Amanda Knox.Lucien Knuteson/Supplied
Amanda Knox is still angry.
When the writer, podcaster and advocate for the wrongly accused reflects on her experience, she still feels the tug of fury at what the system put her through: Her arrest as a college student in Perugia, Italy, for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. A trial and conviction. An appeal that saw this conviction overturned. A second trial and conviction in absentia. And a final, complete exoneration by Italy’s supreme court in 2015.
Knox spent four years in Perugia’s Capanne prison prior to her first conviction being overturned in 2011, at which point she went home to her family in Seattle, where she was finally able to indulge in the luxury of rage at her situation.
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“Rage is an emotion that can make you vulnerable, ultimately. It makes you a little off kilter. It makes you impulsive,” she says over a Zoom call. “I went very numb to those kinds of feelings when I was in prison.”
It’s a bit strange to hear Knox talk this way. In conversation, the 37-year-old exoneree, activist, wife and mother of two appears grounded and sanguine, quick to laugh even as she is describing the kind of harrowing experience most people could not imagine enduring.
The kind of easy forthrightness Knox exudes is also apparent in her second book, Free: My Search for Meaning, which describes her prison experience, life after her release and attempts to reclaim her own identity following a legal ordeal that also saw her become front-page tabloid fodder internationally.
In one respect, the media frenzy that surrounded Knox and turned her into a public figure in her early 20s was predictable given the elements the case threw up.
There was the pretty, young American abroad searching for adventure and experience; her Italian boyfriend of five days, Raffaelle Sollecito, who became her co-defendant and was similarly convicted, and subsequently exonerated, for Kercher’s murder; the prosecution’s accusation that the killing was the result of sex games gone awry.
So focused did the media become on Knox and the persona they created for her, they more or less ignored the figure of Rudy Guede, whose fingerprints and DNA were all over the crime scene and who was convicted in a fast-track trial for the sexual assault and murder of Kercher.
Knox’s resentment toward the media establishment is fervid, and justified to the extent that the media did not act as a locus of sober analysis so much as a vehicle to cash in on the most salacious and prurient elements of the story.
“They did not care what the truth was. They were just crafting a story and perpetuating it because it made money,” Knox says. “Journalism itself is in a moment of crisis because content is so cheap and opinions are so cheap. But actual investigations and objective truth come at too high a cost.”
Sex has always sold, and the notion of a crime that centred on an attractive white woman fed into persistent stereotypes of the Madonna-whore dichotomy that continue to dominate a supposedly more enlightened, post-#MeToo era.
“There’s this idea that all women hate each other and are secretly in sexual competition with each other and you’re either a free-spirited whore or an uptight virgin and ne’er shall the twain meet,” Knox says. “A deep part of ourselves don’t question it when we see that story presented to us.”
Questioning deeply entrenched beliefs – about freedom, justice and society – is something that has been forced upon Knox by her experience. This condition is at the heart of her new book, which takes its subtitle from Viktor Frankl, the late psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor whose book Man’s Search for Meaning Knox read while incarcerated.
Frankl’s text helped inform the attitude Knox adopted both inside prison and once she was released, an attitude that recognizes what she has gone through and does not try to deny or minimize it but instead use that experience to develop psychological strength and resilience.
“It is to provide a methodology for encountering the challenges that we face in life and not feel like they are meaningless and just live in a state of utter despair because of them,” Knox says. “Ultimately, that feeling of being trapped in your life and having things happen to you that you didn’t deserve, then having to make meaning out of those things, is a universal experience.”
Her attempt to take some measure of control while inside found her reaching out to fellow inmates, many of whom were illiterate, to read and translate legal documents and other correspondence. After her incarceration, Knox took up a position on the board of the Innocence Center, a California non-profit dedicated to advocating for the wrongfully accused.
In each instance, she has positioned herself as a support worker advocating for the kind of justice she wishes the legal establishment had shown her.
“I very much am in the business of calling out injustice when I see it,” she says. “That’s where rage is useful. Because rage is the signal to me that something unjust is happening.”
One of those injustices is very close to home: the continuing accusations that Knox is exploiting her experience at the expense of her dead friend’s memory.
“One of the most difficult things I’ve encountered since coming home is affirming that my life matters too,” Knox says. “That what I experienced does not take away from the traumatic thing that happened to Meredith.”
Knox credits Christopher Robinson, her husband and the father of her two children, with providing her room to deal with her post-traumatic stress and, importantly, not expecting her to be perfect.
“I do not feel that kind of pressure in my own home,” she says. “My husband can see me when I’m angry and can hear me vent, knowing that once I have been able to express my rage to myself, I can then approach the world in the way I want to, which is not with rage at the forefront.”
Which is not to deny these negative emotions, which Knox understands will probably stay with her for the rest of her life. But the sense one gets from speaking to her is that she is now able to channel her anger into more positive avenues, including her children, her family and her activism.
She finds empowerment in locating common ground with others, even those who seem antagonistic. To that extent, she describes in her book a trip she took back to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor who led the case against her in court. It seems like an act of radical empathy to extend an olive branch to the man who was responsible for sending her to prison, but it also appears to be a central part of her character.
The final result of all Knox’s attempts to wrest meaning from her experience, to find a calm centre in her life’s chaos, is not rage but something altogether more surprising. When asked if she is happy, Knox is unequivocal.
“I’m very happy. I feel very, very lucky. I have a beautiful home and a beautiful life and I’m alive and I feel very purposeful and at peace with the way things are.”