What The Hell America!

American Amanda Knox was catapulted into global infamy after being accused of the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, during a study abroad program in Perugia, Italy. Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before her conviction was overturned, and she was eventually exonerated. Still, Kercher’s murder remains the defining moment of Knox’s life.

“Two very young women went to Perugia and one of them didn’t get to go home and one of them came home completely and utterly changed,” she says. “It’s a grieving process for me for both of us.”

In the years since her exoneration, Knox has worked to reclaim her narrative. In her first book, Waiting to Be Heard, she focused on the details of her conviction. Her latest memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, goes beyond the events of her trial and imprisonment and explores the realities of reintegrating into society and rebuilding a life.

“I felt so alone and so ostracized for so long, and not just when I was in a prison cell,” she says. “I felt very alone when I came home until I realized that we all, at some point in our lives, have external things happening to us that we can’t control that make us feel like we’re trapped in our own life and that we are not the protagonists of our own life.”

Wrongful convictions have become part of Knox’s life work. She sits on the board of directors of the Innocence Center, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to freeing innocent people from prison. And she frequently takes on the true crime genre in the podcast she hosts with her husband called Labyrinths.

A few years ago, in an effort to come to terms with what happened to her, Knox reached out to the Italian prosecutor who sent her to prison. He responded and the two began an unlikely correspondence, in which they talked about “everything under the sun, the case, but also our lives,” Knox says.

“He has admitted that he could have been wrong. He has admitted to me that I am not the person that he thought he was prosecuting, that if someone were to ask him to prosecute this case again today, he would not because he knows that I’m not capable of committing such a crime,” Knox says.

Interview highlights

On Meredith Kercher

It’s true that I didn’t know Meredith very well. I had only known her for a few weeks. That said, when you study abroad, you get to know people really quickly because both of us were new arrivals to Perugia. … I was 20. She was 21. She was studying journalism. I was studying languages. And we both happened to rent a room in this beautiful little house overlooking the countryside. And it was perfect. It was that beautiful time of your life when everything is possible and you have every reason to expect to have beautiful experiences.

On her experience with survivor’s guilt

I’ve struggled both with survivor’s guilt as well as with — someone just pointed this out to me — it’s like survivor’s guilty by proxy, where other people are sort of enforcing survivor’s guilt onto me. … When I got married, I had in no way intended that for that to be a public event. I went out of my way to make it very, very private and to be very, very secretive. And paparazzi showed up anyway. And then of course, I get the messages from people saying, “You know who will never get to get married? Meredith.” And I just have that thrown in my face constantly as if my life doesn’t matter, because she lost hers. …

It’s something I call the single victim fallacy … this idea that in any tragedy, there’s only room for one real victim, and somehow, victimhood is a zero-sum equation. And so acknowledging the victimhood of one person somehow takes away from the victimhood of another. And of course, when you really look at it, it’s absurd, it doesn’t make any sense, but people feel that for some reason. And I think that that’s because they’re not capable of imagining me as a real human being.

On finding her purpose in prison as a translator and a scribe

A very important way to survive prison is to be useful, because it’s an environment where there’s a lot of need and not a lot of resources and everyone is competing for those limited resources. So the best way to position yourself is not as competition, but as a resource. … By that time I was fluent in Italian, I was able to function as a translator. So lots of the women that were imprisoned were not Italian, were not fluent in Italian, and had no idea what anyone was telling them. …

[There were] a lot of people from various African nations, also Eastern Europe, but you know there were a couple Chinese women that were in there at one point, and I was translating for them. I just happened to have this English to Chinese dictionary because I’m a language nerd. I just had it in my cell with me and so what they did was they called me down and had me translate for these women by pointing to words in the dictionary and then like translating one by one the words that they were pointing to in the dictionary from, so Chinese to English to Italian. There were no translators in the prison, so I ended up being the unofficial translator for everyone and every language.

And then the other thing that became my sort of unofficial job was scribe. I was everyone’s favorite scribe, not just because I could write in both English and Italian, but because I had nice handwriting. Everyone really thought that my handwriting was very beautiful. And when you are someone who is in prison, especially if you’re feeling lonely and are looking for some attention from some male counterpart, wherever he may be, you wanted to appear pretty to them, and the way that you could appear pretty is by having pretty handwriting.

On why some people may feel reluctant to acknowledge her innocence

Acknowledging my innocence costs people something. It costs them the realization that they scapegoated a person who could very well have just been them, that they’ve consumed as entertainment the worst experience of someone’s life. And I think that the cost of that means that people are resistant to the idea of recognizing that I truly am a victim of these circumstances. And I’m still fighting a wrongful conviction to this day.

On attending a conference of the Innocence Network for the first time

Two exonerees approached me. And I hadn’t yet said a word to anyone, they just came over to me, gave me a big hug, and said, “You don’t have to explain a thing, little sister. We know.” And I had no idea until that moment that that was what I needed to hear, because what I had been feeling was that before I could ever be accepted by other people, I had to explain myself. And I have to justify my existence and my presence constantly. And they were letting me know that not only was that not true, but they also had felt that way too, because why else would they know to say that?

On her decision to reach out to the prosecutor of her case

For a long time, he was the boogeyman. He was the big scary man who was making decisions to ruin my life. And I was scared of him, I didn’t understand him. The question that haunted me most … was why, just simply why? … I didn’t think that he was a psychopath. … There had to be something more to it, it had to be more complicated, but I couldn’t figure it out. … So many people advised me not to. Including everyone in the innocence movement, they were all saying, it’s a waste of time. …

I reached out to him, and I told him that I wanted to know him outside of this adversarial system where we were pitted against each other from the very beginning. I recognized that he very likely felt misrepresented by how the world had viewed him and his interactions with this case and how I found that relatable.

On how this experience changed her as a mother

I 100% believe in transparency and honesty and I should always answer my daughter’s questions with age-appropriate honesty and not treat this story as like this weird taboo aspect of my life and our lives. But even more important than that, I think that children see what we do more than they listen to what we say. And I feel really confident that I can show my daughter that stuff will happen that is painful and out of your control and inevitable, but it doesn’t define you and you can find your way through it. I don’t know what inevitable horrible thing is going to happen to my daughter or my son, but all of us go through something. And I want her to see deep down that that is not the end, and that is all, and that in fact, that is just the beginning. And I feel so confident that I can do that for her and I can be there for her.

On why she goes back to Italy 

In a big way, I grew up in Italy. Italy is a part of me. I speak Italian to my children. I am an Italian American, in many ways. One of the things that my husband and I [said] on one of our trips back to Italy was, “make good memories.” That was our mantra, “make good memories.” And even when I revisited my house in Perugia, where this whole crime happened, I had this shocking realization that it was just a place. Like there was somebody else living in it as if nothing bad had ever happened. It wasn’t like this set-in-amber place of tragedy. It was a place. This was a place where someone had lost their life and also someone had made love and other people had lived their lives and like it was just a place. And every place is the place of someone’s worst tragedy and someone’s best moments.

I really felt like after living so long in a tragedy in Italy, what I wanted was to have good memories alongside them so that I wouldn’t have this distorted view of this ultimately beautiful country and beautiful people. That was really important to me, to see Italy for what it really was, and not just the seat of the worst experience of my life.

Lauren Krenzel and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.