Amanda Knox was found not guilty. That Doesn’t Mean She’s Liberated.
“That’s the kind of trap I’m in, where I’m continuously forced to engage in discussion about something I’d rather not,” Ms. Knox explained. “I’m continually advised that I should simply vanish.”
The Creation of A Caricature
What happened that night in Perugia will be discussed for the rest of time. But there are certain fundamental truths that are not rumours, crazy prosecution theories, or tabloid propaganda.
On Nov. 2, 2007, the corpse of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old University of Leeds student, was discovered in her bedroom at the residence she shared with three roommates, including Ms. Knox.
Mr. Guede, whose bloody fingerprints were discovered on the room’s walls and his DNA on her clothes and inside her vagina, was tried separately from Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito and convicted before their trial ever began. He said that he sat with Ms. Kercher as she died, did not contact police, and was still unable to shake the image of a river of blood from his head. Nina Burleigh, an investigative journalist who covered the trial from Perugia, remarked, “He must have talked about that blood for 10 minutes.” Mr. Guede was freed from prison last year.
According to court filings, it was eventually found that there was no biological trace of Ms. Amanda Knox or Mr. Sollecito in the bedroom. However, after an all-night interrogation in which Ms. Knox claimed she was hit in the back of the head by police and did not have a lawyer or interpreter present, Ms. Knox signed a confession written in Italian in which she placed herself at the house and accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner who had been her boss, of the crime. Amanda Knox quickly recanted, and the confession was ultimately declared inadmissible in court, but Amanda Knox was convicted of defaming Mr. Lumumba.
Any high-profile court case is a media struggle as well as a legal one. In Italy, home of the paparazzi, juries are not sequestered, and police and attorneys frequently leak material to the press. Which would explain the release of Ms. Knox’s jailhouse notebook, which included a list of sexual partners and was written after prison officials informed her she had tested positive for H.I.V.
