The creepiness of Amanda Knox She continues to fascinate us

Amanda Knox starts off her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, with a barbed anecdote: her mother told her once when she was a child that she would have “an extraordinary life”. And she has, though not in the way that any mother would wish for. As most people at least semi-remember, Knox is the American exchange student in Perugia, Italy, who, along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was convicted of the brutal 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher; a second man, a migrant from Côte d’Ivoire named Rudy Guede, was also convicted in a separate trial.

The bizarre details of the crime — Kercher was raped, stabbed multiple times, then covered tenderly with a duvet — and the Italian prosecution’s proposal, on no physical evidence, of a Satanic sex ritual orchestrated by Knox, created an international media firestorm that has flared up again with each new legal development. Knox was freed on appeal in 2011 and has been exonerated by Italy’s highest court. But the legal wrangling continues (she has sued to have additional minor convictions overturned), and she remains an object of bizarrely intense public fascination. Her new memoir (she also wrote one shortly after her release) is well-written, persuasive, and genuinely insightful.

It’s also occasionally tone-deaf in a way that seems to expose the reasons the story gripped us so in the first place.

Knox, who was 20 in 2007, has steadfastly maintained her innocence ever since her brief, obscure time in Italian police custody directly after the murder, when she made a series of damaging and incoherent statements that were used against her as a confession. She has always maintained the plausible and evidence-supported theory that Rudy Guede acted alone, and that the Italian police took advantage of her youth and naivety to juice up a salacious case.

Today, she is 37, married, and a mother of two, and lives once again in her hometown of Seattle. She has become a writer, hosts a successful podcast with her husband, the author Christopher Robinson, and is an activist for criminal-justice reform and media ethics. If she was once dangerously naive about her predicament, she is no longer. She explains that her first book, written shortly after her release, was “the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did.” Free is a corrective whose dual mission is to tell her personal story and to defend her right to tell it.  

White, female, American college students from solidly middle-class families haven’t contributed much to prison literature to date. But the combination of Knox’s intelligence and unique situation is a genuine addition to the genre. As she tells it, she arrived in prison so innocent that “it took me a while to realise that the room I was kept in was in fact a cell, my cell…” As the days and months passed and the gears of justice turned (very slowly, provincial-Italian-style), she had the experiences we would expect: she was scared, alone, isolated, and mistreated by the guards and other inmates (who disliked her as the privileged and famous one).

But she also had experiences we don’t expect: when she was allowed out to exercise in a small courtyard, she jogged, did jumping jacks, skipped, and sang at the top of her lungs, anything to feel free. When she was scared and lonely, she would call up a vision of herself as the happy, innocent, tough little girl she once was, and then she would talk to her younger self about their current troubles. Her raw youth pours off the page.

She was aware, even at the time, that much “invisible luxury” set her apart from her fellow prisoners. She had family to support her and visitors at every visiting hour. She didn’t suffer from the combination of trauma, mental health, and addiction that is common among female prisoners. Nonetheless, she was a prisoner, and accepting the situation as it was, especially after her conviction and sentencing to 26 years, helped her survive. The story of a young girl’s slow, painful grasp of the human essentials is powerful: we always have agency; there are things we possess that can’t be taken away; we must accept the life we actually have, and not pine for the one we wish for. 

After four years of incarceration, Knox was freed on appeal and returned to America, only to discover herself in a different kind of prison. She was traumatised from her ordeal, had panic attacks, and found it difficult to reconnect with family and friends. She was — and is — notorious, a public figure and media sensation, a frequent target of hatred and death threats. For defending her innocence, asserting the value of her own story, or even just being OK, she is perceived as denying the awfulness of what happened to Meredith Kercher. The tabloids, especially in England and Italy, continue to distort her every action into something sinister. “Amanda Knox Wears Bizarre Yellow Outfit as She Marries Poet Boyfriend”, ran a Daily Mail headline from 2020. Once again, she faces the challenge of accepting the life she has, trying to make sense of her experience and to make something good out of something terrible. 

The middle section of the book explores the social and cultural factors at play in her case, skilfully woven into the events of her life post-release. She was, she theorises, the first cancellation of the social-media era and the first person to be subject to the kind of prolonged public shaming that has now become commonplace. She was also a victim of prurience, and the virgin-slut narrative, and the time-honoured tradition of pitting women against each other. Cultural factors came into play: the Italian investigators couldn’t comprehend her behaviour in the days following the murder, and created a narrative of her guilt as a result. The case became not about the facts, but about her character. 

I was moved by the book, and went to see Knox in discussion with British journalist Jon Ronson at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on Wednesday night without lingering doubts about her innocence. I understood why the people who still believe she is guilty, not least the Kercher family’s lawyer, find her ongoing notoriety to be ghoulish.

If you think she did it, Free is a very provocative name for a book. And that “extraordinary” from the opening anecdote has a third valence: Knox has had a more extraordinary life than most people because she has benefitted, and not just spiritually, from her hardship. She writes books about it; she befriends other famous people (Monica Lewinsky became a pal); she just executive-produced Blue Moon, a Hulu series about the ordeal set in Perugia, expected to debut this year. But I’d been convinced that these perceptions were not her fault, and that she had no moral obligation to cater to them. 

And yet a strange thing happened: the longer she talked, the more it seemed possible that this small, cute, physically unimposing, nerdy-chic Seattle mom in platform boots could have done it. To be clear, I don’t believe she really did it. More important, there has never been any evidence that she did. But there is something about her affect and demeanour that gives off the eerie vibe that if any totally unlikely young woman could secretly be a crazed killer, it’s this one. The more she laughed and said how absurd it was, the more I could see why the police were suspicious.

She mentioned some photographs in a particular situation made her look like “a flippant psycho”, cackling at the ridiculousness to a crowd of fans, but that was exactly what she looked like in that moment. She argued that such perceptions are the awful legacy of suspicion, media-distortion, and our dirty minds. Perhaps greater self-knowledge would come in realising that it is a mysterious quality of hers, unfortunate to be sure, that was visible to Italian investigators, and has been visible in photography since the early days of the case. I suspect it’s the real cause of our unstoppable slippery fascination with her.  

And there are reasons for it. Knox doesn’t quite know how to treat other people. Her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, for example, has only a minor role in Free, mainly as a person whose life was, unlike hers, permanently derailed by the wrongful accusations. He’s still single, Knox writes. He’s a pariah in Italy, and he’s never been able to get steady work. Someone brought him up at the event, and she retold an anecdote from the book about how sad he was during their meeting in Italy in 2022, when a passer-by mistook her baby for his.

I thought Sollecito would have been unlikely to feel good about himself if he were sitting in the audience. Knox’s right to tell her story suddenly seemed more complicated than it had in the memoir. If you’ve come through an awful catastrophe, with multiple victims including yourself, and your ultimate success highlights your fellow survivor’s failure, do you really have every right in the world to promote it far and wide? There are some situations — many, actually — where we can’t say whatever we want, and this in order to protect the feelings of other people. Or we can, but we’ve chosen ourselves over them, and it’s going to look bad. 

There’s also Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor of Knox’s case, with whom she strikes up an unlikely relationship in the book’s third section. The narrative slows down a bit here, as Knox enters into an endless wrangle with what she wants from the man — which somewhat contradicts her claim to have found peace. Mignini is willing to engage with her and offer her his friendship, but he won’t say he was wrong about her case. Her final epiphany comes from accepting that there is greater value in just forgiving him. It’s true, and it sounds good (and makes her sound good), but she also mocks him in the book and did so again during the event for being more invested in the relationship than she is. At the event, she tacitly agreed with Ronson, her interviewer, that Mignini is a narcissist. Again, I wondered how he would have felt if he were sitting there, and again I doubted Knox for promoting her own virtue at someone else’s expense. 

One of the many themes of the case has been Knox’s ordinariness. She fascinates us, supposedly, because what happened to her could happen to anyone. But Free proves in many ways — both its insight and intelligence, and also its odd failures and lack of self-awareness — that she’s never been ordinary. 

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Valerie Stivers, a Compact columnist, cooks from literature for The Paris Review.

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