I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Hear's the Thing from iHeart Radio. In two thousand and nine, Amanda Knox was sentenced to twenty six years in prison for a crime she didn't commit. You probably remember her case. Amanda was a foreign exchange student in Perugia, Italy in two thousand and seven when her roommate Meredith Kircher was raped
and murdered. Despite a lack of physical evidence linking her to the crime, Knox spent almost a decade of her life stuck in the maze of the Italian criminal justice system. Amanda Knox is thirty three now and lives in Seattle. Last year, she and her husband launched a podcast called Labyrinths. In December, they put out a special episode to mark the release from prison of Meredith Kircher's actual killer, Rudy Gaday.
Well, thank you for being here on this labyrinth with me. Should he have gotten the life sentence, I don't think so. I would not wish an unreasonably harsh sentence on anyone. I would wish them only true rehabilitation. Gooday's lawyers say he's well along that path. Maybe so, but I do know one thing. So long as he refuses to admit his crimes to show true regret, I will continue to unjustly bear his infamy, be held accountable for the Kircher's grief,
be shamed for not showing remorse for Gooday's crime. He could end all that in a second.
Amanda Knox knows what it's like to be stuck inside someone else's preconception of you.
So the work that I'm doing now is I'm a podcaster. I'm a journalist. I very often, especially in my journalism and focusing on on criminal justice issues, not just wrongful conviction issues, but more broad criminal justice issues. I'm on the board of the Frederick Douglass Project, which is working to build bridges between the incarcerated population and the non
incarcerated population. So I'm deeply interested in that divide. But my podcast work, and Labyrinths being the podcast that I've devoted so much energy and love into this past year, is about how people navigate being lost. We just had a twelve episode season that concluded on January first with an interview with LeVar Burton, which was super fun, and.
You discussed what with him.
For example, we talked about his career and how he could have done a lot of different things, how he was on the path to becoming a Catholic priest except that this one thing happened, and then he very well could have gone into politics except that this thing happened.
So we had this really fun and we actually had a lot of fun with that episode because Chris and I decided to become super nerdy and go sci fi, and we created alternate dimensions where like we talked to Catholic priest LeVar Burtons and politician LeVar Burton.
He's so talented.
Yeah, he's a sweetheart. He was so nice. But we cover a lot of ground in the in the season, and we go from anywhere from like super super dramatic stories, like we interviewed Samantha Geimer, who was the fourteen year old girl who was raped by Roman Polanski. Yeah, and how like interestingly speaking of you know, people using individual human beings like worst experiences of their lives as entertainment that they're entitled to and as a profit making machine.
Like that was her story, and she didn't react the way or didn't want the things that people expected a rape victim to want, and so they vilified her because she actually wanted some kind of amicable resolut with Polanski, and they themselves found ambicable resolutions behind closed doors, while the rest of society was still trying to churn up this like victim and villain narrative. What's the name of the podcast Labyrinths?
Labyrinths.
There's actually a really awesome comic that was drawn and came out shortly after I got out of prison, which showed me escaping the labyrinth of the Italian criminal justice system, and I felt that that was a really beautiful metaphor.
And what I've found is that not only is my own case, you know, it's remarkable and unique in a lot of ways, but it's also totally not remarkable and unique in the sense that it has all the telltale signs of wrongful convictions that happen here in the United States. But also like the feeling of going through that experience of being lost and feeling like there's this overpowering force that's like you can't actually navigate and you're sort of like on this journey and you don't know how it's
going to end. That's an experience that lots of people have. I remember going back to school and taking a poetry class, and there was a girl in my poetry class who was really clicking with my poetry. And I wasn't, you know, writing explicitly like I'm Amanda Knox. I was in prison for crime I didn't commit. It was more just like very emotional. And eventually one day she figured out who I was and she said, oh my god, you're Amanda Knox. And I was like, oh, no, Like what Google rabbit
hole has she gone down now? And instead she said, no, No, you don't understand. I was gang raped when I was sixteen, and the feeling of what you went through feels like what I went through when I was gang raped at sixteen. And I was like wow. So the fact that like I sit in this very weird position where I'm a not very usual wrongfully convicted person in what way, Well, I'm female, for one thing.
Who's usually wrongfully convicted.
People who are usually wrongfully convicted tend to be, especially in this country, tend to be young men from impoverished backgrounds and young men of color.
And that's because they can't afford a good defense.
I mean, that's part of it. There's also a lot of biases that go into it. There's a lot of sort of hysteria around youth culture, like even just issues with like gangs. That's an issue where it's like, you know, a lot of people don't understand that kids just by virtue of living in a neighborhood are sort of associated with gangs, even if they have never committed a crime. And so suddenly you're like in a gang book and
you're identifiable as a gang member. But that's only because you happen to live in that neighborhood, and you happen to associate with a number of people who also live in that neighborhood. You know, those kinds of things. But the major thing is that the criminal justice system is a system that was built by men for men, because the vast majority of people who are committing crimes are men, and for someone like me to be put through the
criminal justice system as a defendant is highly unusual. I come from a middle class background, I come from an educated background. I have no history of you know, behavioral
problems or anything like that. Like I'm usually what I mean, actually, usually the victims of crimes also happen to be young men of color, but generally when you think of someone like me, the media presents someone like me as a crime victim, and for me to be in a position of being able to both sympathize with what it is like to be a young woman who is victimized by a man, and to be able to sympathize with the experience of young men who are being put through this
incrediblely unfair criminal justice process, that puts me in a unique position to like build bridges, and I kind of view my work as bridge building, as like acknowledging the complex humanity of people on both sides of the equation and being able to bring nuance back into the true crime genre, which I tend to feel has been more dominated by scandalous, salacious, black and white presentations of stories
as opposed to more complicated ones. And a lot of times, like a lot of people reach out to me thinking that I am going to be able to understand their humanity in a way that other people just don't or refuse to, and so a lot of the stories that I end up talking about are just people who've reached out to me.
So you're not somebody who people are coming to you and going I need you to fix this for me.
I mean, a lot of people reach out to me asking me to fix things for them, But the truth of the matter is, I'm not a lawyer, so like a lot of the people who would love for me to be able to do something about someone's case, like I usually end up being the person who like directs them towards the innocence project that is closest to their location. What I end up doing is I try to give a voice to the people who have felt like their
voice has been stolen from them. And once again, it isn't necessarily someone who's been wrongfully convicted.
Did you come out of this experience when you finally were free, did you come out of this with some divine ability to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't.
No, I don't think anyone has that ability. No, they don't, absolutely not. I think that what it gave me was a perspective that I wouldn't have had otherwise, but also a sensitivity to when I view people as being scapegoated, whether they did something or not. I am very sensitive to when people become ideas of people and not actual people, and I can see that happening on a day to day basis.
What was the most consistent idea that you represented the people.
That Foxynoxy was a drug adult, sexually promiscuous young woman who manipulates men to do her bidding, Like there's this idea of I think there was also this sense of like female jealousy that was imbued in me. So basically everything that is stereotypically bad about being a woman was sort of put on me. I was made to be this like jealous, sexually promiscuous, manipulative, druggy woman, and I
came to embody that in the minds of people. And on the other hand, I also was, you know, portrayed as this like saint like damsel in distress, and even in the courtroom, people were, you know, presenting me as like, on the one hand, she has the face of an angel, on the other hand, she's really like the devil. And it was like, how about I'm neither. I'm just a young person who, like my roommate was murdered and I
had no idea what was going on. And everyone was speaking an Italian really fast, and I had no idea what was going on, and I got scared and here I am so how.
Much time did you spend in the Italian prison.
Total four years. My god, So from age twenty to twenty four, I spent in a foreign prison.
And everybody in there with you was Italian.
Actually, the vast majority of the people who were in there were either Nigerian or Roma.
Interesting.
I mean, there were plenty of Italians in there, and a lot of them were very, very poor Italian people who had ties to the drug trade and stuff like that. A lot and a lot of people in for drug offenses, whether they were drug mules or drug dealers.
Amanda Knox, if you like crime drama where the defendant is falsely accused, that listened to my conversation with filmmaker Joe Berlinger. Berlinger directed the Paradise Lost series of documentaries about the trial of the West Memphis three.
I mean, here you have allegedly a crime by three teens who are not professional killers, who brought, according to the prosecutor, three little boys out into the woods and slaughtered them to death in this savage beating, and yet there was no blood found at the crime scene. And then you look at the confession, and the confession is riddled with inconsistencies and problems coaching and coaching, so within months we knew that something was amiss.
Hear more of my conversation with Joe Berlinger at Here's the Thing dot org. After the Break, Amanda Knox describes the toll that her long wait for justice had on her family. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. After her release from prison, Amanda Knox wrote a memoir titled Waiting to be Heard. A few years later, Netflix released a documentary called Simply Amanda Knox. However, she's resisted offers to participate in a feature film based on her experience.
I actually very much pushed back against that. I mean, there's kind of a film that's sort of a narrative version of it. It's not worth watching. It's really bad. I Mean, what I thought that the documentary did that a film couldn't do was it allowed everyone to sort of present their own thoughts in perspective about what happened.
And it didn't claim to be Like, it didn't have a scene where I either kill or don't kill Meredith Kircher right, Like the problem with having a film be about it is you're making some sort of you're taking some stance about reality that is built up of a lot of claims of reality, but not necessarily reality. And in a situation where so much judgment is attached to that, I found that that was inevitably going to be flawed.
Whereas a documentary that genuinely allows everyone to portray what they experienced and what they think about what they.
Experienced and the facts as they know.
And the facts as they know them is going to be closer to the truth and also is going to present the crux of this issue, which is that people are making claims about reality that they can't actually you know, like sustain with evidence, what do we actually know? I want to preserve this sense of like, well, you know, the person who actually committed this crime, Rudy Gadet, who no one ever talks about, is not someone and who's
forthcoming with what actually happened. We have the evidence of him at the crime scene, of him interacting with Meredith's body and leaving his fingerprints and footprints in her blood. We know that. Do we have a camera on the wall where we see him doing it or we're in his mind? No?
No, he confesses right, And imagine for you you want to avoid that where they're going to leave it gray whether you really killed this girl or not. You know, a feature film is always.
Going to be like, well, you know, yeah.
That's a fear I would have.
Yeah. That's the unfortunate thing about true crime in general is there is this sort of temptation to treat it fundamentally as an entertainment product. And due to that, like the thing that is most entertaining is when people can walk away from the movie and just argue about it. You know, like, if I feel this way about the case, you feel that boy about the case, and you know,
now we can argue about it because it's unclear. And I think one of my big frustrations with my own case was that the prosecution, first of all, but also just people in general, always wanted to have this attitude of, well, the defense says this, and the prosecution says that, and so you know, there must be some sort of truth in between. Amanda must be guilty of something. We're not quite sure what it is, but she must be guilty of something. And that's actually like one of the major
reasons why I was retried and reconvicted. I don't know if you knew that, or maybe you've followed that in the documentary. But like in Italy, the double jeopardy laws aren't the same, and so when the sort of whole forensic case against me came crashing down after my acquittal,
I was retried again but on behavioral evidence. So basically the prosecution said, sure, we can't actually place her at the crime scene, but she just didn't act like I was just something like, we can't be totally wrong, so like something's got to be there. And I was reconvicted on that, like just on that sort of sense that there must be something there.
Yeah, we don't have the evidence yet, but we're going to find it. Trust me.
Yeah, like there's some you know, I just got a vibe and they bought that. And it wasn't until the Supreme Court. I was on trial for eight years, and it wasn't until the court swooped in and was like, where's the evidence. There's literally no evidence.
Explain to people who don't know what are the extradition arrangements between Italy and the United States. Did they try to have you extra died it? Because when you were convicted again, you didn't go back right.
So the way that it worked was that there is an extradition treaty between the United States and Italy, And so while I was on trial there, I was in prison, and then I was acquitted and I was allowed to go home, but I was still on trial, like they still pursued a case against me, and I was retried in absentia, so they had a whole trial without me in Italy while I was here living in the United States.
And while that was going on, I was meeting with lawyers here to see, depending on the outcome of this new trial, do I want to make a case to at least potentially serve my sentence here in the United States so it's less of a burden on my family.
So here I am like trying to go to college and go to school, but also making plans to potentially turn myself into the cops in case there's a bad outcome in this case, which there was, and I'm trying to like plan to how am I going to fight my case in court here in the US, to just see if I can try to serve a sentence here in the US as opposed to being trucked all the way back to Italy. Like that was my twenties that.
Doesn't exist to you can't serve your time in the US for a crime in Italy, can you.
Well, the US has discretion over whether or not it actually will fulfill that extradition treaty. It can always say, you know what, I don't really care to extradite her. She's going to stay here in the US. But because we want to appease the Italian justice system, we're going to hold her here in the US. She'll serve her sentence.
Really, I didn't know that. I went through a divorce in California what's been re christened the Parents' Rights movement. It was the father's rights movement. Women were favored so clearly in courts about custody and so forth. And that's slowly changing. But in an analysis that different organizations I worked with did, California was ranked at the bottom of men's rights. I mean, it was a really, really, really because and that breaks down to basically two the haves
and the have nots. I was in court, and if the guy that walks in the room is a gardener and he's getting divorced from his wife, the divorce proceedings are over in fifteen or twenty minutes. There's no money for lawyers to mine and pump out of that situation. If a famous whatever, actor, writer, musician, it doesn't matter government official. If somebody prominent who was presumed to have the resources comes into court, it's like this is a
big business. So they say to you, Alec Baldwin, your daughter who back then she was five years old, she's on the other side of this six foot concrete wall. Here's a paper clip, start digging, and you're going to start digging because if you're a normal human being who has a child, you want to be with that child, you want to parent that child. I know many people drop out and they give up and they write it off and go, I'm going to go start another family
because they're so abused by that system. And so abused was I by that that I wrote a book. So I wasn't wrongfully convicted of murder in an Italian courtroom. But I was somebody who did everything they asked me to do, and they just kept punishing me because they knew I was going to keep coming. I'm wondering in your case, was they're just this driving need for you to share with other people what I went through and the lessons of that and how you can avoid what
I went through. Was there some of that?
Well, first of all, I just want to say that I'm really sorry that you went through that. And I was going to point out, like, you know exactly what it's like to be made to be the center of a morality play that people feel like they can just you know, keep taking and like profiting from and profiting from and profiting from. And I'm sure the tabloids have their cut of the pie too, Like I get it, Like it's easy to be made the villain of a story,
especially when you're on trial, especially when you're accused. Yeah, like all of the sort of prejudices and stereotypes that we associate with people, but we don't say in polite company. As soon as you're accused of something and you're in court, like everyone feels comfortable bringing those stereotypes and prejudices to the table, Like it's no, it's always now we're allowed to say she's a.
Whore right now? When you went to prison, what was the sentence.
The first time I was convicted, I was sentenced to twenty six years, And when I was reconvicted and resentenced, I was sentenced to twenty eight and a half years. But to your point previously, I think that especially when we're talking about someone like you being in court for not you know, a murder, right, like, this is a situation where it's and I think it points to the fact that, like, this issue is not just about wrongful convictions.
It's broader than that. It's about judgment. It's about mob mentality and mob profit off of an individual human being, and it's about the dehumanization of individual human beings for profit. That is something that has repercussions, not just in wrongful convictions cases where like the stakes are highest because you know, the prosecutor ultimate.
Cancel culture, right, the ultimate cancelation. Yes, you're going to go to prison for twenty eight and a half years.
For a crime you did not commit.
Amanda Knox. If you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep it to yourself. Tell the world and be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Amanda talks about returning to Italy for the first time since her release. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing When Amanda Knox was released after four years in prison, she returned to Seattle. It took time
for her to rebuild her life. Last year, on February twenty ninth, she married writer Christopher Robinson.
He's a novelist, he has two master's degrees in poetry. He's but you know, he's my partner.
DNA expert.
Yeah no, no, no, not at all.
In fact, nothing to do with that.
No, if anything, I've sort of like dragged him into this world and that he you know, didn't really have that much of a perspective on He was just like a philosophy poetry guy. But we have a really great dynamic because of that, because you know, he can bring
his sort of analytical self. I bring my emotional, experiential self, and then we put that together into what we hope is a really complex, nuanced, heartfelt, you know journey that we put people on to your experience with paparazzi is something that you know, one of the things that people would tell me when I came home was they would say things like, I feel really bad for you because it's not like you're a celebrity. It's not like you asked for it. You just get you know, people chasing
you down the street. Do they do that to you now today? No? But when I first came home, and for many many minu months afterwards, and actually the entire time, I was still on trial, so like I was still in I was in freedom for four years, but still on trial. Like any time something happened with the case, there would be people outside of my apartment building.
But that's subsided now.
Yes, it's all finished. Now the Supreme Court in Italy definitively acquitted me in twenty fifteen. So it's over. Like it's over in the sense that I was definitively acquitted. It's not over in the sense that, like my entire life and identity is now associated with a crime that I didn't commit, that is still an ongoing reality.
Do you feel that way? Do you go places and do you? I mean not now? Maybe it's died down and where you live is it's home, and maybe you fitted and people are much more, you know, kind of polite toward you if you will. But I mean, I'll walk into restaurants you just see that look in people's eyes. Someone's eating with a crowd of people. They smack the
person next to them. They look at you, they look at them, they talk, everyone huddles up, they lie, and then all of them look at you at the same time. Five heads go slap. Then they will come back into the home and start laughing. And you are this fodder for them in this kind of gossipy, tabloidy way.
Well again, you're an idea of a person, right like they've had you as an idea of a person in their mind this whole time. And the way that I feel when I'm moving through the world is that I have this sort of doppelgang or version of me that sort of stands in front of me, and everywhere I go, I see people seeing her, and I have no idea what they're actually seeing because what the vision of me that they're actually seeing was constructed out of probably just
a lot of media, but what media and who? And like, you know, what are the things that they are projecting onto the name and face Amanda Knox or Foxy Noxy. You know, there's a sense of sort of entitlement because we are not, like I don't think our brains are even really well adapted to understand that a human being that we've seen but never encountered is a real human being.
Like back in you know, hunter gatherer days, if you ever heard of a human being who you had never actually met before in your real life, they were a god. Like that's that's the only person that you would ever have heard of that you've never encountered on day to day life. And the king would be a god. And so this like idea of a person is actually something that is very difficult for people to like genuinely understand.
So I don't know if that's you know, something that can help you process or you know, console yourself or find peace. Is like we actually, generally our brains are really really bad at understanding that a human being that we've heard of but never encountered before is a human being like I am.
I always tell people the worst thing in life is to be misunderstood, Like also there and say, kind of only people really knew who I was. I just don't feel to think people you know what we do, and you know my wife and I what we do philanthropically and all those silly things that you wind up having to resist the desire to point your finger that underline that. But I do this. And here's another thing, you.
Know, I'm a human being. Look, there are multiple sides of me.
But that's the trap that you lunge in that way and you start to advertise, and you start to respond and say to people, well, I'm really this great guy, and you don't get me, you get deeper in the quicksand unfortunately when you do that. But my point is is that in your case, you're wrongfully convicted. But there are people who do these crimes. Someone killed Meredith Kercher.
His name is Rudy Gaday. He was actually recently released from prison.
He was I mean, without getting into any ugly details, can you share with us just one moment of when you really, really when you were in prison and you just hit rock bottom and you thought, what the am I going to do? What was that feeling like for you as a person who didn't belong there.
Yeah, there are a number of moments that come to mind. Unfortunately, So first of all, I should describe what was the default setting. The default setting for me in prison was I had like I had been the sort of like cheerful, just like having a good life kind of person, and my new emotional default setting was reset to sad. Oh, so I woke up sad. I lived through the day sad. I went to bed sad, and that was just like my new emotional default setting.
Oh my god.
And I just sort of like lived that and I became numb to it, even like I was just sad and that was just normal.
What an amazing answer.
But on top of that, like there were moments where, you know, depending on the various places that we were in the case, Like very shortly after I was convicted, two years into my imprisonment, because it took that long for the trial to go do its whole thing, my dad came in to visitation and he had just had like a conversation with the lawyers about potentially how long it was going to take for the appeals process, and you know, he had to share with me, you know,
maybe it's going to be, you know, another several years. It could be five years, it could be ten years. We're not quite sure. And I at that moment, you know, during my visitations, I would very very I tried very very hard to be cheerful and to like have just like this positive moment with my family members because those moments were precious, right.
I didn't want to upset my dad. I'm here, wrongfully convicted of murder, facing a twenty six year sentence in an Italian prison. But you know, I really really don't want to upset dad.
I don't want to upset Dad because it's like we only have some We only have six hours a month that we get to see each other. So like, this is my one hour with my dad, and I just couldn't hold it together and I started sobbing. And then I did the thing that is like the worst thing that I did in prison, which is that I begged my dad to save me, even though I knew that he was doing everything he could already and there was nothing more that he could do.
So you were saying to him, you got to get me out of here.
I was like, please save me.
And what did he say?
I mean, he couldn't say anything. He just started, well, he started crying. And it was the first time I'd ever seen my father cry. It really really solidified for me how bad the situation was, because I had never seen my dad cry before in my entire life.
Is that the point where you started to consider at least that you weren't going to.
Get out of there absolutely, And you know, that was the period of time where I was writing in my journy ernals, trying to imagine what a worthwhile life would look like if it took another five years, or another ten years, or another twenty years, or if I got out as an old woman, Like what was I going to do to make my life worth living? So that was the kind of things that I was thinking about as a twenty two year old.
And when did the sun come out again and you started to have hope that you were going to get out of the labyrinth.
Well, like I said, I was afraid to hope all the way leading up to my acquittal.
You were prepared for it to go the wrong way.
I was prepared for it to go the wrong way. And the moment I was acquitted, I lost it. In fact, I lost it so hard that people who were escorting me thought, like the police thought that I had misunderstood the verdict. They were like trying to tell me, no, you got to quit it, and I was like, I know. And that was the moment of like, oh my god, it's over. And the great irony of that is that
it wasn't over. And I entered into a whole new version of this labyrinth where I thought I had got out, and yet here's this yet another four years of labyrinth ahead of me. And like the sort of true moment of feeling like I'm no longer being hunted anymore was after I was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court.
Throughout my entire trial, when everything was just getting worse and worse and worse, I kept believing that it was inevitable that I was going to be found innocent, because I was like, there's just some horrible misunderstanding and eventually the truth is going to come out. The jury's going to see through all this bullshit that the prosecution is saying, and I'm going to be released. So I was convinced the day that I was convicted that I was going
to be acquitted. And then once that happened and the world turned upside down and everything I thought was true about reality was turned upside down. I no matter how good it was getting throughout my acquittal, my appeals trial leading up to my acquittal, I was afraid to hope because I couldn't allow myself to be crushed again. And so even when there was like big news that like, you know, the independent experts are calling bullshit on all
the prosecution's forensic evidence. I was afraid to hope because I knew that, like I was innocent the first time, like what stopped them from acquitting me, you know, last time, So like for me, those are the hard moments. The sort of true moment of feeling like I'm no longer being hunted anymore was after I was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court. And honestly, one of my first true experiences was actually when I first met Chris. I
was doing arts correspondence for a local newspaper. He wrote his debut novel. I reviewed it for the paper, I asked for an interview. I interviewed him and his co author. They were two best friends who wrote a novel together, and I had this great experience interviewing. We drank Scotch, we watched Star Trek, We wandered around the neighborhood into
the night. And at the end of like hanging out with these two guys who I'd never met before, Gavin, his best friend and co author, gave me this big bear hug and Chris shook my hand and said we should be friends, and I was like, oh my god, I can just make friends with people again, Like I can just like meet people and make friends now, Like I don't have to hide anymore, have a normal life, right,
and like, you know, my life is not normal. But I was restored that that feeling that like I'm no longer being hunted, I no longer have to fear people that I don't know in the same way anymore.
Another thing that occurs to me about this is to have Civics classes taught to teach people about what are the things we need to do, one of which is jury participation, in jury selection. To use your story as a kind of a of a template here, Let's say that girl, let's say she slept with everybody in the Perugia phone directory. That doesn't make her.
A murderer, doesn't make her a murderer. Yeah, I could have been a professional dominatrix and it shouldn't have mattered because the evidence wasn't there.
Yeah, I mean that's what bothers me.
Yeah. I actually think Civics would be really really good to teach in schools. And part of that civics course would be not just your civic responsibilities, but also your rights. So I didn't know what my rights were going into the interrogation room. I didn't know how to recognize that I was being interrogated as a suspect. They certainly didn't tell me that. They certainly refused me a lawyer costing that.
So you know, like, so there are a million ways that we are set up to be ignorant in the face of these bigger societal structures that have enormous power over our individual lives. And I think that it's an atrocity that we aren't more empowered with the knowledge of how we have power over those structures and also how those structures have power over us.
I'm always filled with joky versions of this, but I have this feeling like, you get out of prison, you do the four plus years in prison, and you could have been in prison for decades, and you get out. How is your relationship with your parents now? Because, like my joke version, as you call your mom and go, Mom, I really miss you. Can we have lunch and she's like, I'm sorry, baby, I have tennis tomorrow. Where are you at with your parents now?
I mean we've always been super super close. Can I talk about a joke though that I really appreciated that first of all, I loved you on thirty Rock, and one of the first nice jokes about me was on thirty Rock that I encountered. Oh, good God, maybe there's some nice jokes out there, But most of the time I found when I first came out, that people were making jokes at my expense, of course, And the first time that I heard a joke that was not at my expense was Kristen on thirty Rock saying it's not
hard to be famous. Amanda Knox is famous for not killing someone, and that was like, Oh, you can make a joke and not at my expense, Thank you.
Thank you, Kristin Shaw. But things are good with your family, absolutely, and they appreciate you and hold you close because you could be over there right now, in an alternate universe. You could be over there now, just really really struggling.
Absolutely, And their lives all came to a stop when everything happened to me. So it's not like my life was sort of trapped in a hole and theirs went on. Like everyone in my family, their whole lives just came to a stop. And this was especially difficult on my younger sisters. I have three younger sisters and one of them was eight years old at the time has happened, another was thirteen, one was just going into college. Their lives stopped, like everything, all my entire family became about
saving Amanda. Save Amanda. And it wasn't until I was able to come home that we've all been able to restart our lives. And of course we all live within walking distance of each other, and it's always been that way.
Have you been back to Italy?
I have been back to Italy. So I was invited by the Italy Innocence Project, which did not exist while I was in prison, to come and speak at their first ever annual conference about trial by Media. And I felt that, like, of all of the ways to return to Italy, that was the best way possible. Like, you know, I had struggled with the idea of like how am I going to go back and see the people who supported me and thank them and like to try to
do that process. And I returned and the press called it, you know, Amanda's familiar dance with the with the paparazzi, and it's like, actually, I'm being assaulted by them, Like I can't move because they're throwing themselves at me and my partner, the country.
That originated the word paparazzi, by the.
Way, yep, Yeah, that was a crazy experience. I had many many good moments.
Were you scared to go there? Were you terrified to go there?
I was absolutely scared to go there.
You're braver than I. I would never go back there again ever.
Well, Like the crazy thing is, these things happen everywhere, right, Like, it's not like there's anywhere where you're safe from being judged, you know, like misunderstood and misjudged and mistreated.
You're in as much danger here as you are in Peruja.
Yeah. The one difference being that like here in the US, there's more of a nuanced sentiment towards me, whereas in Italy there's more of a She's the oj Simpson of Italy kind of thing. And I was surprised. Like the big surprise that I had was when I gave my speech, I was fully prepared to get arrested again, like to like get shanked, get booed, like all of that.
Do you say shanked a prison term? You just put a chill in my back to get shanked. What a reveal that was? You really did do four years in prison.
Yeah. Shit, I was surprised when people gave me a standing applause for my talk, and granted, these are the kind of people who are going to show up, who are interested in criminal justice issues, who are interested in the Italy Innocence Project, who are going to show up anyway, so they I was a more accommodating audience, but I
was not. I was not ready for it. Like I I remember like being whisked away because I had have personal security while I was there, Like it was, it was not an easy process, and this like personal security guard sort of whisked me away down the stairs, down the hallway in underground where I had this like secret sort of underground dungeon bunker thing where I sort of lived throughout the entire conference. And as soon as we got down the stairs, he gave me a little squeeze
and said parfeto and I just started bawling. And it was a really great moment where I was like, Wow, maybe I'll be given a chance, not even a second chance, like a chance. In Italy.
Journalist, public speaker and podcaster Amanda Knox by'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue, and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening.