What this covers
Sam Harris speaks with Amanda Knox about her experience of having been falsely convicted and imprisoned for murder in Italy.
Amanda Knox is an exoneree, journalist, public speaker, and author of The New York Times best-selling memoir Waiting to Be Heard. She is the co-host, with her husband Christopher Robinson, of the podcast Labyrinths. Between 2007 and 2015, she spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit. She has since become an advocate for criminal justice reform and media ethics. She sits on the board of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice.
Website: www.knoxrobinson.com
Twitter: @amandaknox
December 18, 2023
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Amanda Knox argues that her wrongful conviction resulted from cascading cognitive biases, confirmation bias, and media sensationalism rather than evidence, and that understanding these systemic failures is essential to criminal justice reform and media ethics.
- Police interrogation techniques and language barriers produced a false confession from an innocent person through coercion and gaslighting rather than genuine guilt
- Media and tabloid coverage created a reputational lock-in effect where initial biases prevented correction even when exonerating evidence emerged
- The actual murderer (Rudy Guede) left copious physical evidence while Knox left none, yet prosecutors rationalized away this contradiction to maintain their predetermined narrative
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Media pressure and competition for sensational stories created an early focus on Knox because 'girl on girl crime' is more commercially interesting than male violence, and this media bias influenced the police investigation and prosecution.
“the journalist who was interviewed for the Netflix documentary says it best when he was like it's girl Ong girl crime this is it's sexy it sells we don't want to hear about another guy raping and murdering a a young woman we want to hear about a young woman raping and murdering a young woman”
When Patrick Lumba was released from police custody after two weeks, it was only because they had arrested Rudy Guede and obtained limited forensic evidence implicating him, not because of the numerous eyewitnesses who could have cleared Patrick immediately.
“when I was arrested my boyfriend was arrested my boss Patrick lumba was arrested and you know the very next day people are showing up at the police office saying we know that Patrick is innocent we were with him the night of the crime we there was a whole big group of us at his Pub together like this is impossible and instead of releasing Patrick on that evidence on the numerous numerous eyewitnesses who you know who came forward and you know it was the only thing that was even implicating him was this nonsense confession that was totally incoherent they held him for two full weeks I believe like he was in prison for two weeks and they only released him once they had arrested Rudy Gade once they had some like The Limited forensics that they were able to bring back that showed Rudy G's fingerprints that was that was only when they finally let him go”
Knox spent 53 hours over 5 days in police custody undergoing questioning, with inconsistent provision of interpreters—sometimes having an interpreter present and sometimes not, particularly during her final and most critical interrogation.
“I spent 5 days with the police pretty much non-stop I think the hours that they were able to confirm that I was in the police station or in police custody undergoing questioning was 53 hours over 5 days”
The media created a selection bias in how Knox's behavior was interpreted: media outlets zoomed in on moments when she was not visibly crying or showed 'inappropriate' emotional responses, while ignoring the context that she had not witnessed the crime scene directly and did not yet understand the full horror of what had occurred.
“so much of my behavior or my alleged behavior is what what is going to capture people's attention and so they zoom in on that kiss that between me and Raphael and they interview people who say oh Amanda wasn't crying when I hugged her and they don't know that when I was alone I would break down and cry and or when they hear it from the prosecutor that I did break down and cry they say oh she broke down and cry because she was looking through the knife drawer and suddenly remembered a horrible thing about knives like there's so much of people projecting their own Prejudice about what my my behavior meant”
Raphael, Knox's boyfriend of only five to nine days at the time of the murder, remained in prison and faced trial alongside Knox despite having no motive or connection to the crime, and though he briefly confessed under coercive interrogation, he immediately recanted and stood by Knox's innocence at great personal cost.
“he knew me for only a few days before this crime occurred I think we had known each other for five days yeah so you've been we've referred to him as your boyfriend all this time but this is a boyfriend of five days”
The prosecutor tapped only Knox's phone, not anyone else's, indicating that police had targeted her as a suspect before conducting the investigation, contradicting their stated role as neutral investigators gathering evidence.
“what I didn't know is that you know already going into this interrogation they had decided that I was guilty somehow they had already tapped my phone for instance they had not tapped anyone else's phone they had brought in my boyfriend to try to get him to turn on me so this was not you know just them questioning me offand”
Harris argues that false confession production is not unique to Knox's case but represents a systematic phenomenon in criminal justice, and that understanding the psychology of false confessions is essential for reform.
“well it really is a tragic case of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing okay so I don't want to derail the you from your timeline here but um one more question at this point at what point if you recall did it Dawn on you that you were a suspect”
Knox argues that judges along the chain of custody—from the prosecutor through trial judges to appellate judges—failed to apply sufficient scrutiny to the prosecution's theory, allowing bias to persist across multiple levels of the judicial system.
“what for me is really troubling is you know a judge signed off on this and later along down the line another judge agreed that we deserve instead of just throwing the case out they sent us on to trial and then I went through a Year's worth of trial and was convicted”
Rudy Guede, when confronted by a police informant over Skype while on the run, exonerated Knox by saying 'Amanda doesn't have anything to do with this,' only to change his story after being arrested and extradited, falsely claiming Knox was present at the murder.
“the first time that he was ever he ever even mentioned me was while he was still on the run and he was Skyping with a friend of his who he didn't know was corroborating with the police so the police had already arrested me but they then got the fingerprints back they identified Rudy g day so they were looking for Rudy g day and they contact a number of his friends and they and one of his friends agreed to contact Rudy while the police were listening in to their Skype conversation and when this friend talked to Rudy Gade he asked about me like what about Amanda what does Amanda have to do with this and Rudy Gade said Amanda doesn't have anything to do with this”
Knox was not informed she was a suspect until she was brought before a judge days after her final interrogation, when the judge told her 'you are accused of murdering Meredith Kercher, how do you plead'—at which point she had not yet been allowed to speak with her lawyers.
“and this is going to sound really dumb but I didn't know that I was a suspect until I was brought before a judge days later because in the midst of this interrogation again it was I was constantly being referred to as this witness”
During Knox's final interrogation, a police officer physically assaulted her by slapping the back of her head twice and saying 'remember,' causing Knox in a state of desperation to construct an incoherent false memory combining fragmented images (boyfriend's apartment, basketball court, Patrick's coat) which police then formalized into a more coherent written statement for her to sign.
“at a certain point where where one of the police officers was standing behind me and she is she slapped me in the back of the head and just said remember and slapped me again and said remember and in this sort of state of desperation I pieced together broken fragments of memory to try to remember what they were asking me to remember and it wasn't a memory it wasn't I didn't you know in my mind see Patrick the murdering Meredith it was an it was kind of like an incoherent Montage I I had like the vision of the outside of my boyfriend's apartment and then I had a vision of the basketball court that was between my house and the university and I had a vision not even of Patrick but of his coat”
Knox discovered through meditation practice and Saul Kassin's research on false confessions that she had internalized the police's narrative of her guilt and doubted her own sanity, rather than consciously fabricating a story to appease authorities.
“now that I know better about false confessions and the psychology that is a part of false confessions you know I didn't for a long time and I spent years in prison just feeling UT utterly baffled myself because I didn't understand what had just happened to me and I thought that there was something uniquely broken about me that I had just something was wrong with me or I was a coward or like it's it's not like I was sitting there knowingly and willingly making stuff up just to appease the cops right like I had internalized what they were telling me and I was trying to genuinely make sense of what they were telling me”
Knox experienced being stripped naked and having her genitals examined by police under the guise of checking for signs of sexual assault, which she now recognizes as a violation that was normalized at the time as part of the investigation procedure, even though it involved gaslighting her about the purpose.
“even when they stripped me naked and took photograph of me and poked and prodded my genitals and even when they put handcuffs on me and put me into a police car they told me that I was this witness and they told me they they told me that they were stripping me to make sure that there weren't signs that I had been sexually assaulted”
Knox was also convicted of slander for the false statements she made implicating Patrick Lumba during her coerced interrogation, meaning she was acquitted of murder but found guilty of defaming an innocent man whose wrongful arrest she had caused through her forced confession.
“at the same time that I was tried for murder I was also being tried for a different crime slander that was associated with those statements that I signed during my inter interrogation Patrick the Mumba uh was eventually you know released from prison and found to be completely extraneous to this crime and he was suing me for defamation and in Italy uh slander is a is not a civil crime it's a it's a criminal case and so I was being tried in the very same courtroom at the very same time for slander and murder and I was found guilty of slander”
Raphael has had difficulty reintegrating into society even after acquittal because of continued stigma in Italy; he was catfished by a reporter on Tinder and has struggled to find employment as a computer engineer, remaining trapped in his association with the case despite his innocence.
“he's been catfished by a reporter on Tinder he's attempted over and over again to just go back to having a quiet legitimate computer engineer job and has consistently found difficulty finding work because people don't want to be associated with him and it's just been this insane uphill battle where door after door after door has been closed in his face”
The prosecutor in Knox's case believed that only a woman murderer would have covered Meredith Kercher's body with a blanket, using this as evidence of the gender of the murderer and of Knox's guilt, exemplifying how confirmation bias led him to interpret neutral details as confirming his predetermined conclusion.
“the blank it the prosecutor's belief that only a woman murderer would have thought to cover a woman with a blanket right like that that that proves the gender of the murderer”
Police did not arrest Knox based on physical evidence but on 'gut instinct' driven largely by media pressure to quickly solve the case, only arresting her before forensic results were available that would have exonerated her.
“they didn't know this at the time that they arrested me they they didn't have you know the the fingerprints back from the the forensic you know people they didn't have the DNA results back yet so they were really just going like by the time they arrested me and my boyfriend they they were just going off of gut instinct and their gut instinct in large part had to do with a lot of pressure like there was already TV cameras that were parked across the street from our house like just zooming in on our driveway just hours after Meredith's body had been discovered and so the police felt an an incredible amount of pressure to come up with answers as quickly as humanly possible”
Police officers engaging in interrogation are typically not consciously trying to obtain false confessions from innocent people, but rather have a bias that they have identified the guilty party, and then use interrogation techniques to try to extract what they believe to be the truth from that person, which breaks down their will and sense of agency.
“it's not like these things happen because police officers are uniquely trying to go out of their way to get innocent people to lie and and implicate themselves it's because they have a bias they think they have the person who committed the crime or they think they know who is not being forthcoming with the truth and so they do everything they possibly can to Gaslight and convince this person to give them what they want to hear and it just so happens that in a lot of cases it's not the truth”
Unrecorded interrogations prevent courts and reviewers from later assessing whether police provided suspects with non-public crime details, a foundational error in Knox's case where police told her details about the murder method which she then 'recalled' during interrogation.
“there there are some really just common sense things that you can do like record interrogations like videotape them record them have some kind of a record so that people can later go back and say oh look at that that that person didn't have actual knowledge that only the the killer would know the police told him on hour three that the murder was committed with a rope and so like it's stuff like that that ends up in a lot of cases being just a he said she said situation in the courtroom where the police say Well only the killer would know that the person was murdered with a rope and so he must have done it”
Knox did not discover Meredith's body when she came home; she only discovered that the house had been broken into, then returned with her boyfriend Raphael to call police, and it was police and her roommates who broke down Meredith's locked bedroom door and discovered her body.
“when I came home I did not find Meredith's body right like I I came home and I found that my house had been broken into but I didn't know that Meredith had been murdered as soon as I realized that my house had been broken into I went back to my boyfriend's apartment I grabbed him had him come and check it out with me he helped me call the police because I didn't even know how to call the police at that time and the police arrived and when they had arrived when my other roommates had arrived they all broke down Meredith's bedroom door which was locked and discovered her body and I actually didn't even see into the room I never saw her body in person”
The police misinterpreted Knox's Italian text message to her boss Patrick Lumba, reading 'certo, ci vediamo poi, buonasera' (certainly, I'll see you later, good evening) as meaning she had made an appointment to meet Patrick that night, when she had simply responded that she wouldn't need to come in to work.
“I sent to my boss Patrick lumba the night of the murder and at first I don't even I didn't even remember having sent that text message it was just not at the top of my mind but they said yes you sent this text message you made an appointment to meet with this person named Patrick who's Patrick why are you covering for him what you know what did he do really insinuating like here is this person that we know you met with on the night of the murder and you're covering from him why are you covering from him what horrible thing did he do to you”
The prosecutor created an elaborate false narrative claiming Knox used 'feminine wiles' to convince Rudy Guede and Raphael—two men who did not know each other and had no motive—to collectively break into her house, sexually assault and murder her roommate with no premeditation, despite Knox leaving no trace of herself at the crime scene while Guede left copious DNA evidence.
“they swapped Patrick out and put Rudy Gade in and orchestrated this theory about me having used my feminine Wilds to convince these two men who had no relationship with each other to out of the blue just with no premeditation whatsoever go to my house and rape my roommate for me and then hold her down so I could stab her to death”
Sam Harris has stepped off Twitter entirely to avoid the distorting effects of social media on his perception of human nature, discovering that the platform created a 'funhouse mirror' where incentives pushed everyone to show their worst self.
“having stepped off of Twitter was just a produced a a sea change in my day-to-day experience I mean just there's you know I I have not even 1% of the the hassle I I had in my life around any of these issues now that I've stepped off Twitter but you know stepping off Twitter was a in some sense just a an admission that like okay that's this tool which is in fact a tool in in many ways I mean it's not that it's useless it has it its obvious uses this tool is no longer available to me right I like I'm just I'm going to I'm deciding to just step out of this Arena”
Knox's case was covered by the tabloid press with such intensity that it created a media echo chamber where tabloid reporting from Italy was recycled internationally without independent verification, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect that amplified misinformation.
“because we're at this weird juncture in media what was being reported in the tabloids in Italy was then being recycled into legitimate news abroad because people were desperate to just get any information to cover the case and it they weren't doing a lot of their own independent reporting they were just reporting what they found and the people on the ground were not necessarily being the most reliable”
Rudy Guede, the actual murderer, was released from prison after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence, and was recently rearrested for assaulting his girlfriend, demonstrating a pattern of violence against women.
“Rudy Gade so the person who murdered Meredith he was released from prison a few years ago having served 13 years of a 16-year sentence and he was just rearrested for assaulting his girlfriend and so it feels like in like tiny little increments there has been a coming to coming to Jesus in in Italy”
Knox spoke only minimal Italian, having taken only two or three semesters of introductory Italian in college, and thus lacked the vocabulary to discuss legal matters, police procedures, or describe crime scenes accurately.
“I was absolutely not fluent in Italian I had taken two or three semesters of introductory Italian in college so I had very minimal vocabulary a l like I remember I I had learned how to tell a story about little red writing Hood like I could recite a story about little red writing Hood but I certainly could not talk about legal things or police things or I didn't have the vocabulary to describe a crime scene”
Harris argues that the belief in free will is incoherent because no one picks the next thought that arises unbidden, because genes and environment completely determine development from infancy onward, and because the illusion of conscious control breaks down under honest scrutiny of causal influences.
“there's just no no one invented themselves no one's I mean no one no one can pick the next thought that arises all by itself you know you don't know what you are going to think next until the thought itself arises so anyway that's quite confounding to many people”
Knox questions the retributive theory of criminal justice, arguing that punishment severity is not justified by deterrence effects and that certainty of punishment is more deterrent than severity, suggesting that criminal justice should focus on pragmatic goals like preventing reoffending rather than inflicting suffering as a form of retribution.
“our Criminal Justice System doesn't make sense if you remove the like the just the severity of of punishment that we see doesn't make sense for deterrence like I think there's studies that show that like it's more the certainty of being caught that deters people than the severity of the punishment and so we need to look when we think about what works for our criminal justice system when we think about trying to incentivize good social behavior which is what we should be thinking when we think about our Criminal Justice System we need to IM we need to look at what works unfortunately just huge sentences and death penalties don't work in a lot of ways”
Harris argues that the lack of metaphysical free will does not entail a conclusion that everyone should go free ('not guilty by reason of insanity') because practical consequences and incentives still matter, and punishment can be justified on consequentialist grounds even without retributive justification.
“that's quite confounding to many people but it's the crucial thing is that it doesn't leave us with the ethical and the and the judicial opinion that everyone is Not Guilty by reason of insanity right they you just empty all the jails you know and just there's nothing to do no it's just like you just have to you you view people much more like forces of nature and and as I've said before you know if we could imprison hurricanes we would right because they they create enormous harm yeah”
Knox is the 'patient zero' of social media convictions because her case was the first to occur at the moment when social media was emerging, and it created echo chambers that funneled different kinds of information and shaped public perception in ways that preceded and prefigured current social media dynamics.
“I I feel like in a lot of ways I'm kind of patient zero of of a social media conviction because it really was the first time that it wasn't just the media and the Tabloid media that was covering everything it was also these Echo chamers that were arising in the social media sphere where they were capturing people's attention and really like funneling very different kinds of information”
Knox perceives a phenomenon she calls 'the single victim fallacy,' where people view her continued existence and happiness as an affront to Meredith Kercher's memory, effectively requiring her to remain frozen in grief to honor the victim.
“I feel like her and I are like two sides of a coin and whenever sort of I pop up and and live my life or exist it's it's viewed in in many people's eyes as like an affront to Meredith's memory which is really tough um because she's also on an idea in so many people's minds and in in some ways I not by choice I also feel responsible for her image in the world”
Sam Harris's insight from Nassim Taleb is that people hold effort against others when forced to change their opinions—the cognitive effort required to revise a cherished belief creates resentment toward the person making them change, rather than gratitude for correction.
“there a kind of motivated reasoning but there's it's almost this is obviously not unique to your case we see this everywhere and this is actually the one of my favorite points that nii ever made was that you know he he said in in some form when you force people to change their opinion about you they hold the effort it takes them very much against you right so it's just a delightful little turn there where it's just I mean you can just see this like when you're whenever you're arguing with somebody and they're really dug in with their cherished opinion on something whatever it is and you present counter evidence you see this unwillingness”
Harris uses the metaphor of a dinner party where you can choose who to sit with and whose advice to seek, arguing that participating in social media like Twitter is like inviting random anonymous people to the dinner party of your life and allowing them to comment on your worth.
“I tend to view life now like a it's almost like a vast you know dinner party right where you get to decide who you want to sit down with and talk to and you know keep company with and who's Whose advice you're going to seek and who's whose input you really want and uh who you're going to take the time to debate and disagree with and you can pick your battles and and when you look at what the experience is like for someone like me or and I can only imagine Someone Like You on a platform like X and you're you know you're looking at just random people who decide to tell you what they pretend to think about you on a moment by- moment basis you know for me I I just step back and think why would I want to do this”
Knox has argued that people's retention of belief in her guilt is partly motivated by fear of what it means about themselves if they were so wrong about her—they prefer to believe there is something wrong with her rather than acknowledge their own culpability in perpetuating a false narrative.
“I think to realize that you were not only so wrong but so wrong in in such a harmful way is a devastating thing to realize and it's something that it's totally human to want to rebel against at every Point like the sunk cost isn't just that they were wrong and that's embarrassing the sunk cost is that they hurt someone in the process of being wrong and so it's not just the misinformation and it's not just the ego of wanting to be right I think that people are afraid of what it means about them if they were this wrong”
Knox developed an intuition while in prison that the people subjecting her to injustice were not knowingly doing so out of malice, but were instead constrained by their own cognitive biases and institutional pressures, which allowed her to hold compassion for them rather than hatred.
“one of those big intuitions was that I couldn't believe that the people who were subjecting me to this horrific experience were doing it knowingly mhm like I I absolutely could not imagine my prosecutor and the police officers just sitting there in their offices like chuckling to themselves about how they had put an innocent person in jail and so I wasn't living with this delusion that there are just evil people in the world who are out to get you which would have distorted my understanding of my circumstances and of reality in a way that I don't think would have been helpful to me as an individual learning to be a person in the world instead I had this intuition that there was something deeper at play”
Harris remains aware he is occasionally trending on Twitter, but this information has zero impact on his consciousness because he no longer participates in the platform, illustrating that digital reputation is detachable from actual life experience.
“which is a testament to just how unaware I was that it had um defined my my view of the world and my and my view of myself in the world to some degree for years like I I felt like I had a I was living with a sense of digital reputation that in some sometimes is true I mean it's still there I mean I'm told by people that I'm occasionally trending on Twitter even now but in none of it matters to me I mean like it has no contact with my Consciousness even when it does I mean even when someone tells me I'm trending on Twitter that means nothing to me right”
Knox practiced a form of self-parenting in prison by having conversations with an imagined younger version of herself (age 12) as a way of processing trauma and preparing her younger self for the experience she would endure, which was intuitively meditative practice before she had formal meditation training.
“I thought I was going crazy like I would have conversations with my younger self in prison because I didn't really know how to survive this situation that I was in i instead like unconsciously uh or consciously it's hard to say at this point would sort of big sister myself through the experience by very vividly imagining a younger version of myself about 12 years old who would sit across from me on my bunk in my cell and just ask questions about what was happening and it was it was a way for me to process what was happening to me but it was also like practicing meta like I was wishing well upon this younger version of myself who didn't know that some horrible thing was about to happen to her”
Knox found unexpected commonality with Sam Harris in both being 'doppelganger versions' in people's imagination—misrepresented by caricature or misinformation—and both having managed to develop some degree of emotional detachment from the false narratives about them.
“and I think that's interesting because for me I also tend to feel like a a lot of the the love and the hate that is projected at the idea of me doesn't really have to do with me and so I wonder if that's something you relate to”
Knox's resilience has come partly from meditation and philosophy, and partly from what she calls 'getting a little bit lucky' by being the kind of person psychologically capable of finding peace despite ongoing injustice.
“I'm I I feel so lucky like when I think of free will I I just feel so lucky because even thinking back on you know the difference between me and rapael and how at peace I am in a lot of ways and how at not at peace he is I just feel like I got lucky to be the kind of person who was able to find some level of peace”
Knox argues that she does not want Rudy Guede to suffer, but rather wants to feel safe and wants others to be safe, and that understanding Guede as someone attempting to meet his needs in the world through brutal and ineffective means allows her to both fear him and feel compassion for him simultaneously.
“I do not want you know Rudy Gade to suffer that's not that's not what I want I want to feel safe and you know I would never want to be Rudy Gade because I feel feel like he's someone who obviously is interacting in the like trying to get his needs met in the world in an incredibly brutal and ineffective way and I feel bad for him at the same time that I'm scared of him”
Even stepping off social media does not eliminate the fact that doppelganger versions of oneself exist in other people's minds, and Knox must navigate the challenge of existing as herself while knowing that unavoidable psychological projections of her exist in people's imaginations.
“but like you know even if you're not on social media there's still a version of you that exists in people's mind mind oh yeah yeah and that's you know so whether or not you participate is not necessarily relevant to you just being a thing an idea of a person in someone's mind”
Harris has responded to misrepresentations of his views by clarifying his actual positions but recognizes that he cannot control whether people choose to engage with his actual views versus recycled misinterpretations.
“I have people out there who hate me because they think I want to execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world right and there's like there people you know otherwise professional journalists uh who've been going around for 20 years saying that that's what I said in in my first book”
Harris suggests that stepping off Twitter and other social media creates a vast improvement in daily experience comparable to having a mob of 400 people outside one's house yelling insults disappear instantly, and that this change was so significant that he was surprised how unaware he had been that social media had defined his worldview.
“it's um it's somewhat analogous to like if if there were a protest in front of your house right now you know if you had a mob of people like if every time you you know left opened your front door there were you know 400 people out there uh ready to tell you that you're the scum of the earth and then you got a few people out there who say you know yay Amanda we love you right but still there's always someone out there who's just going to say you're scum you know if you could wave a magic wand and have all those people forget where you live right so that you could just walk out your front door and have a nice Empty Street why wouldn't you do that right and so that's that's essentially what happened when I got off Twitter”
Once Knox was released from prison in 2011, she could not go out in public for months or years without being photographed by paparazzi or other people, who would follow her biking to school and post pictures of her on social media, creating a perpetual spotlight where she was viewed through the worst possible lens.
“I couldn't for months years even I couldn't go out in public without somebody photographing me without people Paparazzi following me um I would bike to school and they would take pictures of me on my route to school and then once I'm in school once I'm on campus they aren't allowed on campus but other students are and they're taking pictures of me and posting them on social media and so I was perpetually under a spotlight that was a spotlight where the worst possible light was on me”
Knox's slander conviction was overturned when she appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, and subsequently Italy passed a new law allowing revisiting of old cases based on international court rulings, under which her slander conviction was overturned in October.
“I appealed my slander conviction to the European Court of Human Rights and they ruled in my favor and you know that it was going to just end there except they just passed a new law in Italy that made it possible to revisit old cases or like definitive cases based upon International court rulings and my slander conviction just this just in October was overturned”
Rudy Guede, a known local burglar, broke into Knox's cottage while most residents were away on a holiday, sexually assaulted Meredith Kercher, and brutally murdered her by stabbing her multiple times before fleeing the country and adopting a false identity.
“a local burglar took advantage of this fact and broke into our Cottage broke into our home and it's not fully certain if Meredith was already home at that time or not my guess is that she wasn't my guess is that this local burglar named Rudy Gade had already broken into our apartment by the time she came home and he as soon as she got into her room and got settled he snuck in on her and attacked her and he sexually assaulted her and brutally brutally murdered her stabbing her many times and then he fled the country adopted a false identity and wasn't arrested until a few weeks later”
Knox remained in prison for 1,428 days (nearly four years) awaiting trial and verdict, followed by conviction, 8 years of legal proceedings, and retrial before being fully exonerated by Italy's Supreme Court in March 2015.
“it's only after that that I get a chance to speak to my attorneys or speak to my mom and it was just this from the get-go this thing that was so much bigger than me and it was not a few days it was 1,428 days that I stayed in that prison because of a huge misunderstanding at the very beginning”
Knox has been working on multiple projects with different timelines, including work on Waking Up, her podcast 'Labyrinths' with her husband Christopher Robinson, and ongoing criminal justice reform advocacy through her role on the Frederick Douglas Project for Justice board.
“she is also a co-host with her husband Christopher Robinson of the podcast labyrinths”
Amanda Knox arrived in Perugia in 2007 as a 20-year-old exchange student and lived with three roommates including Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student she had known for approximately three weeks before Kercher's murder on November 1st, 2007.
“this was back in 2007 I was 20 years old I had recently arrived in this beautiful Hilltop town called peria um in the center of Italy to study abroad and I was there for about five weeks I had just moved in with these three other young women two of whom were Italian law interns about you know six or seven years older than me and then there was another exchange student from Britain who was one year older than me named Meredith”