You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.
I'm under a lot of pressure because I'm still on trial. But I'm still a young person, and I'm making a lot of mistakes and they are big, like they're a big deal to make mistakes because I have to be perfect. I cannot afford to make mistakes when I am on trial for murder.
For Mama Maya, you're listening to No Filter. I'm Cape lane Brook, twenty years old, living in Italy with other young people, learning Italian, falling in love with a local boy, working part time in a bar, and exploring the city and its art and culture and food with a fun and interesting group of other girls from all around the world. It sounds like heaven right, like the ultimate youthful dream, and that's exactly what it was for Amanda Knox until
it turned into her worst nightmare. Amanda is thirty eight years old now, she's married to the love of her life, she's a mom of her own daughter now, and she's reflecting on the last eighteen years of her life because in two thousand and seven, Amanda Knox was wrongfully convicted of the brutal murder of her British roommate Meredith Kircher in a botched investigation that seent her to prison in Italy for nearly four years and kept her on trial
for nearly eight years. Eventually, and after far too long, Meredith's real killer was caught and Amanda was fully exonerated. But that's not the end of Amanda's story, not by a long shot, because how do you even begin to reconstruct your identity, your sense of self after such a horrible thing defining you for so long. Amanda has a new book out called Free where she ruminates on that
and so many other big, hard things. And what you're about to hear is one of the most generous conversations I've ever had with someone who's had so much of her story told for her about her, but not anymore. Here's Amanda Knox in her own words, Amanda Knox, Welcome to no Filter.
Hi, Keate, thank you for having me.
You are as the world has come to know someone who really doesn't have much of a filter anyway.
Is that true? Okay?
Well, you know it's interesting because given the circumstances that you found yourself.
In or maybe the world didn't have a filter for me. Maybe that was the problem.
Interesting because also the circumstances that we're talking about, and i'd like to preface this conversation actually by acknowledging Meredith Kercher, who was murdered in Italy in two thousand and seven, not by you, that's right.
By a person who is now under investigation for assaulting another young woman. So, yes, I studied abroad with a young woman named Meredith Kircher, and we were both there only for a few weeks before she came home one night and someone had broken into our home and he raped and murdered her, stabbing her many times, and then
fled the country. And you know, as sad as and tragic as that that event was, I think one of the things that I've been shocked to realize is just how vulnerable young women are when they are abroad and traveling. And I never really thought about that when I made my decision to go study abroad. And I just feel like, of the two of us, I'm the lucky one because I got to go home.
Yes, and and and given the circumstances of meritis murder, and it was in the house that you were sharing at the time. It could have been you.
Yeah, and that does not escape me.
I mean I talk about that in a chapter of my book Free, my Search for Meaining that's going to be coming out, where I talk about how she and I are Almost the way I think about her today is that we were two sides of the same coin, and fate just flipped the coin, and it just so happened that she she came home that night and not me.
I had met, you know, a young boy five days earlier, and I was justo and I was just so enamored of this boy that I was spending every night with him, and so it just so happened that I didn't come home that night.
But if Meredith and I hadn't gone.
To that classical music concert at my school, I never would have run into him, and I never would have met him, and I would have come home, and who knows what it would have happened.
You know what happened after Meredith's passing, though, And it's the knock on effect which has led you to us today. Yeah, and to the work that you're doing now in the world. And you speak in your book Free, which is such an extraordinary book about the knock on and how many victims there are. Obviously Meredith is a primary victim, but there's her family, her siblings, there's you, there's your family, there's your siblings.
Rapelle his family, his siblings. Yes, and I mean I would also argue that, you know, Perusia itself was victimized because in a way it went from being this lovely town where you know, nothing of this this.
Gravity was happening in this town.
Yes, there was like some petty crime going on some it was a college town, so there were things like, you know, some thieving there. There was some drugs that was going around, but you weren't. You didn't expect to be murdered in Perusia, Italy, like this small college town. Really, I thought it was one of the most beautiful places and happiest places I'd ever been up until that nightmare began.
So Perusia I think got a bad rap because you know, out in the world it was depicted as who knows what this like drug den of debauchery, and that's not true. You know, like just because one young man who was unhinged and spiraling broke into our home and then things escalated doesn't mean that, you know, Perusia itself is at fault for what happened.
You know, how did you find yourself going to Italy? So you had you know, you came from a middle class American family. Obviously was very important in your family because you were learning Japanese as a teenage, you're already but your fantasy. How was the fantasy born for you to go study in Italy? And then how did it come to be?
Great question? So I talk about this.
A little bit in the book about how my mom always thought that I was going to live an extraordinary life, and I didn't really know what that meant. I knew that from a young age, I was really interested in the bigger, broader world, right Like, my mom was born in Germany and my family was a divorced family. My dad had his house, my mom had her house, and
there were very different cultures in those two houses. Right Like, at my dad's house it was Hamburger's and hot dogs, and at my mom's house it was Zvechkin Knuru and you know, reladin, and so we were having like even just food wise, the accents, my Alma's accents. So like I knew that there were other ways of being out there in the world, and all of those different ways of being were valid, they were just different. And so that made me intensely curious about other cultures and other lifestyles.
And when I visited Rome with my family when I was fourteen, I just fell in love with the country.
I was enamored of it.
And so I decided that for my junior year abroad, I was going to apply to a study abroad program in Italy, and I specifically chose a small town because I was hoping that I would have more time spent with Italian people as opposed to like hived off in a group of American students who were in Rome and just doing all of their things together. I wanted more of a small town experience.
You wanted immosion.
I wanted immersion absolutely. I wanted to become fluent in the language. I was very you know, I had been to class, and I know, you know, I had learned words like scoyatolo, which is squirrel, or you know, I could tell you, I could ask you where the bathroom was or where the biblioteco was, but like I could, I didn't speak the language. And so I was really hoping that just by diving in, I would be immersed in both the language and the culture, and I would just absorb it.
And you know, in a way I have, like I.
Spent four years of my life in Italy in not the circumstances that I had hoped for, But certainly I did be careful what you wish for.
I did get immersed.
Well, yes, you did. And speaking of being careful what you wish for, your mum's you know prophecy to you that you will live in extraordinary life when you were just you know, you were a child, reminds me of the Chinese proverb may you live in interesting times? That is actually.
Right?
And what are you called to be in those interesting times?
Right?
Yes? And what do you learn about yourself in those interesting times?
But you know, Seneca also said, I consider you unfortunate if you have never experienced misfortune, because you have never known, you've never been tested, not even you know who you really are and what you are capable of. And so that's a way of reframing again those like really difficult experiences that we have as something that's not just terrible but potentially valuable.
And of course it's easier to take that that point of view when you're on this side of fairpoint.
Fair point, yeah, yeah, But those four years in jail, did you think, Oh, I'm so lucky to be experiencing this, because this will this is my character that's been forged in the fire.
I'm pretty sure that you didn't know.
I mean, and you know I talk about this in the book. How I went through different stages, right, how they're the first two years really was in a kind of in denial of the fact that I was this was my life, right, I just I felt like I was that little kitten holding onto the branch, just hanging in there until.
I could have my life back.
Right. I was accidentally living someone else's life, and someday all of the adults in the room would figure out that I didn't belong here, I didn't belong in a prison cell, and they would let me go home. And then the conviction came and the twenty six year sentence came, and that little kitten dropped, and I realized that I
was not living someone else's life by mistake. This was my life, and it was unfair and it was sad, but it was still mine to live and you know, I talk about this in this chapter, about having this epiphany and how it felt cold, But with that coldness came a kind of clarity, like, oh, I have been waiting to live two years of my life. I've been waiting to live because I haven't been unable to acknowledge and accept that the circumstances of my life are this.
There is nothing other than this. There's no alternate reality that I should be living in, Like this is it and it's not fair and it's not fun and I shouldn't be here. But I can't focus on what I should like my life as it should be.
I have to focus on my life as it is.
And it was not easy, right, Like Weirdly, I think actually being trapped in a prison cell made it made it a much quicker moment of like shift in perspective for me than it might have been otherwise, because.
When we're out here in the world, we all.
Are trapped in circumstances that we didn't choose and that had come to that.
Are external to us.
But I feel like we can trick ourselves into thinking that we have control or that we get to decide, and that we are the ultimate protagonists of our own story and not just a pawn in someone else's, but like being stuck in a prison cell made it very clear to me that these were my circumstances. There was no other thing that I could and should be like here I was, So what was I going to do within the frame that I was given that was meaningful to me? And you know, like I couldn't answer that
question in a grand scope of things. I couldn't answer that question in terms of twenty six years of my life, but I could ask myself, what can I do today that is worth living for?
And that's it you speak in the book, And it was just a very interesting, simple example of what was going on with you that if you looked at your immediate surrounds, you were filled with despair. But if you could look a little bit out of the window and say a little chink of the landscape, it made the experience different for me.
Yeah, it's that shift in perspective or you know, so there's that one sort of shift in perspective where like you're looking at a window, do you see the bars or do you see the bunny rabbits on the other side of the window that are like frolicking in the grass.
You can choose which thing to focus on, but there's also the seeing very clearly what is in front of you, Like do you look at your prison cell and see all of this time that is being wasted, or do you see all of this time that you can be doing something in that actually matters to you?
And so I've found.
Little things, little humble things that mattered to me that made again a day worth living for, or even an hour worth living for. Was writing a letter to my mom, out doing the number of sit ups that I could do the day before, reading a book, getting more fluent in Italian.
All of those things matter to me.
Making a call, making a coffee in.
Your cell, or you know, I talk about the book or in the book about this concept of ekey guy, which is the intersection between what you are good at, you like to do, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for this like purpose that you have. And I came to Italy because I loved the Italian language,
I loved the Italian people. I had this idea in my mind that I would be a translator and I would be a bridge between people who could not understand each other, and all of a sudden, again, careful what you wish for.
I found myself immersed.
In a world in the prison of people who were either illiterate, so Italian, but illiterate, so they couldn't read their letters, they couldn't read their court documents.
They needed help.
I could do that because a lot of them were foreign A lot of them.
Are foreigners, Nigerians, Romani or they were from very very poor, poor Italian families. So people who like I did not realize that there were still, you know, people in the world who grew up never going to school because.
They were just that poor.
And so I was meeting this, I was coming face to face with those realities in prison, realizing that I was one of the few people in here who could read and write, and eventually who could read and write in both English and Italian. And so I became a very very valuable asset in the prison environment. And we again you know that, careful what you wish for. I became a translator. I wasn't paid, well, I guess I was paid for it in the sense that like I went from I got respect, you know, like that was.
My prison hustle.
You know, I talk about that which is, which is a valuable currency in prison. Exactly before this and before your epiphany, and before you're deciding to live the life that you were living rather than you know, dream yourself into a fantasy when none of this had ever happened. Tell me how you came to be living in the house with Meredith, who was also a student, and with two other Italians? Yes, how do you? How do you go to Italy and then find yourself in a share house?
And what were your days like then? Oh?
I mean I went and visit Perusia with my sister. We came down from Germany. We were staying with our family in Germany. We came down on a train just to check it out, poke around. I went and visited my university and I saw a flyer up for a room for rent that was at a little house that was right down the road. And I actually the girl who was posting that poster was right there putting it up, and I said, oh my gosh, hi, I'm looking for a room.
You know, Can I check it out?
And she said yeah, absolutely, And this was Lauda, one of the Italian roommates. So I followed her down the road. It was the first place that I saw. It was gorgeous, this little cottage that overlooked the valley that was just right around the corner from the university. So it seemed like an ideal situation. I had two Italian roommates. There was another room for rent. They said they were looking
for another roommate, and so I signed up. I gave them my first deposit, and I went back to Germany with my sister, just like gather the rest of my things and say bye to my family, and went back down and moved in. And by the time I moved in, Meredith had also moved in. And that was that, you know, just a flyer at the university, like a lot of people.
And Meredith was English yep, so she was your obviously.
American, yeah, And we had a lot in common. She was just a year older than me. We were both studying abroad. We were both interested in journalism and writing. She read a lot of mystery novels, I remember, and she had also a number she had met a number of other British girls, so she had a little like British friend group that she hung out with, and then she also hung out with the friend group that we
had constructed which was our house group. So me and Philomona and Lauda and Meredith we would go out to dinner or we would go out dancing, so we were like two different friend groups of hers.
And what role did Patrick Lamumba's Bob in your social scene?
Well, I met Patrick through Lauda. So I had suggested to Lauda that I was used to having a job.
In fact, I had three.
Part time jobs leading up to going to Italy, and so I told her, Hey, you know, I'm looking for a part time job while I'm there. Do you know anybody? And she said, well, yeah, I have a friend who works with at this guy's bar, so I'll put you in contact. And when I met Patrick, he said that he would love to have someone who could help put, you know, pass out flyers to other university students and then come and serve drinks at his bar. And I thought that was a good opportunity for me to meet
people and practice the language. And it was very part time. I think I only worked like twice a week, so it was very very low key.
But when we were talking earlier about the broad sweep yes of Meritith State and the people that it sweped up in that Patrick was one of those.
Absolutely.
He ended up also being falsely accused, yes, of Merediths murder.
Yes.
So in the early days of the investigation, the police made a number of false assumptions. They assumed that the break in into our home was staged. They did not believe that a burglar would have broken in through that window and the way that they did, so they automatically decided that no, this was not a break in. Someone in the house is involved with in the crime and
is trying to cover it up. And of the people that they were that could potentially be that person, all of the boys who lived in the apartment downstairs from us, all of them had ironclad alibis. They were out of town. Lauda was out of town. Philomena was with her boyfriend. I was with my boyfriend. So Philamina and I were the two ones where we only had one person could identify us where we were.
And at the same.
Time that the police had one other lead. They located a what appeared to them to be the hair of an African person at the crime scene on Meredith's body, and so they said to themselves, Okay, we're someone in the house is involved in this. It's either Philamena or Amanda, and a black person is involved with this.
So they had that in their mind.
And then they looked at Philamena and me, and they noticed an important difference. Especially in the early stages of the of the discovery of the crime. Philamena had seen inside Meredith's room. She saw Meredith's body, she saw the crime scene, she saw the blood, she saw everything and was screaming and crying and losing her mind. I had not, And there's this famous clip of me that has made its way around the world. It's this clip of me standing outside of the crime scene the day that it
was discovered. I'm standing there with Raphaela, looking just sort of lost, and then he kisses me to like comfort me. And that was, you know, replayed over and over in slow motion, and people look at that and say, look, she doesn't seem to even care that her roommate was murdered.
And I like to point out to people that, like, I wasn't even sure what was going on in that moment, because as soon as the door was kicked down and Meredith's body was discovered, everyone started screaming in Italian and I had no idea what they were saying. I could only pick up little bits and pieces. I was trying to piece everything together. I was talking to RAPHAELI going, what did they see? Can you talk to somebody?
What is going on? Do they know it's Meridith? Is it like?
And so there was a moment in there where I was just sort of like in shock, trying to piece everything together, and people look at that moment as evidence of me like not caring, when really they'd understand the circumstances of that.
Certainly the Italians were like, this is not how a good Italian girl would behave these circumstances.
Right, And so I think they imposed some of their prejudices onto me, and already they were sort of forming this idea. And then when they discovered like they brought me in for questioning many times over the course of those days and that final interrogation, they were convinced that it was me, like I was hiding something, I was
not telling the truth. So they brought in my boyfriend who was my alibi, and tried to try to get basically force him to withdraw my alibi and at the same time try to force me to say something else. To do anything else.
After this short break, Amanda recalls the moment she returned to her share house and discovered that something was very, very wrong ste with us. Now all of these I'm trying to imagine how you process any of this, given that you're so young, that you've come from your boyfriend's house, you've come back to your place. Is this right for
a shower in the morning? Tell me what you found at the at the apartment when you came back from Raphaela's place, thinking that it was just another morning, and I believe you were going to go off for a weekend TiAl. He wanted to take you somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, he was going to take me to So it was a holiday weekend because Halloween and all Saints Day, all of that, it was going to be. Yeah, it was so November exactly thousand and seven, and so there was no school. We were going to take the days off and go and visit this beautiful neighboring town. And that morning, my plan was simply to go back home, get changed into something pretty for a romantic weekend, and you know, take a shower, blow dry my hair, and
meet back up with him. And I came home and found a number of strange things, like my door was open. The front door to the house was open, and that was odd. But at the same time, I thought to myself, well, the lock is broken on the door. We all have to lock it with the key just to make sure it doesn't blow open with the wind. Maybe someone didn't lock it and the wind blew it open. So I walk into the house and I go, hello, is anyone here?
No one answers. I go, huh, close the door, go into my room, get undressed, go into the bathroom to take a shower, and while I'm brushing my teeth, I noticed a few specs of blood in the sink and I went huh. And at first I thought it was from my ears because I recently had pierced my ears, and I thought, oh my god, am I bleeding? But I was like, no, that's dry blood.
Huh.
And then I thought, huh, Well, I mean we're girls. Maybe someone's on their period.
Who knows.
So I take a shower, and as soon as they get out of the shower, I noticed there's more blood on the bath mat. And again I'm like, okay, weird.
But also.
That sort of rationalization is still happening. I'm not thinking, oh, someone's been murdered. I'm just thinking, oh, weird, someone must have maybe cut themselves.
I don't know.
And then I go into my room, I get changed, I go into the separate bathroom. There's a different bathroom that has the hair dryer. I start blowing drying my hair, and I noticed that there is feces left in the toilet. And then I immediately went, oh, no, something's off because I could explain away these other things that I had seen up to that point as like, oh, maybe they
just didn't lock the door. Oh you know, maybe someone is having other period, but like none of my roommates would have left feces in the toilet, And I immediately went.
Oh, no, someone's has someone been here?
And I got creeped out, and I immediately went back to Raphaeley's apartment and started calling my roommates asking like, hey, did something happen?
What's good?
Like not quite sure what to think of what I had seen, but I was calling and trying to find out, and Raphaeley said, well, you know, talk to your roommates. We'll go back together. We'll take a closer look see what's going on. So he goes back with me, and that's when we discover by poking around more, I went into other people's rooms. I went to Laura's room, Philamena's room and found that Phila Mayna's room had been clearly ransacked.
The window was broken, her stuff had been gone through, but weirdly, her laptop was right there, her very expensive camera was right there. I was looking around the house going like, what kind of burglar breaks into the house and doesn't take a laptop? Like what is going on? So it wasn't making sense to me, like what was
going on? But we called the police. The police came my room when of Philamena came back, and eventually, when everyone was there and talking and trying to figure out what was going on, they broke down Meredith's store and found her body.
So wow, yeah, it's.
It was not at all in my worst nightmares could I imagine that that's what was what we were going to find.
Like I I was really.
Unprepared for the reality that's set in in that moment, so much so that I think a part of me
went into denial. I was like, wait, no, what, No, that's impossible, No, like what and again being very confused by a lot of very upset people speaking in very rapid Italian, and you know, like I didn't really fully fully know that it was Meredith and that she had been killed and that was her body in the room until I was at the police station and I asked a police officer specifically, like do they know that that's Meredith? And they said yes, And I said, how how did
she die? Because I didn't even know? And they said that she had that someone had slit her throat, and I was just like what, Like.
It was just beyond imagining.
I couldn't I couldn't imagine something like that happening to her.
But then of course you're thrown into an interrogation. You don't have a lawyer, you don't have an interpreter. You think that you're there in some kind of witness capacity or because you were Meredith's house man.
Yeah, yeah, but what was.
Really going on with the with the police?
Yeah?
So I only found this out later that of all the people that were connected to the house or that new Meredith, any of the people that they we interviewing, the only person that they had wiretapped was me. They were listening into my phone calls They were clearly focusing their attention on me from day one, and what I was told by the police was that I was their most important witness, that I was the one who was closest to Meredith. I was the one who came home
and discovered the crime scene and called the police. Therefore, I was crucial to them discovering who had killed Meredith, and they needed me to be at their disposal twenty four to seven so that we couldn't let the you know, the killer get away. And I believed them. I mean, I had zero experience with this, and I did exactly what I was told, and you know, I had good reason to. I was raised to, you know, trust police to when I was in trouble call nine one one.
I didn't even know how to call nine one one in Italy. That's why I asked Raphael to call for me. And I just did exactly what they told me to do. So when they called me in at you know, or called Raphae la in at ten thirty pm, after I had already been answering their questions over and over for days already, I didn't question it.
I just showed up.
And when the interview started being very different, than what I was imagining it would be.
I started to get scared.
They you know, I actually did a big series on my podcast Labyrinths about this, about false confessions and about the methods that are used to break down a person. I didn't know at the time that I was being subjected to a methodology which is to nitpick a person, like ask a person to repeat their story over and over again so you can find inconsistencies and nitpick them.
Then you start escalating things and start making accusations like you're lying and putting pressure on the person, bullying, isolation, you know, withholding of food and water, bathroom breaks. I was on my period and I needed to use the bathroom late sleep, absolutely. And then they introduced a new ideas. Once they had sort of nitpicked me and made me
start questioning my own reality, they introduced an idea. They lied to me and said that they knew I was at my house when the crime occurred, and that I had witnessed something so terrible that my mind had blacked it out, but that I had to remember it or the killer would get away and I would spend thirty years in prison. And I, you know, this middle of night hours going into this, I didn't know what to think.
I started. I thought I was crazy. I started to believe them.
And when they located a text message that Patrick, my boss, had sent me the night of the murder, or that I had sent him actually in response to him sending me a message, they interpreted that message that I sent him as an appointment to meet with him the night of the murder.
As soon as they saw that I had.
Said okay us, oh yeah, so yes, n I'll see you and I.
See you later, they interpreted that as not just like okay, chow. It was like, we have an appointment the night of the murder. And they said, look, you've been lying the whole time. Who's this Patrick, He's the one who did it. And they asked me to imagine what my repressed memories were. And after hours of this, I tried. I tried, and at a certain point I became convinced that I was maybe remembering the truth. But even then it was I'd never like, I never had a memory of anyone killing Meredith.
I had a memory of being in my kitchen. I had a memory of seeing Patrick out, you know, out by the school. I had a memory of walking down you know, the street outside of Raphael's how but I never actually imagined anyone killing Meredith. It's just from smashing all of these pieces together that certain inferences were made. And then they they typed that all up and had me sign it, and that was it. That was enough
for them to go and arrest Patrick. And what's really really sad about all of this is, you know, we're talking about Patrick as a victim of all of this. Patrick had a solid alibi, Like they went and arrested him despite the fact that he had a solid alibi. The day after he was arrested, people came forward saying, this is he's not the killer. We know where he was. He was with us all night at his bar, like we were all there, and the police did not release him.
And luckily later on am I right that they produced one of the guys, who I think was from Switzerland or something, produced a physical receipt from the bar that proved that right was.
You know, even by this point, right like the day after he was arrested, I had already recanted, like I had written a retraction, and still they would not release him until they had arrested a different person. And even after they released him. He spent two weeks in jail despite having an ironclad alibi. They kept his bar closed for another three months for no reason, and he lost his bar because the police would not allow it to open, and it was considered, you know, crime scene.
Aside from Raphael obviously because he was there. But when you decided to phone home, who was your first phone call to Was it to you mom? And to your dad?
My mom?
Mad? Yeah, And what did you say in that confsation?
Well, the first call that I made was when I was coming back from my house that you know, the first time I went to my house and I was going back to Raphaels and I called my mom and it was the middle of the night for her, and I said, Mom, I think something's wrong in my house. And I described to her what I had seen, and she she also didn't really know what to make of it, but she said, go back to Raphael. As she knew that I was now dating this nice guy named raffae La,
So go back to rapae LA's talk to him. You know, don't go anywhere by yourself. Figure out what's going on with your roommates, like call them, you know, figure it out. She was very supportive, like in the sense of like, you know, you're not crazy, because I was calling her, going am I crazy? Like? Am I overreacting? Is this something like? And she was like, no, no, no, you're not crazy. These are red flags. You should talk to your you know,
your friends. And then, you know, the next call I was able to make was in the police station, and I'm trying, you know, to tell her what's going on, and I'm trying to figure it out myself, and and really not knowing the depth of trouble that I was already in, you know, I was for days. My mom was telling me, I think you should come home, or I think you should go to your family, like we have family in Germany. You should go to Germany, just you know, get out of there. It's not safe. There's
a killer on the loose, who knows. And I kept telling her, I can't leave. The police say that I'm supposed to help them, and.
So I didn't leave.
And you never ended up leaving.
No, I never did, because you know, I was recently doing some advocating at my state legislature and I was explaining to the legislature about police deception and how it's how devastating it is, and I pointed out to them that I'm not just you know, I'm famously a wrongly convicted person, right like I'm famously a victim of the criminal justice system. You would expect me to have a negative perspective about the police. But what people failed to remember is that I was a crime victim before I
was ever a victim of the criminal justice system. Someone broke into my home and raped and murdered my roommate, and I had to come home and discover a crime scene. I had to come home and ask for help from the police, and I was betrayed as a crime victim. I was failed by the police that I called for help, And I think people forget that, you know.
I write in my book.
About how people don't often ask me what it's like to have lost a friend.
And I was struck by that reading your book. I've read both of your books, actually, your first one was actually one of the first biographies I ever read. Really, yes, but I was struck by the fact that you were never afforded the time to process this. What would be the hugest trauma in anyone else's life, to lose a friend, to lose someone that you lived with in such a vicious and violent manner because of the tsunami of legalities that ensued.
Yeah, and it's only like.
Years later now that I get I have the privilege of getting to really wrap my head around that loss and about what it means for me and what it means for me as a mother now, you know, I as soon as I became a mother, and you know, I talk about this in the book, like I can now appreciate the pain that not just my own mother felt, but also Meredith's mother.
Yes, yes, and.
How you would never you would trade places with your child in a moment.
If you could.
And you know, there is this ongoing sadness. I feel that Meredith's death is wrapped up in my identity through you know, the whole tsunami as you call it, that followed, and I have to I have.
To hold that.
And you know, talk about accepting things as they are, I have to accept that and hold that and understand that responsibility and what that and try to process what that means for me, on top of just trying to remember those good moments that I had with this lovely girl, you know, going to the grocery store, together, or going thrift shopping together, or baking cookies together, or visiting the chocolate festival in Perusia together, Like, all of those memories
of her as a person are buried under a mountain of year's worth of trauma, and I have to like put aside the crime.
Scene photos that I've seen and.
The headlines about me that pitted us against each other, and the ongoing sort of sense that anything good in my life is an offense to her memory in the eyes of some people.
Well, this is interesting because even after you served your four years and then that conviction was overturned and you stepped into freedom, which turned out to be a finite freedom, yes, because then they retried the case. But in that time, I think there's a perception that you're like like, oh, it's all over free, But you were never really free, also because you were so constrained by your inability to show joy or do things that still a normal young
woman would do go out and have a drink. Because all people know about the death of Meredith Kircher is Amanda Knox.
Yeah, And I mean that's a really important difference between my first memoir and the second one. And I'm so glad that you've read both, because you can appreciate this difference. Is Waiting to be Heard was written at a specific time in the course of this story, and for a very specific reason. I had just been released from prison, but my legal troubles were not over, and there was a chorus of voices authoring my experience, saying who I was and what had happened and what had didn't happen.
And I felt like I needed to respond to the accusations and the stories out there that were about me and and give sort of like my voice, just add my one voice through my book Waiting to be Heard, And it was a very reactive thing.
It was a description of the case.
From my perspective, this new book Free is not that it is a very very different book, because this book didn't have to exist. This is the book that I was able to write because I have been able to process and grieve and grapple with a lot of the things that we overlook when it comes to wrongful conviction stories.
You know, I talk about how.
When you hear the typical wrongful conviction story, what you hear is, you know, the lead up to the crime, and then you hear about the crime, and then you hear about the trial, and then you hear that the person got out of prison and they had their first hamburger. The end, and that's the call it the hamburger moment.
The end.
And then the curtain drops and people think that's the end of the story, and I want to say, no, no, they're not done, done, done, And it's.
Like, no, no, Now.
That person has to ask themselves the question now what now that I have spent like an enormous amount of my life has been devoted to proving my innocence, Who am I?
And what is my place in the world?
And you know, I had this weird sort of limbo space in the that I get go into depth in the book about where I'm under a lot of pressure because I'm still on trial, but I'm still a young person, and I'm making a lot of mistakes and they are big, like they're a big deal to make mistakes because I have to be perfect. I cannot afford to make mistakes when I am on trial for murder. And so it was a very scary period of time in my life, and I felt levels of shame and self blame and
isolation that I was not expecting. I thought the entire time I was in prison that I was going to, like get to go back to the life I had before everything happened in Italy, and that was not the case.
I didn't be the.
Person and be the person that I could pick yourself up again and stick back into that scheme suit.
And that that world didn't exist and that person didn't exist. And so I spent years struggling and feeling ostracized and like I didn't belong to the rest of humanity. And then over the course of time, little little things happened
that started turning turning it around for me. Meeting other wrongly convicted people, meeting other women who had been vilified in the media, meeting my husband, and having the opportunity to have the family that I thought had been stolen from me when I had received that twenty six year sentence, and all of those things. I think the best description I've ever heard of grief is it's like holding a box that's just a little too big and it's a
little too heavy. You can hold it, but it's awkward and it hurts, and you can only hold it a certain way for a certain time until you have to shift and I feel like I've been doing that with my grief, and you can see the evolution of this like awkward positioning that I've had to do and the strength that I've had to sort of learn in order
to carry it. And finally, you know, get to a point where I don't feel like I have to that my identity, especially as it regards you know, being the girl accused of murder.
That isn't just a burden. It isn't just a source of pain or grief.
It's an opportunity, and it's an opportunity to care for what you wish for, build bridges between people who otherwise wouldn't understand each other.
When we come back Amanda, she is the meat cute that laid her to her husband Chris, and discusses the complexities of moving forward in your life after such a life defining tragedy, and Amanda shares her message for Meredith's family if they're listening, This is very interesting the course that your life has now taken, or in fact that you have taken your life. In twofold one, you found
your husband, Chris, who wanted to hold that box with you. Yeah, that must have been amazing for someone who'd come from an experience where every time you thought you were in kind of a safe place, the rug got pulled from you. Were you expecting that when you met Chris for that to be the case.
Now we have a really cute meet cute story, because obviously I was not on Tender or any of the websites.
That was not for me.
So I was a special kind of ostracized where it's like, oh, you've been accused of something horrible and nobody wants to have anything to do with you.
Kind of baggage.
Yeah.
I did date two people after coming home, but they were people that I knew from before, you know, from my childhood, and so there were challenges in regards to that because in a way, there was this idea that I would be the.
Person I was before, and I wasn't.
I had clearly been changed by this, And there was also a lot of pressure. You know, people were calling my boyfriend my boy toy, and the tabloids.
Because of course you were Foxy Noxie in the Maybia.
Still, yes, son, any person who wanted to attach themselves to me was either my little male puppet slave or they were clearly a psychopath themselves. Because you know, they would photoshop knives into my boyfriend's hand, you know, like just horrible stuff. So only a psychopath whatever loved me,
was the message. And I felt very alone. And then I started writing for a local newspaper, doing arts correspondents, and I was writing under a pseudonym, and I received an advanced copy of this novel, this debut novel of a local writer. It was called War of the Encyclopedists. And I read it and thought it was amazing and wrote a rave review and submitted it to the paper and.
Thought that's that. But then the very next.
Day I walked out of my apartment and in the diner window across the street was a poster for a book reading at my local bookstore that night, for that very book, And I thought, wow, that's serendipitous. And I never go out in public, but come on, it's a book reading, Like how, it's not like I'm going to a bar or something. Maybe I should just check it out. Go, you know, get out of my get out of my little self imposed cell that I've turned my apartment into,
and go out and see something. So I went and I saw this book reading, and I thought it was so charming, and I asked for an interview afterwards, and that interview turned into drinking Scotch and watching Star Trek and just.
Kind of hitting it off. And I thought, Wow, did I just make a friend?
Like?
Am I allowed to do that?
Now?
This was very.
Shortly after I was definitively exonerated, and I thought, oh my god, I'm I'm not running, I'm not like, I'm not afraid that some acts is going to fall and chop off my head. Like I'm I'm okay, and can I make friends?
And yes? What turned out to be the answer.
And like, the lovely thing about Chris was that he didn't google me, and he wasn't a true crime guy.
He was a poetry guy. So like he vaguely.
Knew that I was, you know, a part of some sort of true crime scandal, but he had no idea and.
Had friends of He's not gone, Oh that Samanda.
Oh, plenty of friends of his did.
And in fact, you know, funnily enough, a very good friend of his named Steph, who's a very good friend of ours to this day. The minute she realized who I was, which was the minute she saw me, she sat me down and sort of was interrogating me about like the whole experience because she had followed it, and Chris was mortified. He was like, Steph, stop being a crazy person. Like he clearly just wanted me to feel
like a normal person. And he didn't google me and was friends with me for like nine months before we started dating. And every single time any of like any person he met knew that he was friends with me, they would always ask him like, oh, is she weird?
What do you think about the case?
And he was like, look, I know that she's a really cool person, and I think you're being weird by going down the Google rabbit hole with her, like I prefer to get to know her as a person, And of course, you know, things would come up, like there's a great example of how one time he asked me if I wanted to watch the movie Wally with him, and I was like, what is Wally?
And he was like, what is Wally? How did you miss Wally? Like Wally was hueah, And I was.
Like, probably came out when I was in prison, and he was like, you know, like so there. It wasn't like I was hiding anything from him, but I didn't feel like I was being seen through that lens, and the idea that I could be in a room with a person who thought I was a nice person, who wasn't looking at me through the lens of girl accused of murder was such a relief and such a rare and beautiful thing, and it is a big reason why
I fell in love with him. That and the fact that he loves my cats and I was like a crazy cat lady when he met me.
I had four cats.
I was a one woman and four cats person because I was very lonely, like I was, so I was so alone, and I didn't you know, cats and pets will love you unconditionally, and they don't know if you've been accused of murder. So here I was alone with four cats, and he was not intimidated by that.
Going back to your new book, you embark on the most extraordinary quest, and it's part of your work now with people that have been unjustly accused or in prison. Indeed, but what you decide to do in the book is to find the prosecutor who made your life a misery, who lied about you, who was part of the case for convicting you without evidence or in fact evidence that should have exonerated you. Eight years Minnini made your life. I'm going to say a misery.
That's a nice word.
Yeah, And then you decide, and it's kind of it runs parallel to your quest of kind of rediscovering yourself and who you are as your new release self. But you decide to not own to go back to Italy because I know a lot of people would be like, is she ever going to go back to Italy? I bet she never will.
Yeah. A lot of people ask me that, and typically they assume no because they think I must be totally scared or they think, oh, it's a corrupt in just country.
And you know, you're right that.
You know, when I first came home, it wasn't sure if I would ever go back to Italy. It was this scary place that something scary had happened to me. But I didn't have the bigger perspective, right like, I had not yet met other wrongly convicted people and realized how prevalent this problem is, especially here in the United States, where we have the biggest you know, incarcerated population per capita in the world.
It's insane.
And so after I met other wrongly convicted people, here in the United States, and they left such an impression on me.
I started asking some questions.
I started poking around and trying to figure this thing out. The why question bothered me. I was plagued by this, like why did this happen? It didn't need to happen. Why did they focus me?
Do you mean why did it happen to you?
Yeah?
But you know, like why was there? Why did this wrongful conviction happen? I mean also I would love to know the why did this guy, you know, break into our house and murder my roommate? But that seemed like more understandable in the sense that like, here's this off, you know, unhinged guy who was clearly spiraling and was violent and towards women. Like I sort of get the guy who committed this crime, you know, like he should be in jail.
He's a dangerous person the end.
Sure, but he was also sentenced to less time than you were, even though his fingerprints, his bloody.
Footpats in DNA. Yeah, all of.
It was all over the crime scene and her body. And you were sentenced too.
Was it twenty I was twenty six, Yeah, so twenty six first, and then they raised it to twenty eight and a half and he was ultimately sentenced to sixteen years, so and he only spent thirteen in prison. And like I said, he went on to then assault another young woman and he's currently on trial for that right now. So yeah, I encountered other wrongly convicted people here in the US, and like met anybody who's been hurt.
You want to know why, and you want to know.
If you want to know if the person who hurt you cares if they hurt you.
You want to know if they're going to acknowledge it.
Like acknowledgment is a huge thing that is very healing for people who have been hurt. And what I gathered from other wrongly convicted people was that prosecutors, police officers do not say that they are sorry, They do not admit that they were wrong. No, But I at the same time, I could not believe that the police officers or the prosecutor in my case were like Rudy Gade, the man who murdered Meredith, that they knew that they were doing wrong and they.
Did it anyway, And.
They were sort of sitting there in their offices cackling away at how they were putting innocent people in jail. I just could not believe that, and so I asked myself, well, then, how did this happen? Why did this happen? Why did they think they were doing the right thing? And I thought about it, and I thought about it and I thought about it, and then finally I asked. I told myself, well, I should just ask them, and so I reached out to him.
And you kind of became pain pals for a couple of years. Yeah, which is during lockdown.
Yeah, you know, I which is the most bizarre experience. And you know, I talk about it a lot in the book because it is so interesting and bizarre and how like banal sometimes it was because like part of the way that I approached him was to say was to say not you know, you might expect me to approach him and say you were wrong and why won't you say you're sorry?
And why did you do this to me? And how dare you? And that was not my approach.
I knew that if I approached someone that way from this like adversarial place, that he would become defensive and obstructive like he had always been. We had been in adversarial roles this whole time, and so I tried to imagine, how do I have a relationship with him that is not adversarial. And so what I did was I tried to find common ground. And I said to him, well,
this case has been huge in the media. I have been misrepresented in the press, and I bet you feel you have been misrepresented in the press as well.
I think we have that in common.
And I think we never actually really got to know each other because you were my prosecutor and I was your defendant, and we were always at odds with each other.
And so I have no idea who you are.
I have this image of you in my mind as this nightmarish figure, but I know that that can't be true. So I want to know who you really are, and I hope you want to know who I really am. And so that became this, you know, ongoing discussion of just sharing with each other moments of our lives as we were, you know, experiencing the world. He would tell me about how he loves the rain, and he loves to listen to Wagner and read Lord of the Rings
and so like little banal things like that. But then on the flip side, there were always these little like moments where we would touch on the case or we would touch upon a meta discussion about the case. There's a whole chapter in my book called Navita and Djoko, A Life on the Line, where Jiuliano asked me to watch a movie about a detective who realizes that the person that he put in prison for a murder was actually innocent and the torment of the prosecutor as he
realizes his mistake. And he was like, this is how I feel about our case. And I was like, what, what?
What you know?
And so there were all these like indirect ways that I was meant to he was like elude new realizations about the case, but he would never expressly say them. And it got to the point where I had to ask myself, what am I doing? What am I really doing here? Am I trying to get him to say something to me that I need him to say, or do I have something that I need to say to
him that I hope he will hear? And that that tension brought me to Italy to sit down with him and sit across from him and have a discussion with him about the case.
Despite the advice and the instincts of every single member of your family except probably your husband.
Yes, my husband was supportive.
Everyone else in my family thought I was crazy and they thought it was a useless endeavor in what was I thinking? And I was just putting it myself in danger again. But I intuitively felt like I was doing something really important, that for the first time in my life, I was not just reacting to this worst experience of my life.
I was being proactive.
I was proving who I was by making the choice to sit down with this man who had hurt me and to tell him that I didn't hate him, and that, you know, all the other things that I talk about in the book, but ultimately it comes down to being kind.
You know, you then saw Raphael Yeap, but had also been exonerated with you, but who you hadn't really maintained any relationship with over those years.
Obviously, I would say that it's not that I didn't maintain a relationship with him, It's just that our relationship was fraught, right, Like, we knew each other five days before this crime completely took over our lives, and so we didn't really like our little, beautiful, little love affair was very short lived, and then we both became you know, we both became people who had survived this intense trauma, and so we sort of looked at each other and
saw in each other the trauma that we had lived through, and he had his own traumas from it. Like I was the one who was big in the headlines, and that comes with its own burden and pain.
But he was overlooked in the.
Media and people didn't seem to care whether or not he had a motive or there was any DNA of him in the crimes, you know, like he felt like mister nobody. And when he looked at me, he saw how being willing, just being my alibi had almost ruined his life.
And also you had another country to go home.
Yes, and he didn't. His own country had betrayed him. And he saw in me things that he didn't have. I have a husband and children, and he wanted that for himself too, And he's had a harder time getting work and making relationships because of that stigma that is still that he still carries in Italy. And you know, when I met him, it was really remarkable because on the one hand, it was really beautiful.
Right we went to Gubio finally.
That place where we were supposed to have Truffle Town where we were supposed to have our little romantic weekend, but it was not the romantic weekend that we had originally planned. You know, my mom and my husband and my baby were there, and there was a certain point where he was pushing my daughter's stroller and we saw a clown who was, you know, making balloons, and the clown he pushed up, you know, my daughter up to
the clown and he was making faces at her. And then the clown said to him, oh, you have such a beautiful daughter, and he had to.
Say, she's not mine.
And I knew because I was feeling it too, like this could have been us, like we you know, if something tragic hadn't just hit us like a train went in our youth, like maybe all of these years later, we were just coming back to Goobio to as a remembrance of this beautiful romantic vacation that really solidified our love for each other, and instead it wasn't. It was It was a in a way, a pale shadow of
what our life could have been together. In another way, it was a grieving the love that could have been. And it was nice to have that moment and share that with him. I knew it meant a lot to him. And he also wanted to go and visit tomb of Saint Francis, which we had visited together before everything horrible had happened. And he told me that the first time that we went to the tomb, he had prayed to Saint Francis that we would always have good times together.
And so when we went back, he went and prayed to Saint Francis and said, I don't think you understood me.
And you know, like he's a very sweet and thoughtful person who also went through this horrible experience, and he is on his own path to making meaning and it's going to be different than mine.
You know.
My final question to you, Amanda, as you navigate this new path that you have and find the grace in that and the grace in forgiveness the churches, is there a relationship there with meridiths family today?
There isn't, but I always always have the hope that there will be. I would really love to visit Meredith's grave, and I would want to do that with their blessing, and so I don't want to put pressure on them. Her parents have passed so what's left is her siblings. Yeah, I hope that we can have a relationship, but I also know that they have really struggled with the fact that there Italy did not give them the closure that
they deserved. I suppose if they are listening to this, I would just say I would love to have a relationship with you.
I would love to talk to you. All of our lives have.
Been irreparably changed by what happened, and I think maybe we could heal together.
Amanda Knox, I really thank you for sharing yourself with us today.
Thank you.
Wow, what did I tell you? Generous?
Right?
It really strikes me that to be open to retelling the story of the worst thing that ever happened to you so many years later is only really bearable when you're so connected to your greater purpose, which for Amanda is her advocacy for wrongfully convicted people. She has and is making meaning from a tragedy that defined her for so long and actually still continues to. I told Amanda that I had read both her memoirs, which I have.
That sounds like I just told her that and I haven't, but I have read them and they're both so good. Her first one from twenty thirteen, Waiting to be Heard, is from a very different time in her life. New one, which is just out now Free, is a remarkable reflection on not just what she experienced, but where she goes from. Here will pop links in the show notes to where you can follow her work and buy her books. She also hosts her own podcast, Labyrinth with her husband, and
we'll link to that too. The executive producer of No Filter Isnaima Brown. Senior producer is Grace Rufrey. Sound designed by Jacob Brown. I'm your host, Kate lane Brook Back in your ears next week.