Amanda Knox says she is one of the lucky ones. She and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had their convictions for the murder of Meredith Kercher overturned for the second and final time in 2015. She now presents a successful podcast called Labyrinths, is a TV producer and bestselling author, does standup comedy and campaigns against miscarriages of justice. She is married to Christopher Robinson, a writer, whom she adores, and they have two gorgeous toddlers. Life could not be much better or fuller. Her new book is called Free. But it could just as easily be called Still Not Free.
Knox’s search for freedom has led her down surprising paths. Most surprising was her decision to write to and then befriend Giuliano Mignini, the conspiracy-theorist prosecutor who created the shocking narrative that Kercher, a 21-year-old Londoner on a student exchange in Perugia, was killed in 2007 by Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede after a drug-fuelled sex game got out of hand. Shocking in itself. But even more shocking because Knox, then aged 20, and Sollecito, 23, had only been going out with each other for six days and neither had previous convictions. And most shocking of all because there was DNA evidence at the murder scene suggesting that Guede (who had been arrested the previous week in Milan for breaking into a nursery school armed with a knife) was the killer, and none implicating Knox and Sollecito.
Knox, now 37, admits that her family think she’s mad for forging a relationship with Mignini. “They thought I had Stockholm syndrome and that I was in a weird abusive relationship with my abuser. But I was haunted by this ‘Why?’ question. Why did this happen to me? If they had done their job correctly, I would be a footnote in Meredith’s story.” It becomes clear over a two-hour conversation by video link how much talking to Mignini has helped her. It also becomes clear that having her murder conviction quashed was not enough for Knox. She is still haunted by the idea that the prosecutor believed she murdered Kercher, her housemate and fellow exchange student. What she wanted more than anything from Mignini was an admission, or even a confession, that he had got it, and her, wrong.
Knox looks happy and confident, so different from the last time I saw her in Seattle in 2014 when she was waiting for the Italian jury to return its verdict in her retrial for murder. Back then, she was in pieces. Today, she’s wearing a quirky T-shirt with purple and yellow sleeves and a white alien in the middle. When Knox was a teenager who loved to play football and was known as Foxy Knoxy (a nickname her teammates gave her that was later used to sexualise and demonise her), people loved her quirkiness. But once she was arrested, quirky became downright weird in press coverage. The tabloids scrutinised everything for hints – she once had a loud party and a neighbour called the police; she did cartwheels in the police station (she didn’t know she was a suspect and she was stiff with tension); she brought a vibrator to Perugia (a joke present from friends); she smiled in court (at her parents, whom we couldn’t see); she got off with someone on a train and caught herpes. All of this was reported at the time as if it was evidence against her.
I first wrote to Knox in 2009 after interviewing her mother, Edda Mellas. By then, Knox and Sollecito had been in custody for 20 months while Guede was already serving a 30-year sentence for Kercher’s murder after being convicted in a fast-track trial. Mellas told me her daughter was compulsively honest, eccentric and naive. I remember her saying that if she bought a new pair of shoes and asked Knox for her opinion, she would tell her straight out that they were hideous. She couldn’t help but tell the truth, she said.
But when Knox was interrogated after Kercher’s murder, she didn’t tell the truth. Under intense pressure, she confessed to her involvement in a murder she knew nothing about. Police interviews were supposed to be recorded, but these weren’t. She was interrogated for 53 hours over five days in a language she was just beginning to speak. She says she was slapped twice on the head. The police used a system devised to get confessions known as the Reid technique. It’s highly effective – officers create imagined scenarios, tell suspects that other witnesses have contradicted their story or dobbed them in, make them think that they were lured into the crime by a more senior partner. The problem is it often leads to false confessions. Knox withdrew her statement hours later. Evidence showed it couldn’t be true. The man she implicated, alongside herself – Patrick Lumumba, her boss at the bar where she worked – had a cast-iron alibi. But it was too late. Everything was set in motion. And the prosecutor was not for turning.
The letters Knox sent to me were touchingly innocent, in every sense – big bubble handwriting, hopeful quotes from Beatles songs: “Here comes the sun! Let it be! Be well, Simon. I’m in your hands, Amanda.” Next to this she had drawn an outline of her hands. If she was guilty, she had to be a psychopath – and she didn’t seem like a psychopath to me. We continued writing over the years. Her conviction was quashed in 2011 and she returned to America to try to rebuild her life. But in March 2013 the court of cassation, Italy’s highest court, announced it was overturning the acquittals and that there would be a retrial.
When I spoke to her in Seattle in January 2014, it was the last week of the retrial, which had started in Italy four months earlier, and which she did not attend. However hard she tried to hold herself together, she was distraught and often tearful. Finally, after 11 and a half hours’ deliberation, the jury found Knox and Sollecito guilty for a second time, and they were sentenced to 28 years and a half years and 25 years, respectively. Knox refused to return to Italy, but there was every chance she could be extradited. After the verdict, she told me: “It’s like I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer.” She said she was thinking back to her time in prison when “you could empathise with people who thought about taking their own life because they’re just … trapped”. I feared for her. (In Free, she says she considered killing herself in prison.)
Fourteen months later, in March 2015, the murder convictions were overturned again. Knox got on with living, and we wrote to each other less frequently.
This is the first time we’ve spoken in years and there’s plenty to catch up on. She tells me about her three-year-old daughter Eureka and 17-month-old son Echo; how the family lives on an island a ferry’s trip away from the family home in Seattle; how at home she is in this artsy forest community where difference is respected and creativity nurtured. I ask how her mother and stepfather, Chris, are. And still she’s upbeat. She says Chris decided he was done with being a computer guy and fulfilled an ambition by heading off to Panama to experience a different life, and they are all waiting for him to come home.
Are Chris and Edda still together? Her tone changes. Her words slow, as they tend to when she’s upset and trying to keep control of her emotions. “No, they are not, actually. They got divorced this past year. Their relationship really struggled over the course of my incarceration, because they were apart for so long. Chris was living in Italy, because he could work there. And, after spending four years apart from each other, they never really learned how to be together in the same house ever again. So that’s one of those ripple effects of all of these things.” And now the tears come. “Part of me blames myself for it. If I hadn’t studied abroad and if this crazy thing hadn’t happened to me, maybe they would still be together now.”
The ripple effect can be seen in so many ways. She says that when she got home the first time, she hoped she’d be able to pick up her life. What’s more, her family expected her to. But she couldn’t. There was so much to process. She’d been happy-go-lucky before. Now she’d sit at the dinner table, terse, anxious and moody. “I had a lot of rage that I didn’t know where to place. My sister said she felt she was walking on eggshells around me. In prison, I was sad, and once I was ‘free’, but not really free, I was angry.”
She was so confused. “I felt rejected by the world, that there was no place for me any more, and I was angry about that.” She knows it was unfair on her family. They had put their lives on hold for four years, given their all emotionally, physically and financially to support her, were suffering their own form of PTSD, and this was how she was thanking them.
Did her mum understand what she was going through? “She knew something was wrong, but didn’t know the right way to help me. That was scary for her, because while I was in prison, it was very clear what the answer was – prove Amanda is innocent and get her out of prison. Now it was, ‘How do I help my daughter heal? I don’t understand why Amanda’s angry right now or why she’s still washing her underwear in the sink when there’s a perfectly good washing machine right over there.’” Did you understand why you were doing that? “At the time, no. I suppose I wasn’t able to navigate the free world like a free person so I just found myself in a new kind of prison.”
It wasn’t just a metaphorical prison. “I couldn’t open my bedroom window because there were paparazzi outside in the street taking photos of me.” How long were they there? “Months.” Even after the paparazzi disappeared, she’d discover pictures of herself in the papers and have no idea where they had come from. “I’d find out that somebody had been stalking me on my walk to the grocery store and they got pictures of me wearing sweatpants or giving my boyfriend some change so that he could go buy a coffee, and it would be like, ‘What is Amanda paying off her boyfriend not to say?’ or, ‘Look how ugly Foxy Knoxy is now’. For years I never knew if I was being stalked by somebody, and I lived in this constant state of paranoia.”
Knox was back at university, but she was frightened of talking to people, let alone making friends. Some people thought she was a monster, some thought she was a catch, and some just treated her as cheap entertainment. So she stuck with the people who had known her pre-conviction. She had relationships with two former male friends, and got engaged to one of them. But gradually she realised he had also objectified her. “My fiance told me that he imagined me as Joan of Arc.” She shudders. “I didn’t like people fantasising about me instead of seeing me for who I really was.” It didn’t seem any different from the people who wrote to her in prison telling her she was a satanic slut or those who said they wanted to marry her.
The press continued to devour stories about her. Everything she did was judged against Kercher’s fate. “Any joke that I make, especially about my own trauma, was seen as being at the expense of Meredith. And any good thing in my life must be at the expense of Meredith, because my identity and her death are inextricably interlinked in so many people’s minds.” The way she sees it is they are flip sides of the same coin. It could just as easily have been her who was killed, she says, and Kercher who was jailed. “Even if I hadn’t been wrongly accused and put in jail, I would still be going to therapy because I came home one day and found my house broken into and my roommate murdered. Like it would be the defining trauma of my life, just that.” Her face is blotchy with tears. “I just happened to be the one of us who got to go home to her family and got to keep living her life. Does that mean that I should hide and pretend that I don’t exist because that’s an offence to Meredith’s memory that I get to keep existing?”
What people don’t realise or won’t accept, Knox says, is that she and Kercher were friends. Today she regards her as an inspiration. “Meredith is like this ghost sitting on my shoulder who fought for her life and didn’t succeed, who is telling me to fight for my life.” She stops, uncomfortably. “I know that’s not what people like to hear. Some people think that her identity disappears next to my identity. And, again, I don’t blame people for having that idea. She became the footnote of a story where I was the central figure.” Knox says it sickened her the day she read a headline in the New York Post saying “Man Who Killed Amanda Knox’s Roommate Freed on Community Service”.
A turning point came after the Innocence Project, an organisation that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted, invited her to a conference in Portland. The idea of attending a meeting with a bunch of people who had been declared innocent horrified her. After all, she had only recently been reconvicted. “I was not even technically an exoneree. I was just like, Jesus Christ, I don’t even belong at this conference.”
But her mother convinced her to go. One of many moving moments in the book is when Knox turns up, paralysed with fear, and two young men approach her. They see how nervous she is, how reluctant to be there, and tell her: “You don’t have to explain a thing, little sister. We know.”
From that moment, she says, she was dedicated to the Innocence Project. “The realisation that what I had been through wasn’t unique was my first moment of knowing that there was a way for me to connect with other human beings, and that I could have a purpose.” She had found her tribe. And her tribe looked and sounded very different from her – the majority were male, black and a good deal older than her. Most had spent far longer than her in prison. That was also when she realised she had been relatively lucky in her misfortune. “I’ll never forget an exoneree telling me at that conference, ‘Thank God you got wrongly convicted, Amanda, because before a little girl from the suburbs of Seattle, a college-educated white girl, got wrongly convicted, no one believed that it was real. So I’m sorry for everything you had to go through, but thank God you did, because now it’s undeniable.’ That really stuck with me.” Ever since she has campaigned – telling her story, making people aware of other miscarriages of justice, and now she is fighting to have the law changed. “One of my battles is with the Washington legislature, trying to ban police deception during interrogations. Police are allowed to lie! It’s an incredibly dangerous practice because it’s not just coercive – when you do that to people it warps their understanding of what is real. I’m working with the Washington Innocence Project to try to ban police deception and also to get all interactions with police officers to be recorded.”
In 2015, she met Christopher Robinson. He knew that she had been involved in a scandal, but didn’t ask about it. He told her that he wouldn’t Google her. Did he really not know your backstory? Knox smiles. “No. He thought it had something to do with someone being pushed out of a window.”
Netflix made a film about Knox, and the tabloids started to write stories about Robinson. At that point, Robinson realised he couldn’t avoid finding out about her past. So he went to the other extreme – he did a deep dive, and read everything that was out there about Knox. He discovered the internet trolls and took them on. He was sure he could make them see that his girlfriend was a good person who had been grievously wronged. “I told him that you can’t convince people on the internet, but he needed to go through it himself. So he drove himself mad for about three months trying, until he finally realised and let it go.”
Robinson gave Knox a new confidence. He made her realise she didn’t have to apologise for her existence. But like every exoneree I’ve met, she was unable to let the past go. When I interviewed her in Seattle 11 years ago, the thing that stuck with me most was her self-loathing. She had considered herself strong before Italy, but now she regarded herself a “weak” character, because she had yielded to intimidatory tactics, made a false confession and implicated the innocent Lumumba, for which she was sentenced to three years for slander.
However quickly she withdrew her “confession”, she had still made it. Although she has been cleared for a decade, she knows people still question her innocence, or simply believe she’s guilty. In recent years she seems to have been trying to win back her self-respect as much as the respect of others by doing the difficult and unexpected. That included writing to Mignini. In Italy, prosecutors are involved with a case from the start – they are supposed to investigate “inquisitorially”, or neutrally, then if a suspect is charged they prosecute adversarially.
The astonishing thing about Mignini is at the time he began investigating Knox’s case he was himself facing charges, relating to the infamous “Monster of Florence” murder case when he argued that a satanic cult was responsible for eight double murders that took place between 1974 and 1985, although evidence suggested a lone killer. Mignini was charged with planting bugging devices in journalists’ cars and abusing his power to question reporters. He was allowed to continue practising as a prosecutor despite being charged. He was eventually cleared on appeal after being found guilty on four charges of exceeding the powers of his office.
Mignini, now 74, wrote back to Knox, and they became regular correspondents. As their relationship developed, it became like an existential tug of war – her hurt and grievance on one side, his pride and grandiosity on the other.
She discovered they had things in common: a love of animals, classical music and literature. They were both fans of The Lord of the Rings. He told her he identified them with characters in the epic fantasy. “The character he identified with was King Théoden, who did bad things when possessed by a spirit, but ultimately turned out to be an upright person who was saving his people. He said that I was like Éowyn, Théoden’s niece. I find that so interesting because the thing she is most afraid of is a cage. There are moments like that where I go, is he trying to tell me something or is this just a coincidence?”
Has she asked him straight out whether he believes she is innocent? “Yes. And he won’t answer. He says that I am not the person he thought he was prosecuting. Or he’ll say things like, ‘It’s very likely, and it’s possible that I made some mistakes.’ The thing that he’s most afraid of is being thought of as somebody who went after a person that he knew to be innocent. He wants to be clear that, at the time, he believed what he was prosecuting.”
So he does think she’s innocent now? It’s not as simple as that, she says. “He’s said publicly that he now thinks that I had nothing to do with the murder, but that I was still physically present. So we go back to what was being told to me in my interrogation room. He says things to me like, ‘I know you’re not lying. I just think that you don’t remember what really happened’, which is incredibly patronising.”
At times, their exchanges were comic. He signed Christmas cards “Merry Christmas from your Prosecutor”. She had called him her prosecutor to remind him of the power dynamic, but he interpreted it as a term of affection. At other times, the exchanges were eerie (he asked her if she had ever thought of becoming a mother just after she had a miscarriage that he knew nothing about), and sometimes even poignant. On one occasion, he told her: “I will never forget the grandness of your soul.”
Does she now regard him as a friend? “Good question. How do you define what a friend is? Do I think that he wishes me well? Yes. Someone who cares about you? I think he truly does care about me. Someone who likes you? Yeah, I think he likes me. And you know what? In some ways, I like him.” A friend is someone you trust, I suggest. “I trust Giuliano to be who he is. But the thing I can’t trust him to do yet is proclaim to the world that he was wrong and that people should leave me alone and that I’m innocent.”
Does she think her parents were right to suggest it was a crazy idea to get in touch with Mignini? Not at all, she says – meeting him face to face, in Italy in 2022, 15 years after Kercher was murdered and she was jailed, was the most empowering thing she has done. As well as wanting him to absolve you, it feels like you’ve undertaken a form of aversion therapy, I say. “Yes! Yes!” she replies enthusiastically. “Anyone who has been hurt by someone wants the person who hurt them to acknowledge the hurt. It’s not just enough for everyone else to acknowledge that you’ve been hurt. I walked into that room feeling like he had all of the power over me. And I walked away from that room feeling like, oh my God, I have all of the power over him.” In what way? “Because as much as I want him to absolve me, I think he wants me to absolve him more. The one time in my life where I felt unstoppable was when I realised that it wasn’t about what I was going to get from him, it was about what I was going to give him.”
Over the past few years, it feels as if she has been trying to unpick her past, stitch by stitch. So when she was in Italy she went to visit the home she shared briefly with Kercher. “In that moment, I could grieve for both her and me, because a part of me did die in Italy.” She says she would love to visit Meredith’s grave one day, but she won’t do it without the Kercher family’s blessing.
On the day Kercher was killed, Knox and Sollecito had planned to go truffle hunting near the medieval town of Gubbio. She had never seen a truffle before, never mind eaten one, and was so excited at the prospect. When she was in Perugia, she, her husband, her mother and Eureka met up with Sollecito and they finally had their day truffle hunting, 15 years on. Like her, she says, Sollecito, who spent four years in prison for the murder, has struggled with life post-conviction.
Earlier this year, she was back in Italy. Her conviction for the slander of Lumumba still stands, and she was appealing against it. In January, the court of cassation upheld the verdict. Lumumba was delighted; she was devastated. She understands why he was pleased – because it had a ruinous impact on his life. “He was arrested in the middle of the night, scaring the crap out of his wife and their baby. He was brought to the police office and locked in a cell without any explanation. He was thrown in prison for two weeks. Even after he was released, they would not release his property. The pub remained closed for criminal investigation for three months for no goddamn reason, so he lost his lease. He had to sell his home in Perugia because he didn’t have enough money. He lost a lot and he has not been compensated for that loss in Italy.” Having said all that, she insists it can’t be slander when it has been accepted that Knox’s confession was obtained unfairly, she had withdrawn it so quickly, and Lumumba produced an alibi within a day.
For all the weakness she saw in herself, Knox has proved herself a scrapper extraordinaire. And she’s still fighting for her right to live her life and own her story. After it was announced that Disney-owned streaming service Hulu was making an eight-part drama about the miscarriage of justice, with Knox as an executive producer, she was attacked for profiting from Kercher’s murder. Francesco Maresca, the lawyer representing the Kercher family, said: “On the one hand, Amanda says the trial created so much suffering for her but then she tries to have it all – the fame and the money.” Kercher’s sister, Stephanie, said: “Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.”
Knox is all too aware of the criticism. “People say, why are you continuing to tell your story? Why are you continuing to elevate and platform yourself? And to that I would simply say, ‘Because this is my story. This is all I have, and I think that it’s valuable – not just valuable to me, it’s valuable to other people.’ If there’s anything that I’ve learned from my experiences, it’s that I can connect with people and my story can connect with people, and that it matters. Just like Meredith’s life mattered and her story matters, so does mine.”
• Free: My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox is published by Headline on 25 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com
