From a very early stage, the idea of Knox as femme fatale gained traction as journalists shaped the slim established facts - and the much more dense material of supposition and rumour - into a suitable product for media consumption: a beautiful young woman apparently involved in a brutal sexual assault and murder. "I am not the femme fatale criminal fantasy they describe. This person does not exist," Knox protested to Italian TV in October last year.
Unfortunately for "Foxy Knoxy", it always had been a case about a femme fatale, from the moment that footage of her kissing Sollecito outside her apartment, just hours after the murder, was disseminated around the world.
By the time the counterspin began to churn, with the PR firm hired by her family pointing out that the nickname had been given to her as a child on the soccer pitch, it was already far too late. While Sollecito and the other accused (and swiftly convicted), Rudy Guede, soon receded into the background, Knox was handed the role of celebrity murderess.
One of Sollecito's lawyers even suggested that, "being with a beautiful girl, he allowed himself to be drawn into giving her an alibi". Journalists in court reported that Knox frequently flirted across the court room with Sollecito, who later felt it necessary to insist he was "not a dog on a lead - at the beck and call of Knox". The prosecution repeatedly cast Knox as prime architect and eager participant in the killing, and some of the press lapped it up.
Knox has been spared no hyperbole: one lawyer called her "a diabolical, Satanic, demonic she-devil". Though she has found her defenders in the media, some of the "quality" press has followed a similar line to the tabloids. At times a value system has been mobilised that condemns Knox for what it perceives to be an unhealthy, immoral promiscuity. When a writer in the
Observer
suggests that leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands meant Knox "knew no boundaries", one is prompted to ask where, exactly, we are locating those boundaries - and what century we are in?
Above all, however, it's not the sex, it's the violence. Violent male offenders are understood to be conforming to well-established patterns of behaviour, even if their crimes provoke horror and revulsion. But female agents of violence are, in the words of writer Ann Lloyd, "doubly deviant, doubly damned": they have not only broken the law, they have transgressed the "rules" of what is understood to be acceptable female behaviour. A criminologist described Knox as a "gap-year Rose West" in the Daily Express, and a former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Association likened her supposed nonchalance in court to Radovan Karadzic's "preening behaviour" during his trial.
The femme fatale meme is one means by which society has historically sought to rationalise the violent woman, to make her "make sense" when she seems to depart so radically from accepted notions of femininity. It is a construct that provokes powerful and confused emotions. On the one hand, she excites feelings of desire in the heterosexual male; on the other, she also inspires fear, and very often her erotic charge is magnified considerably precisely because of the threat she contains.
The coverage of the murder of Kercher swiftly cast Knox in this role. One defence lawyer felt obliged to go out of her way in an appeal hearing in 2011 to protest that Knox "may have femme fatale looks, but is not a killer". Like that famous parody of 1940s noir femmes fatales, Jessica Rabbit, Giulia Buongiorno suggested, Knox was not bad - she had just been "drawn that way".
The figure of the beautiful-but-lethal woman has always been "drawn that way", from Basic Instinct back to Eve tempting Adam. The enduring patriarchal myth of the femme fatale embodies abiding male fears and fascination with the idea that female charm conceals indelible evil.
It may be that this has had little or no bearing on the verdict; nevertheless, it is significant and troubling that such stereotypes continue to circulate and be drawn upon so deeply as the media constructs images of women on trial for murder.
Journey though the courts
November 2, 2007: The body of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British student living in Italy, is found in her Perugia apartment. Kercher shared the apartment with Amanda Knox, an American student, as well as two Italian roommates.
Kercher's cause of death is a stab wound to her neck. Tests reveal evidence of sexual activity before her death.
November 6: Knox, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba are arrested. Knox accused Lumumba of being complicit in the murder, but she later recanted that statement.
He was released two weeks later.
December 6: Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast national, is extradited from Germany and put in jail on arriving in Italy in connection with the murder.
October 28, 2008: Guede sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of murder following a separate fast-track trial. His sentence is reduced to 16 years on appeal.
December 4, 2009: Knox and Sollecito are found guilty of murder and sexual violence. Knox receives a 26-year prison sentence and Sollecito a 25-year sentence.
October 3, 2011: Knox and Sollecito are ordered to be released from jail immediately after an appeals court overturns their murder convictions.
March 26, 2013: The highest criminal court in Italy orders a retrial for Knox and Sollecito after reversing an appeals court's reversal of their convictions.
January 31, 2014: An Italian court convicts Knox and Sollecito for Kercher's murder. Knox, now 26 and who was in Seattle while the court verdict was reached, was sentenced to 28 years.
Lawyers for Knox and Sollecito, 29, vow to appeal to Italy's highest court, a process that will take at least a year.
- The Conversation
