Amanda Knox now considers herself lucky. But she didn’t more than a decade ago when she sat in a claustrophobic Italian prison cell after being convicted of murdering her roommate while studying abroad, depicted as a sex-crazed killer.
But time has changed her view of being one of the lucky ones. In her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, Knox, now 37, reveals what tactics she used to survive prison, the unlikely friendship she formed with the man who had her locked up, and the struggles she faced afterwards as she navigated the outside world.
“Even though I have gone through a very extreme experience, a lot of the things that I’ve learned from it are actually really universal,” she told The Independent, in an interview for the book’s release. “And I’m kind of addicted to that good vibes feeling that I get after being ostracized for so long.”
Knox was just 20 years old and studying abroad in the Italian city of Perugia when her British roommate Meredith Kercher was found stabbed to death on November 2, 2007, in their shared apartment.
The case made global headlines. Suspicion quickly fell on Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, a man she had only recently been seeing. Knox was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison before ultimately being cleared of the murder in 2011 with an appeals court citing errors in the forensic investigation.
Knox noted that people often think that wrongful conviction cases, including her own, end once they’re out of prison.
“But really, that’s where the person’s story really begins,” she added. “Because that is when they are faced with the dilemma of not just surviving but processing this crazy thing that happened with them, and figuring out how does that play a role in your life, and are you defined by it?”
What came next was her real challenge. “How do you possibly do anything in your life that could be as meaningful to you as, for example, fighting to prove your innocence and get out of jail?” she asked.
But despite Knox being definitively acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015, her every move has remained subject to public scrutiny for nearly two decades. Some saw her as monster. Others saw her as a flashy headline.
“Either I am this crazy, woman-hating psychopath that I’m being portrayed to be, which doesn’t exist, or I’m just a regular person like you, and I think that that’s really both scary and intriguing to people,” Knox told The Independent.
But she has worked to rebuild her life in the US, advocating for criminal justice reform and wrongful conviction awareness.
A big part of rebuilding herself was the relationship she forged with Dr. Giuliano Mignini, the man responsible for sending her to prison.
Dr. Mignini, a powerful local magistrate with a fixation during her trial on conspiracy theories involving satanic rituals, painted Knox as a “dirty, woman-hating slut” who killed Kercher.
“Meredith was astonished that Amanda had started a relationship with a boy after just arriving in Perugia … that Amanda owned condoms and a vibrator,” Mignini claimed at Knox’s trial, she wrote in her book. “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 … For Amanda, the time had come to take revenge on that ‘simpering goody two-shoes.’”
With these words, which made headlines across the world, Mignini inducted Knox into a society of women she now calls the “Sisterhood.”
“The women who’ve been the subject of TMZ headlines, SNL skits, and David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists,” Knox writes, referencing Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Bobbitt.
“It all boils down to this titillating lie that women are sexually jealous and and hateful towards other women, and it’s just this perverse male fantasy that’s being projected on young women,” she told The Independent.
Knox pointed out that she wasn’t the only one painted a caricature by the trial and media.
“They turned Meredith into something that she wasn’t,” she said, explaining that this cliche of an “uptight, judgmental kind of bitch” who hated that Knox had casual flings was not true at all. Instead, her roommate was “very nice, introverted, but [a] silly and joyous person.”
Despite how the prosector portrayed them, Knox decided to reach out to him.
“I wanted to understand why he did what he did. I was not content to think of him as an evil psychopath who didn’t care whether or not he was throwing an innocent girl in prison,” she said.
Another part of Knox wondered, “can I convince this man who thought I was a monster that I’m not, and will he do the right thing?”
But Knox’s family, her loved ones, and other exonerees believed she was wasting her time and were worried for her emotional well being.
She was too. Every time an email from him would come in, Knox had to muster up the courage to read it and figure out how to respond. They wrote back and forth to each other about music, The Lord of the Rings and her trial, with him telling her “I’m happy for you.” But Knox wondered, “could he really be happy that I was free?”
“I tried to do my duty,” he wrote to her, along with the words: “I may have made a mistake.”
While Knox yearned for an apology and for him to believe her innocence, she was grateful for his response.
“I think a huge takeaway for me was how much of a good idea it is to set yourself up to be pleasantly surprised by someone,” she said. “You don’t approach them with an expectation. You approach them with curiosity and, it’s going to sound cheesy, but with an open heart, because if you are fixated on the thing that you want from somebody, you are potentially missing the things that they really have to offer.”
Knox decided she wanted to travel to Italy and meet with him in person, to share with him what he had originally denied her: humanity.
“I was going there to give something to him, something that I had inside of myself, that I was capable of, which was compassion, which was understanding, which was kindness, and as soon as I figured that out, I felt unstoppable,” she said.
“I felt like a fucking superhero. I felt like I was finally doing something in relation to this, this whole drama that actually defined me, and I was so fucking proud of myself, not gonna lie, and I came away from it being like, Wow, what a crazy thing that I just did.”
Today, Knox hosts the podcast Labyrinths with her husband Christopher Robinson, and they have two young children who she couldn’t wait to get home to.
“I wake up surrounded by all of the things that I thought I had lost and that I was forced to grieve in prison, and I actually got to have it back,” Knox said. “I get to live, and I get to do meaningful work, and I get to be a mom, and I am very, very aware every morning of how fucking lucky I am.”
