“There’s a joke I’m working on,” Amanda Knox told me. Knox, the American student accused of murder, who spent four years in an Italian prison, is figuring out a one-liner.
“It’s blaming Zach Braff for my wrongful conviction because of ‘Garden State,'” she explained. “In 2007, the manic pixie dream girl was all the rage, and that’s all fine and dandy up until your roommate gets murdered, and then you just become an episode of ‘Law and Order.'”
There’s an entire industry that has attempted to tell her story — true crime books, podcast episodes, snarky YouTube videos, think pieces in The New Yorker, tabloid headlines in the British press, a Netflix documentary and even a Lifetime movie starring Hayden Panettiere — but no one has ever summed up the prolonged fascination with Amanda Knox more neatly or darkly than Knox herself.
“I have felt deeply, deeply punished for being a quirky, silly person,” Knox told me.
Even 10 years after an Italian court decisively overturned her murder conviction, the stigma and speculation never went away. When I told a journalist friend recently that I was interviewing her, his first question was, “So, did she do it?”
There was a time when that kind of comment likely would have affected her more. After prison, Knox told me, “because I was constantly being viewed in the worst possible light, I felt like I had to be perfect, which means I had to be invisible. How do you live your life like that? How do you have a sense of who you are when the thing that you are meant to do is disappear?”
When I meet Knox at Salon’s New York studio, she appears in no danger of disappearing. Instead, she confidently exudes the slightly eccentric demeanor of the girl she was when her life became a news story over 17 years ago — the one nervously doing yoga in the police station, wearing an “All You Need Is Love” T-shirt to court. She wears bright colors. She smiles often and laughs easily, a very American trait that helped vilify her in European eyes during her trial. She also cries easily.
She’s here to talk about her latest memoir, “Free: My Search for Meaning,” a vivid and often funny account of her time incarcerated in Perugia and her readjustment to the fishbowl of scrutiny she experienced when she returned home to Seattle after her release. She writes about reclaiming her sexuality after being vilified for it, of facing down her “demons,” of despair, and of striking up the unlikeliest friendship possible.
For Knox, freedom has meant accepting a mantle that her young, manic pixie self could never have envisioned. Being free, she told me, is “not having my name completely cleared, because it isn’t. It’s not my prosecutor apologizing to me, because he hasn’t.”
Instead, she explained, “To be OK, to be fulfilled, to be free, you need to be able to accept reality as it is.”
At 37, she’s an exoneree, an advocate, podcaster, producer, mother of two young children and occasional aspiring standup comedian. And, she told me, she is also “forever the girl accused of murder.”
“I didn’t stop being a quirky girl when I went into prison.”
Back in the fall of 2007, Knox was a 20-year-old student from Seattle, studying in Perugia and rooming with a young British woman named Meredith Kercher. Then, less than two months into her stay, “some men made a lot of bad choices and hurt innocent people,” she said.
While Knox was out one November evening with her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, Kercher was sexually assaulted and killed in a home invasion. Knox came home to a crime scene.
“Nothing in my life had prepared me for what happened to Meredith and then what was going to happen to me,” Knox recalled. “I feel like of the two of us, fate flipped a coin and I ended up being allowed to survive my study abroad. And she didn’t. There’s no rhyme or reason for that.”
During the initial investigation, Knox cooperated with local authorities, unaware she was actually being interrogated as a suspect. It didn’t take long for Knox and Sollecito to be charged with murder. The story instantly became an international cause célèbre, with American “Foxy Knoxy” cast by the prosecution as a depraved participant in a drug-fueled “satanic” orgy that crescendoed in death.
The press and the then-burgeoning powder keg of social media ran with it. Knox’s whole unscripted persona only somehow served to confirm her image as an American “Luciferina” in college-girl clothing. Even more ambivalent spectators to the media circus tended to write her off as “weird” at best, a damning assessment of a traumatized 20-year-old whose roommate had just been sexually assaulted and murdered.
“Here’s this quirky girl who likes to wear hippie clothes and play the guitar and sing and do yoga like no one’s watching and she gets accused of murder because she’s not normal,” she recalled to me.
“My quirkiness certainly caught the attention of people. It also was a saving grace for me. I didn’t stop being a quirky girl when I went into prison.”
Amanda Knox leaves a court hearing in Perugia on September 27, 2008. (TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images)
Comedian Whitney Cummings remembers watching Knox’s story from afar as it unfolded, long before their eventual friendship.
“It’s clear she’s articulate, really smart and self aware,” Cummings told me. “I remember being like, I bet she’s funny. If she gets out of there alive, she’s going to be hilarious. That’s how, especially women, have to cope.”
“It’s just so clear what this case has always been about – the idea of woman-on-woman violence and sex.”
Back in Italy, the prosecution’s speculative narrative had worked. Knox was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison, Sollecito to 25. Another man, Rudy Guede, whose DNA and prints were found at the scene, was also arrested and convicted. Eventually, Knox and Sollecito’s convictions were overturned. Guede, meanwhile, was released in 2021. Last month, an Italian court placed him under “special surveillance” after being charged with domestic abuse by a former girlfriend. It barely made the news.
Knox seemed surprised when I mentioned Guede’s recent charges.
“You are the first person to know that, that I’ve talked to,” Knox said. “No one knows that because it’s just so clear what this case has always been about – the idea of woman-on-woman violence and sex. The truth about the person who killed [Meredith] was forgotten for the sake of a product being sold by the prosecution and the media.”
Earlier on the same morning that I spoke with her, Knox had appeared on a British news show in which the hosts questioned if by “dragging it all up again,” she was “just continuing the process” of her own “demonization.” Guede’s name was uttered just once.
Knox is well aware that her demonization endures. She engages with her trolls on social media. And she writes in “Free” about being a member of the “Sisterhood of Ill Repute.” So when a heinous crime becomes the thing you’ll always be associated with, how do you live the rest of your life? To the eternal fury of her critics, Knox eventually decided that rather than slink away because her quirkiness rubbed people the wrong way when she was on trial for murder, she was going to own it all.
As she explained it, “I was like, OK, I’m in this box. That box does define me. Can I just use that box as a platform?”
A turning point came when she was invited to speak at a conference for The Innocence Network, a global organization that works to overturn wrongful convictions. She now serves as an ambassador there.
Marc Howard, founder and president of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, commended Knox for the humanity she brings to the project’s advisory council.
Amanda Knox at Salon’s New York studio (Salon)“She’s using her ordeal and suffering to help others, so that we can have a better actual justice system and have fewer errors, but also treat each other in ways that are more humane and compassionate,” Howard said.
Her platform and notoriety are also now her livelihood. “I’m trying to do the very best with what I have and I feel comforted and at peace with that. I’m not confused,” Knox said.
“I was never a true crime person before this — I was a Harry Potter person.”
In addition to the current book tour, Knox co-hosts a podcast with her husband, Christopher Robinson, and is currently executive producing – with her friend Monica Lewinsky – an upcoming Hulu limited series based on her experience.
On a recent episode of her own podcast, Lewinsky said that what drew her to Knox’s story was the familiar tale of “a young woman being feasted on by the world.”
In our true-crime-obsessed era, Knox has learned to lean into her status as one of its most recognizable figures.
“I was never a true crime person before this,” she said. “I was a Harry Potter person” – the perfect genre for future misunderstood adults. The only reason that’s a huge part of my life now is that it’s my credentials. It’s what I know. It’s what I can’t help but care about to this day.”
She has grappled with the ethics of the genre, its entertainment factor and her role in it, including examining how to do “true crime with a conscience” on her podcast, where the sister of a missing woman described being “beat down and used for content, and then just thrown away.”
Amanda Knox at Salon’s New York studio (Salon)”We should be thinking about how we give people whose stories have been stolen from them a say in what their story means and how their story is told,” Knox told me. “I think that is a really interesting and intriguing opportunity that true crime allows.”
For Knox, the story she most returns to is her own. Though she told me that “it doesn’t matter what other people say and what other people do,” she continues to work to completely clear her name (an Italian court recently upheld a slander conviction tied to her case). She still hopes one day for a relationship with Kercher’s family, who have repeatedly rejected her overtures, a situation she calls “an unaddressed wound.”
“We are connected by the worst experiences of our lives, and we will forever carry that grief with us,” she said. “And I feel like we can help each other. I really do, but that’s not up to me.”
Knox has, however, reunited with other key players in her ordeal. In 2022, she and Raffaele Sollecito met up in Italy to share the walk together they’d planned for the day that Kercher’s body was discovered. And Knox has forged a unique relationship with her prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, who was part of the team who once called her a witch and a she-devil.”
“I wasn’t satisfied with just imagining this evil boogeyman who had done a horrible thing to me,” she explained.
So she met him on their common ground, appealing to him as a fellow figure who’d been misrepresented in the media maelstrom.
“I had these fantasies about him doing a press conference and announcing to the world, ‘I was wrong, and Amanda’s a good person and all of you should be nice to her.’ That’s not what happened, obviously.”
What did happen, however, was a deep and respectful dialogue with the man she thanks in the book as her “adversary and friend.” She wears a dove pendant that he gave her around her neck, the Catholic symbol of the Holy Spirit.
“I do not believe in demonizing the criminal justice system. It’s a necessary entity. But God, it hurts. And God, I’m still scared.”
If you look at her closely, Knox carries other subtle messages on her person. In “Free,” she writes of the anguish of having her name associated with “killer, slut, psychopath.”
And on her middle finger, she wears a tattoo of a semicolon.
“It’s a symbol of suicide survival,” Knox explained. “It was given to me by a lovely young woman named Daisy Coleman.”
“I very, very vividly imagined my suicide a lot,” she admitted. “I imagined all the ways, to how I would time it out. I had plans.”
And while Knox eventually decided to “make the choice to live,” Coleman died by suicide in 2020.
“I’m so grateful that I have this,” she told me, looking down at her hand, “to remind myself of all these young women out there who are not believed and are gaslit to death. That doesn’t go away.”
Other things don’t go away, either. Knox told me about a home invasion she recently experienced when she and her family were staying at a friend’s house. She recalled that as her husband went downstairs to investigate, he told her to dial 911.
“I paused,” she said, “because the last time I dialed for help, I got sent to prison for something I did not do.”
Later, after the intruder had run off, an officer interacting with Knox’s 3-year-old daughter gave her a small police badge sticker.
“I wanted to think, what a nice thing, but another part of me was like, it’s a lie.”
Her voice cracked with emotion at the memory.
“I was so conflicted, and I hate that. I do not believe in demonizing law enforcement, and I do not believe in demonizing the criminal justice system. It’s a necessary entity. But God, it hurts. And God, I’m still scared.”
Knox has now spent almost half of her life living in the aftermath of what happened that night in Perugia, almost half her life with a harsh spotlight on her every move. So imagine, if you can, enduring everything she has and being able to crack a joke that “Studying abroad will change your life.” To be joyful, to laugh, to stay quirky in spite of everything, is a supreme act of defiant survival.
“She was in this unique bind, which was, you’re not allowed to have fun for the rest of your life. And I’m just so glad that she can make jokes and be funny and shine,” Cummings said.”
Having been through the unimaginable, Knox is now ready for everything that comes next. “I feel unstoppable,” she told me. “And as somebody who has grappled with freedom and with having it stripped away from me in so many different ways, deep down in my bones, I am OK. I am free. I have a story to tell.”
If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741
Watch and Read more
“Who Are You Now?” features from Mary Elizabeth Williams
