The Amanda Knox Story: Her Fight for Justice on the Global Stage

Episode Notes

Transcript

Michael Semanchik:

Imagine this, you’re studying abroad in a country where you barely speak the language you spend the night at your boyfriend’s place. The next morning you return home to find police at your apartment, and your roommate has been murdered. Within days, you’re being interrogated, accused, and ultimately arrested for a crime you didn’t commit. This is the true story of Amanda Knox, a board member of the Innocence Center and a survivor of one of the most infamous wrongful convictions in modern history. Today, Amanda shares her journey from student to suspect to exoneree and what it means to reclaim your life after the world has called you a killer. I’m Michael Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence Center, and you’re about to hear Amanda Knox on For the Innocent.

Music:

Spent most of my life in prison, chasing a dream, chasing a dream, chasing a dream. Want somebody, please hear my want. Somebody please set me free.

Amanda Knox:

My name is Amanda Knox. For a lot of people out there, I am the girl who was accused of murder, but for me, I am the girl who went to go study abroad, was wrongly accused and imprisoned for four years, and came home and tried to rebuild my life in spite of this horrendous, traumatic thing that really took over my life and the lives of everyone around me. I was a very, I mean, I don’t know, it’s kind of silly to say I was kind of a dork I, but I was a sporty dork in the sense that I was the kind of kid who dabbled in a little bit of everything. I was in musical theater and I was playing soccer, and I did really well in school. I didn’t have to really try hard to do well at school. Even I was able to sort of drift through life because it came easily to me.

It came easily to me to make friends, to compete in sports. I was never the best of the best. I was never the smartest girl or the prettiest girl or the strongest girl, but I did well. I grew up in a kind of standard suburban environment, building forts in the blackberries around my house and riding my bike with the neighborhood kids. I think one thing though that was not necessarily unique but unusual for my family was that my extended family was a huge part of my life growing up. I grew up with divorced parents, but they lived within two blocks of each other, so I grew up in an atmosphere where all of these different houses in my neighborhood were my home. Essentially, I lived with my mom and my little sister, but at any point I could just walk five minutes and walk into my dad’s house into a house where I have another bedroom and go and have dinner almost every night at my grandma’s house, which is again, another five minute walk away. So I lived in an environment that was also very safe. For that reason, I always had somewhere safe to go. I had a lot of people who were looking out for me when I was a kid. I had a lot of support and love, and I felt like I said, very, very safe. What I didn’t realize was that I was also a little bit naive about how the world can be unfriendly sometimes.

Travel was a big part of my identity. Again, because I grew up in all these different households and even just the difference in culture between my mom’s household and my dad’s household was really distinct because my dad is this all American guy who’s eating the hamburger helper and drinking strawberry daiquiris, and on the other side, my mom, who was born in Germany and my mom’s side of the family we’re having goulash and aladin and vecan kdo for dinner. So I grew up with an acute sense that the world was bigger than just my little corner of the world, and I traveled to Europe when I was 14 with my family. We did a little Euro trip where we went to Germany and we went down to Italy and visited Italy for the first time. Also, when I was 14, I went and stayed three or four weeks in Japan just on my own.

I did my first kind of study abroad on my own at 14, living with a family in Japan, one of the best experiences of my life, even growing up, I remembered talking, especially with my Oma about potentially doing high school abroad. She was really keen on me going and spending at least a year of my high school experience in Germany. We never really worked that out, but going into college, I knew I was going to study abroad. It wasn’t a question, it was just where, and the automatic idea was Germany, where I have all of my cultural heritage, that’s where I have actual family that I know there. But at the time, I was much more fluent in German than I was in Italian, and I wanted to have two languages under my belt. So when I put in my applications to study abroad, I put them in for both Italy and Germany and Italy came back first and I was all in.

Michael Semanchik:

And so Amanda began her junior year of university in Prussia, Italy, just 20 years old, full of hope and wonder. Mere months later, Amanda’s flatmate and British Exchange student Meredith Kercher was sexually assaulted and murdered in what the prosecutor and media would later frame as a satanic drug fueled sex game. In the following days, Amanda and her new boyfriend, Raphael Solic Chito, were arrested and charged with murder.

Amanda Knox:

The day I was arrested, it was four days after the discovery that my roommate had been raped and murdered. On November 1st, 2007, I had been in and out of the police office every day since I came home and found my home to be a crime scene, and that final night, my boyfriend of Ben just over a week was called in for questioning around 10:00 PM at night, and because I was staying with him, my home was a crime scene. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I was afraid to be alone. I accompanied him to the police office, and while I was sitting in the waiting room doing my homework, waiting for him to come out of being questioned, another police officer came up to me and started talking to me and brought me into an office to put me through further questioning.

I wasn’t even told that I was being arrested. This is going to sound really dumb because I did have the handcuffs put on me. I was told to strip naked so they could photograph me. I went through all of that and I didn’t understand what was happening to me because for the past several hours over the course of the night, I had been screamed at, I had been hit, I had been put through an incredibly coercive interrogation and lied to. At no point was I ever told that I was a suspect. At no point was I ever offered legal counsel. I was told that I was a witness, but that I was a lying witness and that either I told them who the murderer was or I would face 30 years in prison for covering up who the murderer was. And when I told them that I really did not know who the murderer was and I didn’t know what they were talking about and why they were screaming at me, they told me that I had amnesia and that I had witnessed something so horrible that I couldn’t even remember it.

I told them that that didn’t make sense and didn’t square with my memories, and we argued for hours, but eventually they convinced me and it was the only thing that made sense to me at the time. I couldn’t understand why they would treat me that way, and I thought that they were mad at me because I wasn’t speaking Italian well enough. I was being interrogated in Italian and I was not fluent. I didn’t know a lot of what they were saying. I tried my very best to explain myself, but I thought that maybe I was just failing. I really, really blamed myself for the outcome of that interrogation, not understanding that what they did to me is actually kind of textbook, but I didn’t know that at the time. I had no experience and I had no knowledge of any of it, so I just believed them.

Everything they said, I just tried to do whatever they told me to do, and so I did what they asked me to do, which is I tried to remember something else and in a really, really broken state, I pieced together fragments of memories from completely other days and statements that they cobbled together from my confused statements, and I signed them and I was taken to a prison without knowing that it was a prison. The police told me that they were taking me to a holding place for my own protection and that it would only be for a few days, and that’s how I ended up accused of murder.

I remember when they first brought me into the prison, gosh, again, these little details that are embarrassing now, but show my mental state. At the time when we got to the prison, they had me stand to take my mugshot, and it wasn’t like you’re in front of a wall that has the measures of how tall you are. It wasn’t obvious to me what was happening. They were just like, we’re going to take your picture now. And I automatically just because it’s like, oh, my picture is being taken. I started to smile even though I was like, what is happening to me? I wasn’t even thinking. It was just like I’ve never had a picture taken of me before where I didn’t smile. So I started to smile and they were like, no, stop doing that. So I just stood there and they took my picture, and then they brought me into this building that had a lot of bars in it, but was not obviously a prison to me just yet.

It was a lot of concrete and it was a very sort of bare place, but it looked to me like an insane asylum. The doors weren’t bars like you see in movies. They were big metal doors, almost like you’re in a submarine, and they had little tiny windows that were closed, and the corridor that they brought me into this building seemed to be entirely deserted. I didn’t see anyone. And so when they brought me to my cell, it became clear to me that it was a cell and they took my shoes. I was allowed to wear the same clothes I was wearing, but they gave me a wall blanket and there was this very, very spare room that was just a steel bed frame, a rectangle of foam for a mattress and this wool blanket. And the guard kind of barked at me in Italian and said like, don’t touch anything and don’t talk to anyone. But of course, there wasn’t really anything to touch and there wasn’t anyone to talk to. And I remember being like, why is he talking to me like that? And I asked when I was going to be able to see my mom, and they said they didn’t know, and they just left me there. And I spent the first night there just crying and crying and wanting my mom and thinking about how she probably thought I was dead.

She was arriving that day as I was being arrested. She was landing in Italy to come and support me. And as soon as she landed, she heard the news that I had been arrested. Days later, she had gotten some lawyers from me. She had gotten documentation to prove that she was my mom. I had been officially charged. And finally they let her in. And I remember they brought me into an office, like an empty office. It had a desk and two chairs and a filing cabinet. I remember the first look that we had to each other. For me, it was just so relief to see her because I had been living what felt like this incredibly surreal. I was in an incredibly overwhelming situation that I had no experience with and nobody familiar to help me through it. And it almost felt like it could have been a dream.

It was just so wrong and nothing like this had ever happened to me before. And everyone around me was a stranger, and as soon as I saw my mom, I felt grounded in reality Again. I was like, okay, this is someone real and this is someone I trust and this is someone who’s going to be there for me and is not just going to hurt me and yell at me and hit me, and she’s going to speak my language. And so we immediately embraced and cried a little bit together, but I was so desperate to talk to her that we immediately almost started getting down to just like, what’s going on? My mom’s like, what’s going on? And I tell her, I don’t know what’s going on. They’re telling me that I’m accused of murder and I don’t know why, and this whole horrible thing in the interrogation room. And I tell her everything that’s happened, and all my mom can say at this point is just that this whole thing is bigger than the both of us.

So my mom immediately went to the American Embassy in Rome, and it was there that she was given the name of a lawyer in Rome who could speak English because that’s one of the problems was I needed legal representation in Italy, but so many of the Italian legal representation available couldn’t speak English so they wouldn’t know what was going on. So my mom contacted this lawyer who could speak English, who contacted this lawyer who was in Perusia but couldn’t speak English, and they became my legal team. My lawyers believed me. That was one thing I really appreciated of them. I never felt at any point that they didn’t believe me even very early on when it was unclear what the evidence was and we didn’t have access to it, I feel like they met me. They talked to me, especially when I explained what happened in my interrogation.

They understood what happened. And so they told me very early on that they would fight this to the best of their ability and that I was going to be a teammate and I was going to help them, and we were all going to work, but they never made any promises. They always were like, we don’t know how this is going to go, because this case is political now and it’s in the media now, and there’s a lot of bias in this case, and a lot of people don’t understand false confessions in this country, so they never made promises. What they did tell me quite often was that I had to have courage no matter what happened. I was completely optimistic. It didn’t matter what everyone was saying in the media, and it didn’t matter what was being said in the Courtroom. It was all lies, and eventually people were going to have to add all of the evidence up, and as my attorneys argued in court, zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero.

So while I was still really traumatized by this experience, and I spent two years in prison waiting for that verdict, I came into the Courtroom to receive my verdict, convinced that I was going to be going home. My family had a ticket for me for the flight. We had all shown up. My dad had brought my younger sisters to Italy to be there to help bring me home, and then they pronounced me guilty, and they sentenced me to 26 years, and I was taken back to that prison van and back to the prison in a state of utter existential shock and crisis. It felt like everything that I thought that I could stand on in the world had fallen out from beneath me and then fallen on top of me and crushed me. I realized that I couldn’t count on things and institutions the way that I thought I could count on them.

But most importantly, I realized that this life that I had been living for the last two years, which felt like this life in stasis, this life in limbo, like I was waiting to be living my life again, I realized that it was not me waiting to live my life. This was me living my life. This was my life, and there was nothing I could do about it, accept it for what it was, stop waiting for it to be different and try to make it worth living. So processing it afterwards became more about really, really facing the reality that life isn’t fair, it’s not fair, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking about how in a weird way, I was also kind of lucky because five days before Rudy Gade broke into my house and raped and murdered Meredith, I met Rafael sole chito at a classical music concert at my school.

And if I had not met him five days before and we had not hit it off, I would’ve been home the night that Rudy Gade broke into my house and I would’ve been raped and murdered too. So as much as I felt like my life had been stolen from me, I still had a life and I still felt like it was very, very real to me. It very suddenly that I had been assuming that my life was going to go a certain way, that I would get to go to school and I would get to have a family and I would get to travel the world. That had never been necessarily true. I assumed that would be the case, but it was an assumption, and instead my life was something that was very unfair and deeply sad, but it was still something that I existed within, and there was always a way for me to make at least the day I was living worth living.

No matter what happened in my trial, my family took turns. So they rented an apartment just outside of Perusia, and someone in my family was always in Italy to see me, and that was a big deal because I was only allowed six hours of visitation a month, basically an hour a week. As a result of that, the family member who happened to be staying abroad was very often alone, a little bit in their own cell as it were alongside me. No one in my family spoke Italian. They were not there on vacation. So whoever it was, whether it be my mom or my dad or my stepdad or my aunt or my uncle, someone was there and they were alone for days and days and days and days, and then they would go and spend one hour with me. My stepdad got to the point where he was holding barbecues for students and things like that.

My stepdad always finds a way to have a good time, but even then there was this feeling with them of feeling guilty that they were having a good time. While I was just a mile or two away in a jail cell, my friends and family came together and started this Facebook group to try to organize all these people coming out of the woodwork, trying to help my family. And so I think a friend of the family started the Facebook group to help coordinate people. Any family who goes through this is going to be overwhelmed with all the things that need to happen that there’s no way that you could ever prepare yourself for, and it absolutely takes an entire village to save a person who is in this situation.

One interesting legal quirk in Italy that we should take note of here in the US is that everyone who goes through the criminal legal process is entitled to appeals. So my attorneys explained to me that in Italy it’s way more common for convictions to be overturned, and so I had a fair chance if the judge gave me a fair shake, and especially if they sought independent review of the evidence, I would have a legitimate chance. At the same time though, that didn’t give me a ton of solace because I felt like the judge and the jury in the first trial, it’s not like they hadn’t heard my defense’s examination of the evidence. They just didn’t believe us. They believed the prosecution, and they believed this fantasy story about some psycho slut monster who orchestrated a sex orgy nightmare gone wrong, and the fact that none of that was ever not a shred of evidence was ever put before the court that suggested that I was some violent, impulsive drug fueled, sex obsessed she devil.

And yet people believed that I was afraid to hope. It did put me a little bit at odds with my family members, particularly my mom, because my mom sort of had the same mental outset from the first trial. This is just this horrible nightmare. We’re in this long tunnel, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just the tunnel is a lot longer than we thought it was going to be. But for me, I had believed that like her, but now I wasn’t sure that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and so I was afraid to hope even as things were progressing favorably in my appeal. It was a bombshell when the independent review came back totally discrediting the prosecution. It was a huge thing. And people in prison, my cellmates were telling me, you’re getting out, Amanda, you’re getting out.

I was afraid to put my faith in that because I could not. The thing that I was afraid of was showing up back in that room ready to go home and being told again that I not, I could not have that happen again. I was destroyed by that, and I resisted that feeling of hope up until the last moment. I mean, I was also holding my breath with hope in that Courtroom. When I finally received that verdict, and you can see it, there’s footage of this. I lost it. When the judge pronounced me acquitted and released me from prison. I lost it to such an extent that my guards thought that I had misunderstood the verdict. They were like, no, no, you won. You won. Do you realize you won? And I was like, I know. I know.

Michael Semanchik:

In that moment, after four years in prison, Amanda’s hope had been realized in her final appeal, Italy’s Supreme Court, the court of Cassation overturned her conviction. She was a free woman.

Amanda Knox:

I couldn’t eat for the first week that I got out. I was so overwhelmed. I felt just flooded with stimuli. I was surrounded by people who wanted to talk to me. I had been living in an environment where I basically just didn’t talk to anyone unless I had to. I lived in my head. I didn’t move that much. I did sit ups and I worked out, but I was stuck in myself for 22 hours a day, and so I was so used to a much slower and much more limited existence. And so to suddenly be flooded with people who wanted to talk to me all the time, even just the fact that in one day I would get more contact with my family members than I would get in two months in prison was just really overwhelming. There were just people all around me, hugging me, holding me, cuddling me.

I was being touched a lot. I had gotten to the point in prison where I was pretty twitchy. If someone reached out towards me, I would sort of flinch away and to be suddenly exposed to so much loving touch, it took me a second to get back into it. Pretty much everyone I knew weren’t just on team Amanda. They stepped up. My high school teachers were reaching out to my family and trying to hold fundraisers, and my friends from high school, their dads were calling the governor. And it was a big deal in my little world back in Seattle because everyone who knew me knew that what was being said about me was just so utterly wrong. I mean, that’s one of the sort of weird things about this trial is it was so outrageously wrong that at no point did anyone who had ever met me think, well, maybe there’s something to that.

It was just so outrageous that it was just so clear for everyone. Talk about the impact that this has on family and friends. When on the one hand, one of the best things that you can do with yourself and your time is to help someone else, but when you feel helpless to help someone else, and yet your life, it just revolves around trying to save them, it can become an incredibly punishing experience. It a tremendous amount of stress on my family. It definitely, I think, made everyone in my family feel second fiddle to me. Everyone had to put their needs behind the need of saving Amanda. And so in a big way, their lives became about me. And then when we finally got done with it all, we weren’t entirely done with it all because of what it had done to all of us. All of these changes and all of this pressure was happening to my family in my absence.

There was nothing I could do about it. And I had worried that I was a burden on my family for a long time, and they always told me, no, no, no, not at all. But it’s like, that’s not the truth. They did not want me to feel bad for being in the position I was because it wasn’t my fault and they didn’t want me to feel worse, and I think they wanted to say they didn’t want me to worry about the financial strain or whatever that it was putting on my family, which was tremendous in and of itself. But there’s also the emotional and the psychological strain that maybe they didn’t even want to admit to themselves.

That said, coming home, as much as I thought I was going to be unchanged and I was going to get to go back to my life and I was wrong, I was also wrong to just assume that I would get to go back to the normalness of what our lives were like before and what our relationships were like before. And really, for all of us, it has been a process of rediscovering ourselves in a radically changed world as a result of this experience. And it’s been hard, and we’ve all had our own ways of trying to find ourselves again and find each other.

There have been a lot of ups and downs. There’s been a lot of trying to figure out how to reclaim my identity after it’s been stolen from me. Being the girl accused of murder is not an identity, and it’s not me, but at the same time, it is me. It’s a thing that happened to me. I have to integrate it into my sense of self. I talked a little bit before about how coming out of this kind of experience is not a going back to the life you had. It’s a rediscovery of a new life and a new purpose and a new identity. In a lot of ways, it’s rediscovering yourself. And I’ve had to rediscover myself while also at the same time being under an incredibly intense spotlight that has not left me room to be a human being who makes mistakes. And for that reason, I mean, somehow I got incredibly lucky and I was able to find someone in my life who I trust and who is my greatest champion.

I am married. I have a daughter in a lot of ways. I am doing so well, and not all exonerees can say that at the same time, I have been in a pressure cooker my entire adult life. On the one hand, that’s made me incredibly resilient because I know what stress feels like, and I know what trauma feels like, and I know how to take a traumatic experience and see through it to see the opportunity inside of it to grow as a human being that comes to me very intuitively. At the same time though, I still to this day feel in a large way alienated from the rest of my human companions in society and the world because the worst experience of my life is the thing that most people know about me, and I don’t have that same access into other people’s worlds. And I don’t get to have the worst experience of my life be something that I decide to share with somebody.

It’s already out there. And so trying to define who I am and what my life means in spite of everyone having access to and feeling entitled to the worst experience of my life has been a huge challenge. Same thing for my family. I’ve also felt really isolated because I know what it feels like to be judged with no evidence, and I know what it feels like to be vilified on an international scale. And so when I notice that happening to other people, I get triggered in a way that I don’t see other people around me getting triggered. I feel like I’m allergic to judgment, and other people are really drawn to it. It’s like a drug. And so I feel like I’m this weird sober person walking around in a world of judgment addicts. So I feel isolated, but I am trying to translate that into good work, and I’m trying to let my work speak for me.

And I’ve connected with other wrongfully convicted people because the most astonishing thing that’s ever happened to me is meeting other wrongfully convicted people who I didn’t have to explain myself to. Not one iota. I feel like I’m constantly having to explain myself and with them. I do not have to explain anything they know and oh, it’s such a relief, which is why the Innocence Project is so important and why the Innocence Network is so important. Yes, get innocent people out of prison like priority number one, but connect us to each other too, because we can be there for each other. All of us who have been through this same experience have been there holding each other’s hands in our loneliness this entire time.

My greatest piece of advice to anyone who is still in this experience is to pay attention, to really, really be a witness. Bear witness to yourself because you are someone who has value, who is living something extraordinary and be a receptacle of wisdom. If you just pay attention without judgment to everything that you are experiencing, your anger, your sadness, your relief, your suicidal thoughts, your hopes and dreams, those crazy daydreams that you go off on, where you spin alternate realities, all of that is valuable and worthwhile. And just if you do that every day, you can make life worth living no matter what happens. I process my experiences my life by connecting with other people. And so a huge part of me processing my experience to myself has been talking to other people about it and finding meaning in it. One of the things that I was really surprised by when I started telling my story in various capacities is the number of people who reached out to me to say, I’m not exactly in your situation, but I’m feeling really trapped, and I feel like no one understands, but maybe you can.

So both in a public capacity where I interview people on my podcast or in a private capacity where I just sit with people, I can tell you the number of people I’ve just sat with on a Zoom, just listening to what they’re going through and giving them little bits of advice if I have any. But mostly people just want to talk to me to know that they can survive something and come out on the other side and be okay. They look at me as someone who’s come out okay, and they want to know how, so I talk to them about it, and that feels really meaningful. I like talking about it that way. I also like being a part of the Innocence community. I had no idea that wrongful convictions were a thing before it happened to me, and I don’t wish anyone to go through that experience.

So if there is any way that I can help get people to second guess their immediate judgments of people that they hear about when they’re accused of a crime, there’s any way that I can help, then I like to do it, and I like to help on the other side. One of my biggest priorities right now is being a mom. I’m a mom now, and I love being a mom. I would love to make the world a better place for her, but I also just want to be with her. I know that the greatest gift that you can give anyone, no matter what they’re going through, is to just be with them. So that’s my goal.

Michael Semanchik:

Amanda Knox spent years fighting to prove her innocence, and now she’s using her voice to help others still trapped in the system. Long before joining the Innocence Center’s board, Amanda dreamed of supporting the wrongfully convicted today. She’s turning that dream into action. She’s also sharing her journey through the written word, her first book, waiting to Be Heard, gave the World an Inside Look at Her Wrongful Conviction, her new book, free My Search For Meaning goes further recounting how she survived nearly four years in prison and eight years on trial, and how she spent the last decade reclaiming her identity. It’s a deeply personal, sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious reflection on navigating life after notoriety, searching for love, purpose, and a sense of freedom. Amanda’s story has recently been turned into a show called The Twisted Tail of Amanda Knox, a Hulu series, and just this year, she was honored with the Innocence Network’s Impact Award for her advocacy. On behalf of the Wrongly Convicted for the Innocent is produced by myself and Adam Lockwood. Our assistant producer is Ali Kvi Music in this episode provided by Sound Stripe. Our theme song is by exoneree William Michael Dillon, for the Innocent is a proud part of the Legal Talk Network, an InfoTrack company.