is always, always, always way better than being inside of prison. The transition, though, from going from an imprisoned person to a free person was not easy for me, and it still hasn't really been easy for me because my life and my identity has been defined by an accusation of a terrible sex crime. And so my life is associated with a terrible sex crime that I had nothing to do with. And I am perpetually viewed through that lens as if the only thing that is valuable about me as a human being is my role in people's understandings of this case and this case only. And I found that people resent me for continuing to go on I have a life outside of this, and I have it thrown into my face all the time that Meredith doesn't, that I'm alive and Meredith isn't. But also people resent me for trying to shed light on wrongful convictions or to build off of my experience, and grow, and learn, and reach out to other people who have been shamed in the media. What do they want you to do?
They want me to disappear. They want me to be grateful that I'm not dead and disappear.
Well, let's talk about that because you get out of prison and immediately right after, what was that like a adjusting to freedom?
Well, I don't know if you've... Have you listened to any of the episodes of my podcast? I have not. Because there's a really good one describing the day I got out of prison. Okay, I'm going to send. And I'll send you a link. There's this FBI agent who basically volunteered his services to my family to help me get safely from the prison back home. Oh my God. Like, the number of people who just came out of the woodwork and were like, I can't save you, but I can help in this way. Like an airline a flight person who was like, Oh, you can have my miles so that you don't have to pay as much money to my family so they could come visit me. And this former FBI agent, he orchestrated this whole insane James Bond-esque escape situation. And we had a really good moment.
Were there ever death threats or anything?
There were definitely death threats. And this FBI agent spent quite a lot of time setting me up with contacts that I could reach out to. I also started taking Krav Maga self defense classes.
Adjusting to normal life? What was it like? I assume everyone knew who you were. You went back to Seattle eventually after the safe house. Yeah. Were people nice, mean?
So here's the crazy thing, and this is also a really, really sweet thing. And it's a difference between what happened to me and what happened to Rafaele. And there were people in his hometown who really rallied behind him, but mostly people treated him like shit. Like he was a murderer who got away with it and no one would touch him. I came home, and the minute I stepped out of the airplane, there were people holding signs that said, Welcome home, Amanda. And the local record store had Welcome Home Amanda on their big... Where they would have like, Nervona vinyls. It was like, Welcome Home Amanda. And so I came home to an incredibly warm welcome. But At the same time, paparazzi from all over the world, descended upon Seattle and camped outside of my mom's house. And I couldn't go anywhere without being followed for months. And then when I went back to school, the thing that I wanted more than anything else was to just go back to the life I had before. I had been torn away from my life, and I just wanted to go back to my life. And I discovered that my life from before didn't exist anymore.
That I no longer could go to class without people taking pictures of me. I could no longer just ride my bike to school. I could no longer get a regular job. The case had become my life, and I had to find a way to process that experience and rebuild a whole new life, basically out of scratch.
How do you get through that?
I'm still working on that. But I think the biggest thing is it's given me, first of all, an appreciation for the myriad ways that we all experience this. There are ideas of us in other people's minds that we don't have control over, but that ultimately don't have to define us, at least to ourselves. Yes, it may mean that I can't get a job like a normal person, and it may mean that I can't go on a date with a normal person. When Raphaele, sweet Raphaele, he decided that he wanted to start dating again, and he was having a hard time. So he went on Tinder. And the second he went on Tinder, a tabloid journalist went on there and was chatting him up as if she wanted to date with him in order to write a fucking article about him. It's terrible. So you can't trust anyone. No, you can't trust anyone. And every intimate aspect of your life because you're a public person is now in the public interest, even if it has nothing to do with the crime that initially made you a public person. So this is the ongoing struggle. And also the idea that, oh, my gosh, is it the case that there is nothing that I could ever remotely possibly do in my entire life that will define me as much as a thing that I did not do?
And that may very well be the reality of my life. That very well may be it. Is that something I can live with? Well, yes, because it It doesn't stop me from trying to do good works. It doesn't stop me from trying to be the person who defines my own self, and it doesn't stop me from making choices in my own life to move on. So ultimately, it comes down to a personal decision to persevere despite the mountain of an obstacle that you have in front of you. And meanwhile, what I've discovered is I'm not the only one who's living with this. There are lots of people who feel like they are trapped in the worst experience of their lives, victims of crime and victims in the criminal justice system. We all want to be the voice of our own story, and so many of us are denied that opportunity. So, which is to say that it is so fucking great that you are even talking to me because you're giving me an opportunity to be the voice of my own experience. And for years, I was denied that opportunity. Years. And to this day, even, it's touch and go.
Some people are totally down to listen, totally down to understand my experience from my perspective. And some people are like, I'm not a real person, and I don't fit the perfect bill. Even in the world of criminal justice reform. I don't look like the ideal person to be an advocate for that. I'm this privileged white girl. I don't represent the vast majority of people, even if I've served my damn time.
Is it hard to stay in contact with Raphael?
It's a little bit simply because I completely understand that a big part of his trauma is that no one ever gave a shit about him. So the only reason why he almost lost everything in his entire life was because he started dating me five days before Meredith was murdered. He barely knew me, and his entire life got thrown through a loop, and no one cared about him. He talked about how in the trial, he was bringing up, I don't have a history. I don't have a criminal history. I had no reason to take part in a murder game. What are you talking about? And they were like, Oh, no, no, you're just Amanda's bitch. So you would do whatever she said because you're a helpless man child who would do whatever a femme fatale would say. And he's like, That's not who I am. That's not who I am.
When you tried to get back into dating, how was that? When you tried to get back into dating, how was that?
What ended up happening was my first boyfriend, after I got home, was actually someone who I had dated before in college. So someone who I knew from before, who I'd exchange letters with while I was in prison. So someone I knew and trusted. And we dated for two and a half years. And then my next boyfriend after that was someone who I knew from middle school. So all people that I knew from before but hadn't seen in many years, we'd grown, learned, come to know each other. And then finally, I met my future husband, who... Really, really cute story because, again, like I was saying, I was writing for this local newspaper. I was doing a lot of arts correspondence, so reviewing books or plays or whatever. I was given an advanced copy of his debut novel, and I reviewed it for the paper. I thought it was fantastic. It's called War of the Encyclopedists. I wrote this rave review, submitted it to the paper, and then whatever. I'll never forget about it. It's done. Next assignment. Except the very next day, I walked out of my apartment building, and in the diner window across the street was a poster for a book reading of this exact book.
And I was like, I never go out. I never, ever, ever, ever go out to public things. This is a little bookstore. It's this book that I just read. I thought it was super great. I'll just duck in. So I ducked in and I checked out this great book reading. And at the end of it, I asked him, Can I have an interview for the paper? And he was like, Sure. Come over to my house. I didn't knew who I was because there were people whispering in the crowd like, Oh, man, not this man. He was like, I don't know. I'm a poetry guy. I don't follow true It's crime, whatever. Invite me over to his house, drink Scotch, watch Star Trek, hang out, go on a walk. I interview him. Great. At the end of this interview, hangout session, he shakes my hand and says, We should be friends. And it's like a throw away thing to say. Like, okay, yeah, we should be friends. Sure. But for me, it was a month after I had been fully exonerated. And it was the first time I was like, whoa, maybe I can make friends like a normal person.
Maybe. And so he was one of the first friends I made after I was fully exonerated. And we were friends for a good nine months before we started dating. And what's even funnier is that when we started dating, he was playing the field. And And his roommate who ended up being the officiant at our wedding. He was always like, pick Amanda, pick Amanda, go for Amanda. Wait, that's such an amazing story.
Were you Living with your family when you went back to Seattle?
So I started out living with my family. Then I moved in with a friend of mine that I had known for years. And then eventually, I got my own apartment in an area of downtown.
What was your family's experience when you came back also to town?
I mean, my family has been through the fucking Ringer. When these things happen, they don't just happen to one person. They happen to a whole network of people. And so I feel like unraveling the trauma that happened to everyone because everyone's lives became utterly focused on save Amanda, save Amanda. That was the first priority, and every other priority ended up having to become secondary. That was real. But we've all moved on. We all have our lives. My sister got married and had a kid. My mom is still working as a teacher and is super happy to be grandma now. Everyone's got a life. But we're still unpacking how we've all been affected by this and how our family has been affected by it. My youngest sister was nine when I was arrested, and so she didn't really even fully understand what was happening and only had to figure it out over the years. She's 22 now.
Did any of them experience bullying?
Yes. So my sister, Deanna, describes this one situation where she was with my dad and my younger sister's at the pool. And Delaney, my youngest sister, came crying over to Deanna because she said someone had said that she was sisters with the murder girl. And then my sister Ashley has talked about how people would purposefully call her Amanda Knox instead of Ashley Knox in order to, again, highlight, we all know what your sister did.
How are How often do you think about Meredith?
It changes from the time of year. Right now, this time of year is one that I think about her a lot, obviously, because this week was the anniversary of her murder. It's the anniversary of when I was arrested. I think of her every time we come on to December fourth is when I was first convicted. So there are moments in the case that are very, very vivid It was so good to me. There was that feeling of this, again, how our lives became intertwined, and we almost became two sides of a coin. We were both We're almost versions of each other. And yet I'm the one who lived, and she's the one who died. And it's so bizarre. And at the same time, I also know that she was her totally her own person, and had her own dreams, and her own life and her own family, and that all got taken away. And as much as my identity has been usurped by this whole horrible tragedy, talk about her identity. She never got a chance to even fight back against a false narrative about her because she just is gone, and there's no way to get her back.
And so I'm especially thinking about that now that I've had a daughter, because on the anniversary of her death for the past many, many years, this 14 years, I've always put myself in her shoes and thinking like, oh, my God, what must it have been like? What were her last moments ever as a person? Horrible, horrible moments thinking, oh, my God, it could have been me. And this year, I couldn't help but put myself in her mom's shoes and thinking like, oh, my God, if that happened to my baby, what do you do? I can totally understand how her mom would have willingly taken her daughter's place if she could, and she couldn't. In the same way that my mom, every time she walked into that jail to visit me, she would have taken my place if she could. But every time she had to leave me behind in a place that she knew where I was suffering, and she couldn't do anything about it.
Do you have any contact with Meredith's family?
No, not yet. Not yet is my position, because I know that it's a complicated situation. I know that, at least in the past, it's unclear to me at this point how they feel about me, and I don't want to force a relationship onto them if it's traumatic for them. So I have sent messages to them through intermediaries telling them, I want to have a relationship with you. I want to talk to you. And I'm waiting to see if that's something that want to.
That's something you would want?
I want the same thing that they want. I want to know the truth. I want to know what happened to Meredith. I want her to be recognized for who she was, and I want their suffering to be recognized for what it is, and I want them to get the closure that they deserve. I want that, too. And that's why I have really complicated feelings about her killer, Rudy Gooday, Because I've spent time in prison now, too, and I'm thinking, here's this young guy. I've had this whole thing on my podcast talking about when he was released from prison because he's out.
How do you feel about that?
I know that he was a very young man when he made this colossal, horrible decision to rape and murder Meredith. I don't know how he feels about that today. I would hope that he regrets that. He hasn't actually shown that he acknowledges what he did, and he hasn't admitted to it and asked for forgiveness. So it doesn't give me a super hopeful feeling that he truly feels rehabilitated even. But at the same time, we're also looking at a system that is super adversarial, that disincentivizes people from admitting fault and apologizing for things. And maybe he feels like a fucking victim, too, because he was a young guy who was abandoned by his dad, brought up foster care in Italy, didn't have a great thing going for him. And he spiraled out of control, going from burglary to burglary to burglary until he majorly, majorly fucked up.
What is a word to describe how you feel towards him? Because essentially, I had to look up how to pronounce his freaking name, nor does a lot of the world. We know Amanda Knox, and it's the person that actually murdered murdered, raped, is not at the forefront of the story.
Yeah. His name is not the one that is affiliated with this horrible crime. Mine is. Yeah. I wish that I had a better word, but I think if I was going to be totally honest, I'm angry. I'm angry, and I'm still angry. That doesn't mean that I can't have a compassion for him, but I am angry. I don't think that my name ever should have been associated with his actions. And the fact that no one seems to really care about him, given that they were his actions, really bugs me out. And maybe my anger is a little bit misdirected at him because of all of the people not seeming to care that it was him.
I don't know. I don't think that's irrational at all. I think that's actually sounds like exactly what would be the appropriate response for you bearing the weight of someone else's actions, and now it has affected the rest of your life. But is there anything you do every single November second? Is there anything?
No, there's not a specific ritual. There's a quietness. There's just a thoughtful moment of, again, it's an expression of acknowledgement that I'm alive and she's not. In another reality, it could have gone the other way, or we both would be alive, or we both would be dead. It's like, how fragile are we all in any given moment? Yeah.
Do you still feel like people are judging your every move, especially on social media?
Well, I know that there are certain people who are, in fact, judging my every move on social media. At any moment in time, they're trying to find any fault that they can in me, and so they'll do that. And it'll crop up. I'll go to a Renaissance fair where my friends are sword fighting, and people were like, Oh, look, she can't get away from knives, stuff like that. So there's that. And I do feel like, on the one hand, I long for an existence where I don't need to use social media to interact with the world. I understand that it's inevitably the way that a lot of us are communicating and being a part of a digital community together, and it is important. I think it does have the negative consequence of driving us to constantly seek approval from random strangers. And I understand how much of a losing game that is. So I do think that the mind suck, time suck of social media is not necessarily healthy unless you can have a meta, almost disassociative relationship with it. On the other hand, without social media, there are so many people who have reached out to me either asking for help help, asking for perspective on their own lives.
Like, oh, I feel like no one understands me, but maybe you might understand me. Like, have those kinds of moments happen. And then also people just saying, Hey, I just want to send you some nice vibes today because I know you've been through some shit.
Have you thought about how you will explain this to your child?
Yes, I've thought about that a lot. The moment that I'm most not looking forward to is the moment when she first... When we all first say, That's not fair. Because when you reach the point of understanding whether or not something is fair or not, you've reached a level of sophistication to understand a level of human suffering that can be deep. Life really isn't fair. And it's such a throwaway thing that we just say it all the time. But when you really think about it, how life isn't fair and how bad things happen to good people for no reason. That is something that, at the very least, I feel like I've been able to think really deeply about. I have a lot of perspective about that issue, and it's not something that I take for granted. So when she reaches that moment of her life, when she starts understanding that things aren't fair, I'm not just going to throw away, like life isn't fair, throw a smile on your face. No, that existential crisis of life isn't fair is real, and one of the deeper problems that we have as human beings and as a society, because we don't have great answers for that.
And that's okay. Acknowledging that we don't have great answers for big problems gives you a level of humility to have a lot more compassion for people, no matter who they are. And then I'm sure I'm going to let her guide her own understanding of my case. She'll ask questions. She'll want to know. She'll be exposed to... I have friends who have gone to prison for things they didn't do. And she's going to know from being around me that there's something about this justice system that is a little questionable. And when she's ready, she'll ask me. And I'm going to be totally honest.
Thank you. Thank you. So much. Thanks.