Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison for a murder she didn't commit. After her exoneration, she reached out to the man who prosecuted her case. She talks about how she made herself useful while in prison, readjusting to being back home, and the survivor's guilt that follows her. Knox's new memoir is Free. TV critic David Bianculli reviews The Studio, starring Seth Rogen, on Apple TV+.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Amanda Knox and what is her story?
I did, yeah. I think I've struggled both with survivor's guilt as well as with, someone just pointed this out to me, it's like survivor's guilt by proxy, where other people are sort of enforcing survivor's guilt onto me. And I understand where it's coming from, right?
Like so many people only know me in the context of her murder, and in particular through this very negative lens in the context of her murder. And so because they don't imagine me in the fullness of my human being, They sort of anything that I do, whether purposefully publicly or not purposefully publicly, like when I got married, I didn't 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. doesn't matter because she lost hers.
And I think that that's because they're not capable of imagining me as a real human being.
To refresh people's memories, you were a 20-year-old college student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when you and your then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, whom you'd known for a week before Meredith Kircher's murder. You both were accused and later tried and convicted, and the both of you all spent four years together. in an Italian prison before being acquitted on appeal in 2011.
And then two years later, both of you were retried and then definitively acquitted in 2015. And right now, you're still fighting a slander case, which we'll get to a little bit later. But you wanted to reach out to the prosecutor in this case. You all became pen pals, more or less, and ultimately met
This man was instrumental in spreading the false narrative about you and was ultimately instrumental in your conviction. How did it come to be and why was it important for you to connect with him, to convince him of your innocence?
I guess for me, for a long time, he was the boogeyman, right? Like he was the big scary man who was making decisions to ruin my life and I I was scared of him. I didn't understand him. I also was constantly asking myself, I think that the question that haunted me most that I was attempting to discover the answer to was why? Just simply why?
Like, I've had I don't know how many panic attacks because I I was plagued by this not understanding why this thing had happened to me. And it wasn't, I knew that it wasn't an easy answer, right? Like it wasn't just an evil man sitting in his prosecutor's office, you know, Putting his fingers together like Mr. Burns and chuckling about how he was putting an innocent girl in prison.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Amanda Knox face after her exoneration?
And so you write their letters. I would write their letters. Yeah, their little love letters. And sometimes they got a little frisky with the love letter. They would just dictate to me and I would write down. But sometimes they would say, but Amanda, you're better at saying this than us. Say this in like a really sexy way. And I was like, no, I'm just, you dictate, I write.
You know, this makes me think about, I mean, when you arrived in Italy, you're 20 years old. You're just coming into your femininity, your sexuality, who you are as a woman, you and Raphael's relationship. You know, you have just gotten together a week prior and And you have all of these labels put on you on who you are as a sexual being.
I thought it was really, really interesting that you talked about how you came fully into your self-awareness of your body and your sexuality in prison. Yes.
Yes, I'm so glad you brought it up because it is a very human thing to have a sexual identity, to have an intimate identity. And I was being vilified and punished for this perceived...
sexuality and I and so I absolutely was in conflict with my own sexuality also like you bring up Raffaele and Raffaele what is a deeply romantic person at heart like we hit it off immediately in part because he was a nerd and I'm I love a good nerd but also because he was just so sweet and romantic with me from the get-go and even while we were you know surviving this insane
struggle together, he was ready to continue to pursue a romance with me, even while we were in prison and on trial. And because I was being so punished for my actions, my sexual identity, I resisted it. And I broke it off with him in prison because in part I was feeling I was feeling like the reason I was even in there was because I was a sexually active young woman.
And then over the years, I first of all realized that my life might be spent a great portion of it inside these prison walls and that An intimate life, a sexual life, was a part of being human. It wasn't something to be ashamed of. It wasn't something to repress. It was just one of the things that makes life worth living.
Let's take a short break, Amanda. If you're just joining us, my guest is Amanda Knox. She's written a new memoir titled Free, My Search for Meaning. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.
On the Embedded Podcast. No. It's called denying a freedom of speech. It's misinformation. Like so many Americans, my dad has gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. These are not conspiracy theories. These are reality. I spent the year following him down the rabbit hole, trying to get him back. Listen to alternate realities on the Embedded Podcast from NPR. All episodes available now.
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