Amanda Knox has released her second memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning. Photo / Lucien Knuteson
Amanda Knox has released her second memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning. Photo / Lucien Knuteson
Amanda Knox spent four years in an Italian jail after her wrongful conviction for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher.
In her second memoir, ..., Knox writes about how she adjusted to normal life after returning home to the US
Knox advocates for recognising the damage caused by media-fuelled shaming and urges society to adopt more compassionate perspectives.
Before Italy, I was only vaguely aware of that ancient stereotype that all women secretly hate one another, that we are incapable of true friendship. Some call it “venimism”; others refer to “mean girls”.
In 1893, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote that, “Due to women’s latent antipathy for oneanother, trivial events give rise to fierce hatreds; and due to women’s irascibility, these occasions lead quickly to insolence and assaults.” The source of our latent antipathy?Sexual jealousy, of course. We hate one another because we are ever competing for male attention.
I always thought this misogynistic myth was obviously false. I had lots of girlfriends, from school and soccer; so did my sisters, my mom, pretty much every girl I knew. But then again, I also thought my innocence was obvious . . . And clearly, the stereotype found its way into my courtroom, where a cross hung on the wall and my devoutly Catholic prosecutor accused me not merely of being a murderer, but of being a dirty, drug-addled, woman-hating slut.
American student Amanda Knox was convicted and acquitted twice of murdering her British housemate Meredith Kercher in the university town of Perugia in 2007. Photo / AFP
“Meredith was astonished that Amanda had started a relationship with a boy after just arriving in Perugia... that Amanda owned condoms and a vibrator,” explained Dr Giuliano Mignini. “It is possible that Meredith argued with Amanda... because of her habit of bringing strange men into the house... [So,] under the influence of drugs and probably also alcohol, Amanda decided to involve Meredith in a violent sex game... It was her opportunity to take revenge on that British girl who was too serious and ‘moderate’ for her tastes, whose clique of English friends always excluded her, who openly accused Amanda... of a lack of cleanliness and excessive ‘friendliness’ with men. For Amanda, the time had come to take revenge on that ‘simpering goody two-shoes’— so she must have thought.”
With these words, which echoed out through the global media, Dr Giuliano Mignini inducted me into a not-so-secret society of women. You know who I’m talking about. The women who’ve been the subject of TMZ headlines, SNL skits, and David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists. The women who’ve been turned into Halloween costumes and found themselves referenced in rap lyrics. The women we treat like punching bags and punch lines. The women whose broken bodies, broken relationships, most vulnerable moments, and worst experiences we consume like candy. I call us the Sisterhood of Ill Repute. I didn’t even realise I belonged to this club until I met another member: Monica Lewinsky.
A photograph showing former White House intern Monica Lewinsky meeting President Bill Clinton at a White House function submitted as evidence in documents by the Starr investigation and released by the House Judicary committee September 21, 1998.
It was shortly before my first-ever speaking event in January 2017, at a private conference in Seattle. Monica was one of the other speakers. I had an hour to fill, and I was terrified. After crafting and polishing my talk, I’d rehearsed a half dozen times leading up to the event. I knew that to really tell my story, I would have to break my own heart in front of the audience, so I went to the places that still hurt. But saying those words in my living room was nothing like standing in front of a crowd of hundreds who might believe all sorts of falsehoods about me.
Before the event, Monica invited me up to her hotel room to chat. She had gone through the gauntlet of public shaming in the worst way possible way when I was just a kid. I remember eating dinner with my family and listening to them discuss the news. It was the first time I’d heard the term “oral sex,” and when I spoke up to say that I couldn’t understand why everyone was so upset about people saying sexy things over the phone, my entire family keeled over with laughter. In the years after that, I, too, casually absorbed the image of Monica presented by the tabloids. I didn’t dig into the story, I didn’t educate myself, and if you’d asked me about it in high school, I probably would have said, “Oh, yeah, Monica. The blow job lady.” I had yet to discover what it truly meant to go from anonymous to “public figure”.
But after getting the tabloid treatment myself, I humbly withdrew the conviction that I could ever trust the image presented to me by the media of who any person really is. And when Monica gave her TED Talk, “The Price of Shame”, she opened my eyes, and many millions more, not only to who the real Monica was, but who she had always been. I’d followed her closely since then, reading all her writing for Vanity Fair, feeling utterly validated when she described her experiences of being ruthlessly shamed in the press, humiliated and demonised for the sake of other people’s entertainment and political gain.
I expected to be starstruck when I walked into that hotel room. Instead, what I found, almost immediately, was a big sister.
Amanda Knox says Monica Lewinsky is like a big sister to her.
From the first moment, she was warm and kind. She made me a cup of tea. We sat by the windows, overlooking downtown Seattle, and we talked about my speech. She gave me some invaluable pointers about mental preparation and self-care, but most of all we talked about processing trauma. How you’re never really done with it, and how talking about it publicly is both triggering and healing. She gave me the rundown of which kinds of therapy had worked for her, which hadn’t, and why. (I have yet to meet anyone more committed to therapy.) But perhaps what struck me the most was what wasn’t said. You’re that girl from Italy! What was prison like? What’s it like to be famous? All those conversational notes, ranging from cringey to offensive, that popped up whenever I met a stranger who thought they knew who I was because they’d absorbed a decade of media coverage, were absent. And it wasn’t because Monica had been unaware of all that. She’d read about Foxy Knoxy just like millions of others, but it was Amanda she’d invited for a cup of tea.
I walked away from that meeting feeling truly seen. It was akin to what I’d experienced with my poetry friend, and at the Innocence Network Conference. Here was someone to whom I didn’t have to explain the trauma of prolonged, widespread public shaming. I had been grappling with my status as a public figure since I came home – the invasion of my privacy, my impotence to fight slanderous statements in the press – and seeing her surviving it, and thriving even, gave me hope that I could as well. A strong sense of empathy can form a bond between people with vastly different life experiences, but it’s a lot easier to make such connections when the other person has been in your shoes. That’s why support groups exist, and it’s why I left that meeting inspired to connect with other publicly shamed women.
Lorena Bobbitt.
When I was producing a podcast called The Truth about True Crime, I did a live episode with Lorena Bobbitt (now Gallo) at a true crime convention in Washington, DC. Like Monica, Lorena had been ducking her head for 20 years in the face of reputational damage that could never be undone. But she agreed to meet me on a stage and talk in front of a live audience about how we’ve lived our lives in the crosshairs of public shaming. Most people remember the castration of John Wayne Bobbitt, but they forget that Lorena was a victim of domestic violence and marital rape, and that her own violent act was done in a moment of mental instability. That doesn’t excuse her actions, but it is crucial context that is often left out.
The morning of that event, Lorena and I met up at a local TV news station to promote it. I got there early, and I was in the green room waiting for Lorena to arrive, when a comedian from New Jersey came in. He had just finished his on-air segment, and we chatted briefly. When he asked what I was going to be talking about, I told him I was interviewing Lorena, and he said, “What about? Which knives are best for slicing sausage?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, we’ll be talking about how people still reduce her to a penis-chopping joke when she is in fact a complex human being who advocates in support of victims of domestic violence.”
To his credit, the comedian replied, “Oh, I get it. She’s not the monster. I am!”
Amanda Knox has released her second memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning. Photo / Lucien Knuteson
But as much as we are all responsible for the media we consume, I don’t want to demonise the audience, the millions of us who casually absorbed skewed and incomplete stories about Lorena, about Monica, about me. Such stories are designed to appeal to our worst impulses. Judgment will always come more easily to us than mercy, understanding, forgiveness, and a nuanced acknowledgment of the complexity that underlies nearly all serious harms. It feels good to hate “bad” people, and there’s a special kind of hate reserved for “bad women.” The narrative of the “mean girl,” the “homewrecker,” and “girl-on-girl” crime is titillating precisely because it confirms the stereotype that women are secretly one another’s worst enemies. Amanda vs. Meredith. It distracts from the actual crimes committed against women by men, and even validates them, giving tacit permission for men to hate women, too.
We’ve advanced far beyond the days of Salem, 1692. Now, we’re all experts at witch-burning. Social media enables us to single out targets in a flash, to dox and shame and deplatform without due process or any sense of proportional sentencing. And we are all at risk, because we are all, myself included, converting our meals and our hikes and marriage proposals into public content. We make that choice every day without a second thought. I never asked to become a public figure, but I did make a Myspace page in high school, a Facebook page in college, and when I was put on trial, my social media profiles were mined for material that could be used to vilify me. It’s where the tabloids discovered my soccer nickname, “Foxy Knoxy,” and where they sourced a photo of me at a war museum pretending to fire a Gatling gun. If Monica was patient zero of the 24-hour news cycle and internet shaming, I was patient zero of social media cancellation.
The social media algorithms, which amplify outrage, are a big part of the problem, but we also need to demand higher standards from our traditional media, which so often fails in how it frames a story, even if it is accurate at the level of individual details. This is something that really hit me when I viewed my own story next to Monica’s. It matters what you call a thing. For years, the series of events that resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment were referred to as the “Lewinsky scandal”. But who actually committed adultery, and lied about it? Who was exploiting whom, and why? What about Ken Starr, for that matter? Calling it the “Lewinsky scandal” and not the “Clinton affair” or the “Starr investigation” erases these men’s responsibility and culpability. The same can be said when people call those events in Perugia that derailed my life the “sordid Amanda Knox saga” instead of “the murder of Meredith Kercher by Rudy Guede”. Such framing has reputational consequences for all parties – it cements the idea of me as guilty or guilt-adjacent, lets Rudy Guede off the hook, and erases Meredith as a victim.
I can only do so much to rectify these misleading frames, but my powerlessness to do so, and to stop the attacks on my reputation from traditional media and the chattering crowds online, has been an unexpected blessing. My reputation, my public self, I’ve realised, doesn’t really belong to me. Legally that is true, but it is also true socially, and it always has been. My reputation and public identity are property of the commons. So is yours. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting when someone attacks you publicly, when they shame or disparage you. We care deeply about our reputations, because losing the trust or faith of your tribe is tantamount to a death sentence. Being recognised as honest, reliable, safe, friendly – all that matters immensely. It matters the way your bank balance matters. It shapes your possibilities in life. But it doesn’t say anything about who you really are. And ultimately, your reputation doesn’t fully belong to you. It can be shaped and altered or demolished with impunity by the actions of others.
Dwelling on what people thought of me made me miserable, so I learned to detach myself from those judgments. This came into stark relief for me when Netflix released the documentary about my case and chose to advertise the film with a campaign where they showed two photos of me, with the word “monster” on one and the word “victim” on the other. These ads were everywhere online, and on giant billboards in LA and New York. I remember standing in Times Square underneath those giant photos of my face, pedestrians passing by me, none the wiser.
It helped me to see that my public identity was like a piñata in the shape of me, and I was watching from the back of the crowd as people gleefully took swings at it. The real me wasn’t hanging there in the spotlight. The real me was a sister, a daughter, a lover of foreign languages and dancing, a Renaissance nerd and theatre geek; the real me was devouring an heirloom tomato and licking the plate. The real me was untouchable.
Knox, pictured with her mother, Edda Mellas, and sister, Deanna Knox, after returning to Seattle in 2011. Photo / Michael Hanson, The New York Times
It was the real me that Monica had seen that first time we met. People have asked me what’s it like to be friends with Monica Lewinsky. It’s like having a true friend. It’s like having a big sister. The only difference is that our past traumas and ongoing challenges— a cruel news story, a development in my legal saga – are public. Beyond that, you know exactly what it’s like. On more than one rough day, I’ve received a text from Monica checking in, looking after my mental health when I’ve been too busy battling my problems to step back and breathe.
I wasn’t the first woman to be slapped with a scarlet letter, and I know I won’t be the last. I take comfort from the view inside my Sisterhood of Ill Repute. From here, it’s easy to see how the impulse to crucify others for their misdeeds, whether real or imagined, says more about the shamer than the shamed. And it leaves me optimistic that we might all become a little more hesitant to piñata-fy our fellow citizens. It once seemed unthinkable that smoking would be almost universally reviled as a toxic and disgusting habit. After all, doctors once smoked while examining children. We see the same shifts happening with sugary sodas, and now even with alcohol, thanks to Gen Z. We have it in us as a society to recognise behaviours that harm us and others, and though we will likely never eradicate them entirely, we can push them to the fringes and replace them with healthier alternatives. Shame-fuelled media is no different. And I see the changes happening already.
A few years ago, I gave a talk to a group of lawyers in Kentucky. Afterward, a woman about my age approached me. She was sobbing, and it took her a moment to get her words out.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I treated you as entertainment.”
I hugged her for a long time. So much for women hating women.
This is an extract from Free: My Search For Meaning by Amanda Knox, (Hachette, RRP$39.99), republished with approval.
