April 7, 2025 • 44 mins
Amanda Knox was just 20 years old when she was found guilty of a crime she did not commit — the murder of her roommate. Amanda spent four years in an Italian prison before she was finally exonerated and allowed to return to her life back home in the U.S. But she soon discovered that that life didn’t exist anymore.
Note: this is part one of a two-episode series we’re running this month about Amanda Knox. It was recorded in 2021.
Sign up for Maya’s new newsletter here.
Get early, ad-free access to episodes of A Slight Change of Plans by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.
Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin
Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin hay Slight Changers. First, a quick reminder, I've launched
a newsletter. I'm so excited about it. It's called Change
(00:36):
with Maya Shunker. Every other week, I share personal reflections
behind the scenes, look at my interviews on the show,
bits of what I'm watching or listening to, and some
prompts for you to think about as you go about
your week. It's free and you can sign up at
Changewithmaya dot com or click on the link in our
show notes. Last week, we previewed two upcoming episodes about
(00:59):
Amanda Knox. Today you'll hear the first one. I had
this conversation with Amanda back in twenty twenty one, and
it provides some valuable context about who she is and
what she's been through. I really recommend listening to this
episode before you tune in next week. I hope you
enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
When I was told you're guilty and you are sentenced
to twenty six years, I mean everything I thought to
be true about the world collapsed in on itself and
I had this kind of quick an adaptation in my
mind where I thought, oh, I'm not this lost tourist
(01:42):
who's waiting to go home. I am a prisoner, like
this isn't just a thing that is happening to me.
This is my life, and whether or not it's based
in truth, this defines me. I've just been defined a killer.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
That's Amanda Knox describing the moment when an Italian court
found her guilty of a heinous crime she did not commit,
the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kircher. Amanda was just
twenty years old when this all unfolded. She spent four
years in an Italian prison before she was finally exonerated
and allowed to return home to America, but the reality
(02:18):
of what she faced upon her return was not at
all what she expected.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
When I first came home, I thought that I was
going to get to have the life that I had
left behind back that once this is all worked out
and everyone agrees that I'm innocent, then I get to
go back to my life that I lost that was
on pause, and I realized that that life didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
On today's episode, what happens when the world simply won't
let you move on. I'm Maya Shunker and this is
a slight change of plans, a show about who we
are and who we become in the face of a
big change, you know, to begin with it. It's so
(03:08):
interesting for a guest with your story, you know, I
would do the work of trying to figure out, Okay,
how do I summarize for the listener what it is
that this person has gone through. But because so many
people have tried to appropriate your story over the years,
I don't want to do that. I want this, Amanda.
I want to hear your story.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
In your words, absolutely, and thank you for that. When
I was twenty years old, I decided that I wanted
to study abroad. I ended up choosing a program and
a really small ancient city in the middle of Italy
called Perusia. I moved into an apartment in a small
(03:47):
house overlooking this beautiful valley with three other young women,
two Italian girls and a British student who was just
like a year older than me named Meredith. And the
day after Halloween, on November first, I was hanging out
with my new love fling of five days, Rafaele Salchico,
(04:11):
and Meredith was home alone and a local burglar named
Rudy Guidet broke into our home and raped and murdered her,
and then fled the country. And I discovered all of
this by coming home next day to take a shower
and noticing that our home was in disarray I had.
(04:32):
I brought Rafaela over, we called the police together. The
police came and discovered the crime scene, Meredith's body, which
fortunately I never had to see in person. But unfortunately
there was a lot of frantic energy, a lot of confusion,
a lot of fear in those opening. You know, days
(04:53):
after the murder was discovered, it was immediately of tremendous
public interest. International media was descending upon Perusia, talking to
any single person that they possibly could. Meanwhile, I'm spending
hours and hours and hours at the police station trying
to help the police uncover what happened to my friend.
And I spent about fifty three hours over five days
(05:17):
in that police office, being questioned over and over and
over again, telling them the same story that I've been
telling them what happened that night as far as I knew,
and they were telling me that I was wrong, that
everything that I remembered was wrong, that I was traumatized,
and that my freedom and my access to my family
(05:39):
depended upon me remembering something that I couldn't remember, and
I was alone. I was speaking of foreign language, I
was without a lawyer. I was asking for my mom,
I was asking for any help whatsoever, and instead I
got slapped and screamed at for hours until I was
(06:00):
willing to sign a statement that they wrote implicating my
boss Patrick L. Mumba. I caved. It was the only
thing that made sense to me anymore. I started to
doubt my own sanity, and I signed those papers and
they immediately ran off to go arrest my boss Patrick,
(06:20):
and I was finally left alone to breathe and think
straight after hours of horrible treatment, and I immediately recanted.
I told them, oh my god, there's a huge mistake.
I was under a lot of pressure. I don't actually
remember witnessing any murder whatsoever. They wouldn't listen to me.
(06:43):
They told me that with time my memories would come back,
and that I just needed to be quiet. And like
just a few days later, I was brought before a
judge and finally finally told you are under investigation for
the murder of Meredith Kircher.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So there's a few critical moments in what you just
described that I'm interested to hear more about. In particular
what your psychology was like at the time, as well
as how you might think differently about that experience now.
And the first is you know, when you were trying
to be helpful to the police right to help identify
(07:19):
who the murderer was, they began using aggressive interrogation tactics
on you. As you said, they accused you of having amnesia.
It led you to engage in false confessions. And I
can only imagine how traumatizing it is to go through
something like that, especially when you don't understand that the
(07:40):
human mind is in fact capable of such things, right.
I think it is actually really hard for most people
to appreciate the conditions under which they would be likely
to generate false memories or false confessions. And I think
the reason why I feel like this is such an
important part of your story to bring to light is
that when you are made to question your own sanity,
(08:06):
your own ability to accurate the reason about the world
around you, that is damaging. That puts you in a
state where I imagine it's easy to feel broken because
you start asking yourself questions like how how was I
capable of that? How is I capable of implicating this?
Totally innocent person. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Absolutely, And that's actually a really interesting way of framing
that question, because of course, going into an interrogation room,
you don't think I would ever say anything that would
that I don't know to be true, and that would
that would implicate me or not be to like you know,
that could be compromising to oneself, like that's that is
(08:50):
it's so counterintuitive. I didn't know that this was possible.
I didn't even know that police could lie to you
like I did. I just there was so much I
didn't know, and I therefore, like my my instinct when
all of this became a catastrophe was to blame myself
because I didn't know who else to blame. I didn't
(09:10):
know that there was a specific police interrogation technique designed
to break down people to just admit to something. And
it wasn't until a cognitive scientist who studies false confessions
reached out to me, and it was while I was
still in prison, it was after I had been convicted.
(09:32):
He didn't share any research with me at first. He
just said, please describe everything you can possibly remember about
your interrogation and send it to me. So I did,
and it was it was hard even doing that, because
it was the scariest moment of my life, the most
confusing moment of my life, and it's the moment of
my life that I felt the most shame about because
(09:54):
I just I couldn't explain even to myself why it happened.
I honestly couldn't. I just felt like there was something
wrong with me, and I was the only one in
the world that had ever happened to as far as
I knew, and of course everyone was judging me as
a bad person because of it. And then he responded
by sending me back his research, and his research showed
(10:15):
that the exact way that they had broken me down
was just like, you know, point for point, just how
you break down innocent people. And that moment of relief
and self forgiveness was tremendous for me because it was
(10:38):
at that point that I really really understood that my
wrongful conviction wasn't really my fault, that I had been
set up, and that there were a lot of forces
at play, a lot of people who had, you know,
a ton of agency in this equation, and I was
the least among them. I was at the mercy of
(11:01):
people who were not just taking advantage of me, but
actively trying to destroy my life.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah. I like to talk for a bit about the
time that you spent in prison, because you spent four
years in full, but at one point you were sentenced
to twenty six years in prison. Yes, and as an
early twenty something, twenty six years is like your entire
freaking life.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
It is your entire freaking life.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
I want to know what was your relationship with Hope
during your time in prison, and I'm just curious if
you can dig into that a bit.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, absolutely so. And it's interesting how I had, like
this tremendous shift happen because the first two years, while
I was still on trial and believing that all of
this was just a huge out of proportion misunderstanding, I
was convinced that I was going to eventually be going home.
(11:59):
And there were moments in that time where I was
just like, oh my god, you know, I've been here
so long, Like I missed my twenty first birthday that
I you know, I'd always thought, oh I would go
and have a drink with my dad. Nope, that didn't happen.
So feeling like I was losing really important parts of
my life. But ultimately thinking this is a really, really
(12:23):
long nightmare that does have an expiration date, and that
expiration date is the verdict. And my family, especially my mom,
very much like that was sort of our mantra that
there is a light at the end of this very
long dark tunnel. And when I then was told you're
guilty and you are sentenced to twenty six years, I
(12:47):
mean everything I thought to be true about the world
collapsed in on itself. I very much felt like the
ground beneath me had fallen away and I had nothing
to stand on. I literally collapsed between you know, my attorneys,
and then the guards sort of had to carry me
out of this courtroom where I'm hysterical, like unable to
(13:07):
believe what is happening. And I had this very very
i mean kind of quick an adaptation in my mind
where I thought, oh, I'm not this lost tourist who's
waiting to go home. I am a prisoner, Like this
(13:28):
isn't just a thing that is happening to me. This
is my life. This is my life now, and whether
or not it's based in truth, this defines me. I've
just been defined a killer, and I have just been
told the only place that you belong is behind bars
for the majority of your life. And all those things
that you thought that you would get to have in
(13:50):
your life, a family, a career, the opportunity to be
with your family and watch your nephews grow and your
kids grow, and all of these things that I thought
were going to be a part of my life were
not a part of my life. That was never going
to be a part of my life, And and what
(14:12):
is my life? Then? Who am? I? And my mom
had a very different relationship with hope than I did.
She didn't have that shift happen when I was convicted.
She looked at this and I think just out of desperation, like, oh,
the tunnel is just longer than we thought it was.
But you are going to get out. You are going
(14:34):
to be found innocent, you are going to be vindicated.
You are innocent, You're my daughter. You're going to come home.
And after my conviction, I wasn't sure about that anymore,
Like I didn't have any reason to believe that anymore.
And I ended up having really really difficult conversations with
her where I said, well, I hope that happens, mom,
(14:54):
but if it doesn't, I hope that I can achieve
this goal in the prison environment, or I hope that
one day I'll be able to, you know, write about
my experience, so that i'm you know, at least one
voice voicing my experience in this huge, you know, world
of voices who are calling me a murderer, and maybe
(15:14):
one day it'll matter. I hope that I stay healthy.
I hope that I don't get sick like all these things.
And my mom viewed that as a kind of mental
giving up, like I had given up on the fight
for my innocence. And I hadn't. It's just that I
had to live. It was very apparent to me that
(15:36):
I was not. Like at the end of the day,
every day I went back to my cell, back to
my cot and that's where I stayed.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Amanda, how do you get through those days? I mean,
you said, you're having to confront this idea of inhabiting
this new identity, this identity that's been thrust upon you,
which is prisoner, and it's been unjustifiably thrust upon you.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Well, the first step was acknowledging that this is a community,
but it is full of a lot of a lot
of human suffering and a lot of humanity. I lived
alongside people who had done really horrible things, and these
were my people, I guess is a way of saying it,
(16:24):
like this was my community, whether I liked it or not.
And I started to realize that I wasn't just sort
of a separate or a part entity of it. I
was an integral entity in that community. And I started
to think about what is my role in it? What
(16:44):
can I do? What is the best thing that I
can do in that space? And so I ended up
spending a lot of time helping people write letters. Another
job was simply acting as translator. There was no translator
available to any of the prisoners, so any prisoners who
didn't speak Italian had no way of knowing what court
(17:07):
documents they were signing or how to tell the doctor
that they weren't feeling well. And so I was constantly
called in to help other prisoners understand what was happening
and translating for them.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
What was your contact with the outside world like during
this time, I mean, did you have family and friends'
emotional psychological support helping to ground you in your new reality?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
So the thing that was the hardest for my family
was of course that they at a certain point, they
couldn't hold my hand right like at the end of
a visitation. They went one way and I went another.
And I know that like if my mom could have
traded places with me, she would have in a second,
but she couldn't, So all they could do was try
(17:57):
to remind me that I didn't belong there, that I
had a home and I had a life, and I
had people who cared about me waiting for me. So
I had one ten minute phone call a week. Every
every week, my family and friends piled into my mom's
house for a six am ten minute phone call just
to hear my voice and let me know that they
(18:19):
were they remembered me, and that they cared about me.
And one day I was waiting at my cell door
like usual because I knew the exact time that I
would go and have my call, and the guard didn't come,
and I called out agente la telephonata guard guard my
(18:46):
phone call, and I called again. No one answered. I
called again, no one answered. I spent a good half
an hour getting more and more anxious and miserable and
desperate and crying and yelling and feeling like a caged animal,
(19:07):
until finally a guard came up and was like, what
the hell are you screaming about? And I was like,
my phone call, my phone call? Have I missed my
phone call? And they said, we're not doing phone calls today.
We're low, we're short staffed, we're not doing phone calls today.
They just approached me and were like, what are you
crying about? Like shut up? And that was one of
(19:29):
those moments where I felt like, Wow, I am subhuman
right now, Like it didn't even occur to them to
tell me. It didn't occur to them that would matter
to me, and it was I had this moment of
worry that no matter how hard my family and friends tried,
(19:51):
our lives were diverging so drastically that we would become
strangers to each other despite our best efforts, just because
I was living such a different existence than they were,
and my world and my opportunities and the psychological effort
that I had to put in to deal with the
(20:13):
situation that I was in was very different than theirs.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah. Yeah, can you paint the scene for me of
the day that you were acquitted? Yes, what was that day?
Like that was a.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Really bizarre day. I'll just have to describe it to you.
So I got up, I got dressed, I did the
normal going down, get into the prison van. I was
brought up into the courtroom. Everyone had their final word,
and the court was dismissed for the day, and I
was brought back to the prison and I knew that
(20:50):
it was going to take a long time, that I
had several hours ahead of me of not knowing what
was going to happen. I tried to distract myself in
the meantime, and I had a very hard time of it,
and ultimately my relief came when the prison chaplain, who
had become a good friend of mine despite the fact
that I'm actually, you know, an atheist, he invited me
(21:13):
down into his office like usual, and we played music together.
He had this keyboard and he taught me how to play,
and so I started playing this song that I had learned,
and he uh surreptitiously took out this tape recorder, which
he was absolutely not allowed to have, and he was like,
(21:36):
I really want to record you because this is maybe
the last time I hear your voice.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
So we sang.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
We played music together. At a certain point, I sat
down on the couch with him and you know, he
was talking to me about how I was feeling and
if I was afraid, and and eventually I went back
to my cell, but I spent I spent many hours
just in the office with him, just crying and talking.
(22:05):
And then finally in the evening they brought me back
in and hearing him say acquitted and that she goes free,
I I I broke down at that moment too, like
(22:29):
that I had hoped and I was afraid to hope,
and so suddenly this hope was alive for me again.
Suddenly I was like, if I'm in this dark tunnel
and I've closed my eyes to the light that is
about to hit me, I was suddenly just like flooded
with light, and I collapsed again, just hysterical, just crying, crying, crying,
and to such a degree that the guards who were
(22:51):
with me, they thought that I had misunderstood the verdict.
They thought that I had heard guilty, when in fact
I had heard innocent, and so they were trying to
tell me, no, it's okay, you won, you won, and
I was just like, I know, I know. And then
they brought me back to the prison to gather my thing,
but not in a prison van. They put me in
a police car where I could actually look out the
(23:14):
windows and like a person again. And as I got
back to the prison, like everyone was looking out their
windows waiting to see it, and everyone started banging pots
and pants and screaming their heads.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Off, just le Berta Leerda.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
And then it was a whole high speed chase out
of the prison to get to Rome, to where my
family was, to a secret location, and it was it
was very, very the most Jason Bourne scenario that I've
ever been in.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. After spending four years behind bars for a
crime she did commit, Amanda Knox was finally exonerated and
(24:12):
she soon headed back home to America.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I was afraid to go to sleep, worried that it
would mean that I would actually wake up in prison,
like I had that moment where I was just trying
to stay awake as long as I could because I
was like, is this the dream? Am I just having
the most vivid dream of my life? Or is this real?
(24:36):
And when I first came home, I thought that I
was going to get to have the life that I
had left behind back I thought that, you know, I
was under that same misconception that once this is all
worked out and everyone agrees that I'm innocent, then I
(24:57):
get to go back to being me. I get to
go back to my life that I lost that was
on pause. And I slowly realized that life didn't exist anymore.
And the reason I knew it didn't exist anymore is
because I couldn't go out of my apartment building without
(25:17):
you know, paparazzi following me to school, and I couldn't
but even beyond that, like I also couldn't meet people
who hadn't heard of me before, like you know, people
in my classes who were taking pictures of me and
posting them to social media and saying like, oh my god,
I'm in you know, look who's in my class and
(25:38):
the murderer, you know. So I knew that. I slowly
realized and came to grips with the fact that not
only was the outside world not going to let me
go back to my life, but also I was living
now with experiences that I couldn't just put behind me
(25:58):
as if they never happened. Right, I had lived four
years in prison, and I had been on trial for murder,
and that, despite all of my best efforts, had left
an impression on me. And now I was really really
sensitive to certain things, like to this day, I do
(26:21):
not farewell when someone accuses me of something that I
didn't do, even if it's small, because it's just it's
so triggering that I'm very sensitive to it and it
hurts a lot. So I had to come to an
(26:43):
understanding that the world was not the same place for
me anymore. My role in it was not what I
thought it could be, and I had to figure out
what was the best thing that I can do and
try to do it despite the fact that I also
knew that there were legions of people rooting against me,
hoping that I would live up to the Foxy Noxie
(27:08):
narrative I would be just as bad as everyone thought
I would be.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And you were also put back on trial, right, which
compounds the narrative that people want out of you.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah. And when the Supreme Court in Italy
overturned my acquittal, first of all, I didn't even realize
that that was possible because it so goes it goes
against what we assume here in the United States, which
is when you're found innocent. It's just it's done. No,
It's not like that in Italy because it's not done
(27:39):
until the Supreme Court decides it's done. So the prosecution
appealed my acquittal. My acquittal was overturned and they convicted me.
I was actually sentenced to twenty eight point five years
at that conviction.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
So what was it like then, Amanda, to be definitively exonerated?
What was that day like?
Speaker 2 (28:03):
That was astonishing because first of all, I'm here in
the United States, so I'm like logging on to all
of like the live streaming Italian news channels online to
see which one is going to be reporting first on
what the verdict is. And I'm the only one in
my entire family who can speak fluent Italian. So here
(28:25):
we all are crowded around my laptop. Everyone is around me,
and I hear definitively acquitted. I gasped. I was like
I was shocked, and everyone in my family was like
what what? What was what? What is it? And I
was like, it's over, it's over.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
It's over.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Oh my god, it is over. And you know, of
course we're all like squealing and it it was. It
was over. It was it was astonishing, Like the feeling
of no longer being a prey animal that is being
hunted down was huge. And suddenly I felt like, oh
(29:05):
my god, I can actually live my life. I can't
just survive my life. I can live my life and
no one is going to freaking stop me. I am
not going to let anyone feel like they can stop
me from living my life anymore. Like I'm done, Like
I'm done with that.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, it's so interesting that you say that. I wonder
if it is that narrative in your mind that helps
you stave off feelings of resentment, because if you are
too resentful, then you have let them own a piece
of your future, which is the one thing that you
can control. I can just so easily imagine getting consumed
(29:45):
by resentment, because you know, it's one thing for a
tragic event to happen in life, just because, like I
imagine being struck by lightning, there's no object to your anger, right,
but here there was malicious human intent and they haven't
even shown any contrition.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Yeah. No, that's that's a great question, because I think
a lot of people come away from me thinking that
I don't actually experience anger, and I do like I
have moments of like deep deep anger about what happened
and how it didn't need to happen. But I also
am aware that living four years in a room that
(30:26):
was locked really really showed me that the thing that
I have control over is my own mind. And that's
pretty much it. And so if I am going to
live my life, I need to be mindful of how
I'm allowing myself to live it and what sort of
(30:48):
feelings and thoughts I'm indulging in, because I think the
important thing to remember here is that I allow myself
to feel anger, but I try not to indulge in it.
And that's the difference, because I think that especially when
you feel righteous anger, you feel like you should entrench
yourself in it and like dig deep and like and
(31:11):
know that pain and feel that and have that be
the driving force in your life, because it is righteous.
It's coming from a place of like, I deserve to
be angry. But just because you deserve to be angry
doesn't mean that it's the thing that's going to make
you your best self, And don't I don't want what
happened to me to turn me into something that is
(31:31):
not my best self. I want to. I want to
still feel like I'm in control of at least one
thing in my life, and that's me and how I'm
reacting to a set of bad circumstances. On the one hand,
your story is so exceptional and so extraordinary. On the
other there are many themes that are so relatable. We
(31:53):
all have these moments in life where we think, oh, man,
this person, they really misunderstood me. If only I could
clarify to them what the truth was, like what really happened, or.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
You know what I really mean. But we don't always
get the chance to set the record straight. And you
know today there are still slots of people out there
who think you are guilty of a crime you didn't commit.
And I want to know how you make peace with that,
how you don't allow yourself to be driven insane by that,
(32:23):
Because if you, Amanda, can come to terms with this,
I imagine it could give a lot of listeners a
lot of hope who are dealing with far more quotitian misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Sure, sure, I appreciate also that you say that, like,
there's a lot of things in my experience that is
really relatable. One because actually the way that I was
wrongly convicted is not very different than the way lots
of people are wrongly convicted. You just don't hear about
their cases quite as often. But furthermore, I also appreciate
the fact that you are trying to relate to what
(32:56):
I'm talking about and how I feel like that feeling
of being misrepresented, misunderstood. People finding fault in you are
stripping you of context given your situation. A lot of
people reach out to me and say, like, how do
I deal with the fact that people are calling me
a slut in my high school? Or what do I
do about how like my reputation is destroyed based upon this,
(33:16):
like one tweet I did when I was young. And
one of the things that I I find personal peace
with is just knowing that, like all those people who
hate me don't actually hate me, Like the person that
they think they hate doesn't even exist, so it's not me,
(33:37):
Like they're directing their hate at at target that is
this sort of false version of me that doesn't really exist,
and I just happen to be the face and the
name that they associate with this fantasy. However, that doesn't
mean that I don't live with the sort of challenges
that come with people having preconceived notions of me as
(33:58):
I try to like put my work out into the
world or just even you know, exist in public spaces.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Can you say more about that. How does that manifest?
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Oh? Sure, I mean I think a lot of people
think that maybe people come up to me and are like,
you are guilty, But no, it's not how it manifests itself.
It's more like I drive up to the kiosk to
get on a ferry. I give them my credit card.
The person sees my name on the credit card says
are you that a man to knocks? And I go yes,
and they say, well, I have some questions to you
(34:30):
about your your cartwheels and what you were saying in
your interrogation. Meanwhile, this is the person who's like holding
onto my credit card and not giving it back to
me until I answer their questions for them. So it's
that kind of sense of entitlement that people have to
the worst experience of my life that at any point
that they happen to run into me, that continues to
(34:53):
be this challenge. But again I also understand that here
this person is who has invested themselves in the case,
and this is like their one moment in their whole
life where they feel like they're going to get to
finally have a question answered, and so they think, I can't,
you know, let this opportunity pass up, but failing to
appreciate that, well, I'm in the middle of my life
(35:15):
and my life does not revolve around answering your questions.
So it's a kind of failure of empathy.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Aman, I'm struck by the fact that you know, on
this show a slight change of plans. It's so much
about identity, our self identity, the fragility of our identity,
who gets to own our identity, how our identities change
over time? And to me, your story screams of these themes, right,
I mean you might experience that with a much greater intensity,
(35:45):
which is that your identity in many ways has been
usurped by lots of actors out in the world. But
many of us feel that way, like who claims maya right?
Like who gets to define who I am and what
I've done?
Speaker 2 (35:59):
So definitely, my ongoing curse is continuing to be defined
in the greater you know, human awareness, a crime that
I didn't commit, as opposed to all of the things
that I have done. Like the vast majority of people
when they think Amanda Knox, they don't think of podcaster, journalist, writer,
(36:20):
They think girl who was accused of murder at best, right,
And my challenge has always been, well, first of all,
how important is it to me for me to define
my own narrative and legacy? Is that necessary for me
(36:42):
to live the life, like to live a happy life?
And you know, ultimately it's not necessary, right, Like I
don't have to convince everyone in the world that I'm
innocent in order to live a fulfilled life, because ultimately
living a fulfilled life is on me, right.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
However, one of the more traumatic experiences someone can have
is to not be allowed to define what their experiences
mean to them. So not only like what their experience was,
but what it means to them. And so doing constant
processing work to define for myself what it means to
(37:23):
me is valuable to me and also in turn valuable
to others who are trying to find their own meaning
to their experiences. Because there is no inherent meaning to
any of our suffering, we have to make sense of
it and we have to define what it means, like
how big of a role it is in our life, so,
you know, everything leading up to everything that happened in Italy,
(37:45):
I lived very charmed but naive life. I was, you know,
very sheltered, and you know, had a very limited perspective
on things. I thought that only bad people went to
prison and that I never had to think about those issues.
But I also think, wow, you know, would I be
would I be a good you know, would I be
a good person if I hadn't gone through something so terrible,
(38:08):
Because nothing that had ever happened to me up to
that point, and I sort of took for granted that
I would just be able to have the life that
I wanted in a family and a career without you know,
any problems. Today, I feel like I have a perspective
that I having lived kind of with the lowest possible
hopes and then being able to like take that perspective
(38:33):
and try to give voice to an experience that doesn't
often have a have a voice, and try to like
make those connections between other people suffering and overwhelming experiences
and others, because I think there is this this false
idea that people can't relate to each other if they
don't have the same experiences and it's like, no, we can.
(38:55):
We can do that empathy work. We can understand how
the mind works when it reacts to traumatic experiences. We
can share that with each other, and we only get
better for it. I feel like weirdly better for that experience,
even if I would never wish it upon my worst enemy.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
That's profound. I mean, yeah, look, I think again, maybe
this is just the part of my mind that studies
human behavior for a living, but I feel like there
are so many common threads in psychology that absolutely transcend
the specifics of an experience. In fact, that's one of
the reasons I built this show is to show that,
you know, the cancer patient in the throes of a
(39:34):
stage four diagnosis might have more in common with you
when it comes to psychology than someone who had experience
that in terms of content rivaled yours, right, And so
it is all about finding those commonalities. Yeah, I know
that in present day you're actively involved in something called
the innocence network, which supports the wrongfully incarcerated, and that
you have been warmly welcomed into their family.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah. So when I came home, one of the things
when I came home from Italy, one of the things
that I had sort of resigned myself to was this
idea that I was very alone in my experience, and
I was isolating. I was isolating in a big way,
and my mom was worried about me. She was really
worried about me. I kept doing prison things like washing
(40:19):
my underwear in the sink and generally just kind of
being a loner. And she was reached out to by
the director of the Idaho Innocence Project, who said, Hey,
just so you know, there's this whole world of people
who work to overturn wrongful convictions here in the United
States based off the Innocence Project. We all get together
(40:40):
once a year at this conference. You need to bring Amanda,
and of course my mom brings us to me. And
the last thing that I want to do in the
world is walk into a room full of hundreds of
strangers who are going to recognize me, Like that is
my worst nightmare scenario. And I was still actually convicted
at the time. I had just been reconvicted, and I
(41:02):
was doing all those like facing extradition, what if I
have to turn myself in kind of things. That's the
world I was living in when I walked into that
basement conference room with the bad lighting and the bad
carpet in Portland, Oregon, and I walked into a room.
My mom sort of pushed me into the room, and
(41:23):
these two guys immediately ran up to me and hugged
me and said, you don't have to explain a thing,
little sister. We know. And it's like they knew, they
knew what I was most scared of walking into that room,
that I was going to be recognized and have to
explain myself and be judged. And I was introduced to
(41:47):
a not just a community, but a family of people
who understood and cared even though they didn't know me.
And what they did for me, and that moment, these
two men who had each spent over a decade in
prison for crimes so they didn't commit I could probably
do for someone else too. And that world has introduced
(42:09):
me to some amazing people doing amazing work. And I
try to bring light to that work and shed light
on people's cases and the issues that get people wrongly convicted.
Those are all things that we all can totally understand
and totally fix. It is absolutely within our power and
(42:29):
is so worth it.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Next week Amanda returns
to the show for one of the most moving and
profound conversations I've ever had. We spoke about what it
was like to confront the man who helped put her
behind bars.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
I wanted to understand why, why did this happen to me?
And I realized that the only way to truly understand
was to ask him.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
That's coming up on A Slight Change of Plans. A
Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced
by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our
showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our
(43:43):
producers Britney Cronin and Megan Luvin, and our sound engineer
Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of
Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks
to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks
to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of
(44:04):
Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week.
The The The
Pushkin hay Slight Changers. First, a quick reminder, I've launched
a newsletter. I'm so excited about it. It's called Change
(00:36):
with Maya Shunker. Every other week, I share personal reflections
behind the scenes, look at my interviews on the show,
bits of what I'm watching or listening to, and some
prompts for you to think about as you go about
your week. It's free and you can sign up at
Changewithmaya dot com or click on the link in our
show notes. Last week, we previewed two upcoming episodes about
(00:59):
Amanda Knox. Today you'll hear the first one. I had
this conversation with Amanda back in twenty twenty one, and
it provides some valuable context about who she is and
what she's been through. I really recommend listening to this
episode before you tune in next week. I hope you
enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
When I was told you're guilty and you are sentenced
to twenty six years, I mean everything I thought to
be true about the world collapsed in on itself and
I had this kind of quick an adaptation in my
mind where I thought, oh, I'm not this lost tourist
(01:42):
who's waiting to go home. I am a prisoner, like
this isn't just a thing that is happening to me.
This is my life, and whether or not it's based
in truth, this defines me. I've just been defined a killer.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
That's Amanda Knox describing the moment when an Italian court
found her guilty of a heinous crime she did not commit,
the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kircher. Amanda was just
twenty years old when this all unfolded. She spent four
years in an Italian prison before she was finally exonerated
and allowed to return home to America, but the reality
(02:18):
of what she faced upon her return was not at
all what she expected.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
When I first came home, I thought that I was
going to get to have the life that I had
left behind back that once this is all worked out
and everyone agrees that I'm innocent, then I get to
go back to my life that I lost that was
on pause, and I realized that that life didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
On today's episode, what happens when the world simply won't
let you move on. I'm Maya Shunker and this is
a slight change of plans, a show about who we
are and who we become in the face of a
big change, you know, to begin with it. It's so
(03:08):
interesting for a guest with your story, you know, I
would do the work of trying to figure out, Okay,
how do I summarize for the listener what it is
that this person has gone through. But because so many
people have tried to appropriate your story over the years,
I don't want to do that. I want this, Amanda.
I want to hear your story.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
In your words, absolutely, and thank you for that. When
I was twenty years old, I decided that I wanted
to study abroad. I ended up choosing a program and
a really small ancient city in the middle of Italy
called Perusia. I moved into an apartment in a small
(03:47):
house overlooking this beautiful valley with three other young women,
two Italian girls and a British student who was just
like a year older than me named Meredith. And the
day after Halloween, on November first, I was hanging out
with my new love fling of five days, Rafaele Salchico,
(04:11):
and Meredith was home alone and a local burglar named
Rudy Guidet broke into our home and raped and murdered her,
and then fled the country. And I discovered all of
this by coming home next day to take a shower
and noticing that our home was in disarray I had.
(04:32):
I brought Rafaela over, we called the police together. The
police came and discovered the crime scene, Meredith's body, which
fortunately I never had to see in person. But unfortunately
there was a lot of frantic energy, a lot of confusion,
a lot of fear in those opening. You know, days
(04:53):
after the murder was discovered, it was immediately of tremendous
public interest. International media was descending upon Perusia, talking to
any single person that they possibly could. Meanwhile, I'm spending
hours and hours and hours at the police station trying
to help the police uncover what happened to my friend.
And I spent about fifty three hours over five days
(05:17):
in that police office, being questioned over and over and
over again, telling them the same story that I've been
telling them what happened that night as far as I knew,
and they were telling me that I was wrong, that
everything that I remembered was wrong, that I was traumatized,
and that my freedom and my access to my family
(05:39):
depended upon me remembering something that I couldn't remember, and
I was alone. I was speaking of foreign language, I
was without a lawyer. I was asking for my mom,
I was asking for any help whatsoever, and instead I
got slapped and screamed at for hours until I was
(06:00):
willing to sign a statement that they wrote implicating my
boss Patrick L. Mumba. I caved. It was the only
thing that made sense to me anymore. I started to
doubt my own sanity, and I signed those papers and
they immediately ran off to go arrest my boss Patrick,
(06:20):
and I was finally left alone to breathe and think
straight after hours of horrible treatment, and I immediately recanted.
I told them, oh my god, there's a huge mistake.
I was under a lot of pressure. I don't actually
remember witnessing any murder whatsoever. They wouldn't listen to me.
(06:43):
They told me that with time my memories would come back,
and that I just needed to be quiet. And like
just a few days later, I was brought before a
judge and finally finally told you are under investigation for
the murder of Meredith Kircher.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So there's a few critical moments in what you just
described that I'm interested to hear more about. In particular
what your psychology was like at the time, as well
as how you might think differently about that experience now.
And the first is you know, when you were trying
to be helpful to the police right to help identify
(07:19):
who the murderer was, they began using aggressive interrogation tactics
on you. As you said, they accused you of having amnesia.
It led you to engage in false confessions. And I
can only imagine how traumatizing it is to go through
something like that, especially when you don't understand that the
(07:40):
human mind is in fact capable of such things, right.
I think it is actually really hard for most people
to appreciate the conditions under which they would be likely
to generate false memories or false confessions. And I think
the reason why I feel like this is such an
important part of your story to bring to light is
that when you are made to question your own sanity,
(08:06):
your own ability to accurate the reason about the world
around you, that is damaging. That puts you in a
state where I imagine it's easy to feel broken because
you start asking yourself questions like how how was I
capable of that? How is I capable of implicating this?
Totally innocent person. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Absolutely, And that's actually a really interesting way of framing
that question, because of course, going into an interrogation room,
you don't think I would ever say anything that would
that I don't know to be true, and that would
that would implicate me or not be to like you know,
that could be compromising to oneself, like that's that is
(08:50):
it's so counterintuitive. I didn't know that this was possible.
I didn't even know that police could lie to you
like I did. I just there was so much I
didn't know, and I therefore, like my my instinct when
all of this became a catastrophe was to blame myself
because I didn't know who else to blame. I didn't
(09:10):
know that there was a specific police interrogation technique designed
to break down people to just admit to something. And
it wasn't until a cognitive scientist who studies false confessions
reached out to me, and it was while I was
still in prison, it was after I had been convicted.
(09:32):
He didn't share any research with me at first. He
just said, please describe everything you can possibly remember about
your interrogation and send it to me. So I did,
and it was it was hard even doing that, because
it was the scariest moment of my life, the most
confusing moment of my life, and it's the moment of
my life that I felt the most shame about because
(09:54):
I just I couldn't explain even to myself why it happened.
I honestly couldn't. I just felt like there was something
wrong with me, and I was the only one in
the world that had ever happened to as far as
I knew, and of course everyone was judging me as
a bad person because of it. And then he responded
by sending me back his research, and his research showed
(10:15):
that the exact way that they had broken me down
was just like, you know, point for point, just how
you break down innocent people. And that moment of relief
and self forgiveness was tremendous for me because it was
(10:38):
at that point that I really really understood that my
wrongful conviction wasn't really my fault, that I had been
set up, and that there were a lot of forces
at play, a lot of people who had, you know,
a ton of agency in this equation, and I was
the least among them. I was at the mercy of
(11:01):
people who were not just taking advantage of me, but
actively trying to destroy my life.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah. I like to talk for a bit about the
time that you spent in prison, because you spent four
years in full, but at one point you were sentenced
to twenty six years in prison. Yes, and as an
early twenty something, twenty six years is like your entire
freaking life.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
It is your entire freaking life.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
I want to know what was your relationship with Hope
during your time in prison, and I'm just curious if
you can dig into that a bit.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, absolutely so. And it's interesting how I had, like
this tremendous shift happen because the first two years, while
I was still on trial and believing that all of
this was just a huge out of proportion misunderstanding, I
was convinced that I was going to eventually be going home.
(11:59):
And there were moments in that time where I was
just like, oh my god, you know, I've been here
so long, Like I missed my twenty first birthday that
I you know, I'd always thought, oh I would go
and have a drink with my dad. Nope, that didn't happen.
So feeling like I was losing really important parts of
my life. But ultimately thinking this is a really, really
(12:23):
long nightmare that does have an expiration date, and that
expiration date is the verdict. And my family, especially my mom,
very much like that was sort of our mantra that
there is a light at the end of this very
long dark tunnel. And when I then was told you're
guilty and you are sentenced to twenty six years, I
(12:47):
mean everything I thought to be true about the world
collapsed in on itself. I very much felt like the
ground beneath me had fallen away and I had nothing
to stand on. I literally collapsed between you know, my attorneys,
and then the guards sort of had to carry me
out of this courtroom where I'm hysterical, like unable to
(13:07):
believe what is happening. And I had this very very
i mean kind of quick an adaptation in my mind
where I thought, oh, I'm not this lost tourist who's
waiting to go home. I am a prisoner, Like this
(13:28):
isn't just a thing that is happening to me. This
is my life. This is my life now, and whether
or not it's based in truth, this defines me. I've
just been defined a killer, and I have just been
told the only place that you belong is behind bars
for the majority of your life. And all those things
that you thought that you would get to have in
(13:50):
your life, a family, a career, the opportunity to be
with your family and watch your nephews grow and your
kids grow, and all of these things that I thought
were going to be a part of my life were
not a part of my life. That was never going
to be a part of my life, And and what
(14:12):
is my life? Then? Who am? I? And my mom
had a very different relationship with hope than I did.
She didn't have that shift happen when I was convicted.
She looked at this and I think just out of desperation, like, oh,
the tunnel is just longer than we thought it was.
But you are going to get out. You are going
(14:34):
to be found innocent, you are going to be vindicated.
You are innocent, You're my daughter. You're going to come home.
And after my conviction, I wasn't sure about that anymore,
Like I didn't have any reason to believe that anymore.
And I ended up having really really difficult conversations with
her where I said, well, I hope that happens, mom,
(14:54):
but if it doesn't, I hope that I can achieve
this goal in the prison environment, or I hope that
one day I'll be able to, you know, write about
my experience, so that i'm you know, at least one
voice voicing my experience in this huge, you know, world
of voices who are calling me a murderer, and maybe
(15:14):
one day it'll matter. I hope that I stay healthy.
I hope that I don't get sick like all these things.
And my mom viewed that as a kind of mental
giving up, like I had given up on the fight
for my innocence. And I hadn't. It's just that I
had to live. It was very apparent to me that
(15:36):
I was not. Like at the end of the day,
every day I went back to my cell, back to
my cot and that's where I stayed.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Amanda, how do you get through those days? I mean,
you said, you're having to confront this idea of inhabiting
this new identity, this identity that's been thrust upon you,
which is prisoner, and it's been unjustifiably thrust upon you.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Well, the first step was acknowledging that this is a community,
but it is full of a lot of a lot
of human suffering and a lot of humanity. I lived
alongside people who had done really horrible things, and these
were my people, I guess is a way of saying it,
(16:24):
like this was my community, whether I liked it or not.
And I started to realize that I wasn't just sort
of a separate or a part entity of it. I
was an integral entity in that community. And I started
to think about what is my role in it? What
(16:44):
can I do? What is the best thing that I
can do in that space? And so I ended up
spending a lot of time helping people write letters. Another
job was simply acting as translator. There was no translator
available to any of the prisoners, so any prisoners who
didn't speak Italian had no way of knowing what court
(17:07):
documents they were signing or how to tell the doctor
that they weren't feeling well. And so I was constantly
called in to help other prisoners understand what was happening
and translating for them.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
What was your contact with the outside world like during
this time, I mean, did you have family and friends'
emotional psychological support helping to ground you in your new reality?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
So the thing that was the hardest for my family
was of course that they at a certain point, they
couldn't hold my hand right like at the end of
a visitation. They went one way and I went another.
And I know that like if my mom could have
traded places with me, she would have in a second,
but she couldn't, So all they could do was try
(17:57):
to remind me that I didn't belong there, that I
had a home and I had a life, and I
had people who cared about me waiting for me. So
I had one ten minute phone call a week. Every
every week, my family and friends piled into my mom's
house for a six am ten minute phone call just
to hear my voice and let me know that they
(18:19):
were they remembered me, and that they cared about me.
And one day I was waiting at my cell door
like usual because I knew the exact time that I
would go and have my call, and the guard didn't come,
and I called out agente la telephonata guard guard my
(18:46):
phone call, and I called again. No one answered. I
called again, no one answered. I spent a good half
an hour getting more and more anxious and miserable and
desperate and crying and yelling and feeling like a caged animal,
(19:07):
until finally a guard came up and was like, what
the hell are you screaming about? And I was like,
my phone call, my phone call? Have I missed my
phone call? And they said, we're not doing phone calls today.
We're low, we're short staffed, we're not doing phone calls today.
They just approached me and were like, what are you
crying about? Like shut up? And that was one of
(19:29):
those moments where I felt like, Wow, I am subhuman
right now, Like it didn't even occur to them to
tell me. It didn't occur to them that would matter
to me, and it was I had this moment of
worry that no matter how hard my family and friends tried,
(19:51):
our lives were diverging so drastically that we would become
strangers to each other despite our best efforts, just because
I was living such a different existence than they were,
and my world and my opportunities and the psychological effort
that I had to put in to deal with the
(20:13):
situation that I was in was very different than theirs.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah. Yeah, can you paint the scene for me of
the day that you were acquitted? Yes, what was that day?
Like that was a.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Really bizarre day. I'll just have to describe it to you.
So I got up, I got dressed, I did the
normal going down, get into the prison van. I was
brought up into the courtroom. Everyone had their final word,
and the court was dismissed for the day, and I
was brought back to the prison and I knew that
(20:50):
it was going to take a long time, that I
had several hours ahead of me of not knowing what
was going to happen. I tried to distract myself in
the meantime, and I had a very hard time of it,
and ultimately my relief came when the prison chaplain, who
had become a good friend of mine despite the fact
that I'm actually, you know, an atheist, he invited me
(21:13):
down into his office like usual, and we played music together.
He had this keyboard and he taught me how to play,
and so I started playing this song that I had learned,
and he uh surreptitiously took out this tape recorder, which
he was absolutely not allowed to have, and he was like,
(21:36):
I really want to record you because this is maybe
the last time I hear your voice.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
So we sang.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
We played music together. At a certain point, I sat
down on the couch with him and you know, he
was talking to me about how I was feeling and
if I was afraid, and and eventually I went back
to my cell, but I spent I spent many hours
just in the office with him, just crying and talking.
(22:05):
And then finally in the evening they brought me back
in and hearing him say acquitted and that she goes free,
I I I broke down at that moment too, like
(22:29):
that I had hoped and I was afraid to hope,
and so suddenly this hope was alive for me again.
Suddenly I was like, if I'm in this dark tunnel
and I've closed my eyes to the light that is
about to hit me, I was suddenly just like flooded
with light, and I collapsed again, just hysterical, just crying, crying, crying,
and to such a degree that the guards who were
(22:51):
with me, they thought that I had misunderstood the verdict.
They thought that I had heard guilty, when in fact
I had heard innocent, and so they were trying to
tell me, no, it's okay, you won, you won, and
I was just like, I know, I know. And then
they brought me back to the prison to gather my thing,
but not in a prison van. They put me in
a police car where I could actually look out the
(23:14):
windows and like a person again. And as I got
back to the prison, like everyone was looking out their
windows waiting to see it, and everyone started banging pots
and pants and screaming their heads.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Off, just le Berta Leerda.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
And then it was a whole high speed chase out
of the prison to get to Rome, to where my
family was, to a secret location, and it was it
was very, very the most Jason Bourne scenario that I've
ever been in.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. After spending four years behind bars for a
crime she did commit, Amanda Knox was finally exonerated and
(24:12):
she soon headed back home to America.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I was afraid to go to sleep, worried that it
would mean that I would actually wake up in prison,
like I had that moment where I was just trying
to stay awake as long as I could because I
was like, is this the dream? Am I just having
the most vivid dream of my life? Or is this real?
(24:36):
And when I first came home, I thought that I
was going to get to have the life that I
had left behind back I thought that, you know, I
was under that same misconception that once this is all
worked out and everyone agrees that I'm innocent, then I
(24:57):
get to go back to being me. I get to
go back to my life that I lost that was
on pause. And I slowly realized that life didn't exist anymore.
And the reason I knew it didn't exist anymore is
because I couldn't go out of my apartment building without
(25:17):
you know, paparazzi following me to school, and I couldn't
but even beyond that, like I also couldn't meet people
who hadn't heard of me before, like you know, people
in my classes who were taking pictures of me and
posting them to social media and saying like, oh my god,
I'm in you know, look who's in my class and
(25:38):
the murderer, you know. So I knew that. I slowly
realized and came to grips with the fact that not
only was the outside world not going to let me
go back to my life, but also I was living
now with experiences that I couldn't just put behind me
(25:58):
as if they never happened. Right, I had lived four
years in prison, and I had been on trial for murder,
and that, despite all of my best efforts, had left
an impression on me. And now I was really really
sensitive to certain things, like to this day, I do
(26:21):
not farewell when someone accuses me of something that I
didn't do, even if it's small, because it's just it's
so triggering that I'm very sensitive to it and it
hurts a lot. So I had to come to an
(26:43):
understanding that the world was not the same place for
me anymore. My role in it was not what I
thought it could be, and I had to figure out
what was the best thing that I can do and
try to do it despite the fact that I also
knew that there were legions of people rooting against me,
hoping that I would live up to the Foxy Noxie
(27:08):
narrative I would be just as bad as everyone thought
I would be.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And you were also put back on trial, right, which
compounds the narrative that people want out of you.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah. And when the Supreme Court in Italy
overturned my acquittal, first of all, I didn't even realize
that that was possible because it so goes it goes
against what we assume here in the United States, which
is when you're found innocent. It's just it's done. No,
It's not like that in Italy because it's not done
(27:39):
until the Supreme Court decides it's done. So the prosecution
appealed my acquittal. My acquittal was overturned and they convicted me.
I was actually sentenced to twenty eight point five years
at that conviction.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
So what was it like then, Amanda, to be definitively exonerated?
What was that day like?
Speaker 2 (28:03):
That was astonishing because first of all, I'm here in
the United States, so I'm like logging on to all
of like the live streaming Italian news channels online to
see which one is going to be reporting first on
what the verdict is. And I'm the only one in
my entire family who can speak fluent Italian. So here
(28:25):
we all are crowded around my laptop. Everyone is around me,
and I hear definitively acquitted. I gasped. I was like
I was shocked, and everyone in my family was like
what what? What was what? What is it? And I
was like, it's over, it's over.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
It's over.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Oh my god, it is over. And you know, of
course we're all like squealing and it it was. It
was over. It was it was astonishing, Like the feeling
of no longer being a prey animal that is being
hunted down was huge. And suddenly I felt like, oh
(29:05):
my god, I can actually live my life. I can't
just survive my life. I can live my life and
no one is going to freaking stop me. I am
not going to let anyone feel like they can stop
me from living my life anymore. Like I'm done, Like
I'm done with that.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, it's so interesting that you say that. I wonder
if it is that narrative in your mind that helps
you stave off feelings of resentment, because if you are
too resentful, then you have let them own a piece
of your future, which is the one thing that you
can control. I can just so easily imagine getting consumed
(29:45):
by resentment, because you know, it's one thing for a
tragic event to happen in life, just because, like I
imagine being struck by lightning, there's no object to your anger, right,
but here there was malicious human intent and they haven't
even shown any contrition.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Yeah. No, that's that's a great question, because I think
a lot of people come away from me thinking that
I don't actually experience anger, and I do like I
have moments of like deep deep anger about what happened
and how it didn't need to happen. But I also
am aware that living four years in a room that
(30:26):
was locked really really showed me that the thing that
I have control over is my own mind. And that's
pretty much it. And so if I am going to
live my life, I need to be mindful of how
I'm allowing myself to live it and what sort of
(30:48):
feelings and thoughts I'm indulging in, because I think the
important thing to remember here is that I allow myself
to feel anger, but I try not to indulge in it.
And that's the difference, because I think that especially when
you feel righteous anger, you feel like you should entrench
yourself in it and like dig deep and like and
(31:11):
know that pain and feel that and have that be
the driving force in your life, because it is righteous.
It's coming from a place of like, I deserve to
be angry. But just because you deserve to be angry
doesn't mean that it's the thing that's going to make
you your best self, And don't I don't want what
happened to me to turn me into something that is
(31:31):
not my best self. I want to. I want to
still feel like I'm in control of at least one
thing in my life, and that's me and how I'm
reacting to a set of bad circumstances. On the one hand,
your story is so exceptional and so extraordinary. On the
other there are many themes that are so relatable. We
(31:53):
all have these moments in life where we think, oh, man,
this person, they really misunderstood me. If only I could
clarify to them what the truth was, like what really happened, or.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
You know what I really mean. But we don't always
get the chance to set the record straight. And you
know today there are still slots of people out there
who think you are guilty of a crime you didn't commit.
And I want to know how you make peace with that,
how you don't allow yourself to be driven insane by that,
(32:23):
Because if you, Amanda, can come to terms with this,
I imagine it could give a lot of listeners a
lot of hope who are dealing with far more quotitian misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Sure, sure, I appreciate also that you say that, like,
there's a lot of things in my experience that is
really relatable. One because actually the way that I was
wrongly convicted is not very different than the way lots
of people are wrongly convicted. You just don't hear about
their cases quite as often. But furthermore, I also appreciate
the fact that you are trying to relate to what
(32:56):
I'm talking about and how I feel like that feeling
of being misrepresented, misunderstood. People finding fault in you are
stripping you of context given your situation. A lot of
people reach out to me and say, like, how do
I deal with the fact that people are calling me
a slut in my high school? Or what do I
do about how like my reputation is destroyed based upon this,
(33:16):
like one tweet I did when I was young. And
one of the things that I I find personal peace
with is just knowing that, like all those people who
hate me don't actually hate me, Like the person that
they think they hate doesn't even exist, so it's not me,
(33:37):
Like they're directing their hate at at target that is
this sort of false version of me that doesn't really exist,
and I just happen to be the face and the
name that they associate with this fantasy. However, that doesn't
mean that I don't live with the sort of challenges
that come with people having preconceived notions of me as
(33:58):
I try to like put my work out into the
world or just even you know, exist in public spaces.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Can you say more about that. How does that manifest?
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Oh? Sure, I mean I think a lot of people
think that maybe people come up to me and are like,
you are guilty, But no, it's not how it manifests itself.
It's more like I drive up to the kiosk to
get on a ferry. I give them my credit card.
The person sees my name on the credit card says
are you that a man to knocks? And I go yes,
and they say, well, I have some questions to you
(34:30):
about your your cartwheels and what you were saying in
your interrogation. Meanwhile, this is the person who's like holding
onto my credit card and not giving it back to
me until I answer their questions for them. So it's
that kind of sense of entitlement that people have to
the worst experience of my life that at any point
that they happen to run into me, that continues to
(34:53):
be this challenge. But again I also understand that here
this person is who has invested themselves in the case,
and this is like their one moment in their whole
life where they feel like they're going to get to
finally have a question answered, and so they think, I can't,
you know, let this opportunity pass up, but failing to
appreciate that, well, I'm in the middle of my life
(35:15):
and my life does not revolve around answering your questions.
So it's a kind of failure of empathy.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Aman, I'm struck by the fact that you know, on
this show a slight change of plans. It's so much
about identity, our self identity, the fragility of our identity,
who gets to own our identity, how our identities change
over time? And to me, your story screams of these themes, right,
I mean you might experience that with a much greater intensity,
(35:45):
which is that your identity in many ways has been
usurped by lots of actors out in the world. But
many of us feel that way, like who claims maya right?
Like who gets to define who I am and what
I've done?
Speaker 2 (35:59):
So definitely, my ongoing curse is continuing to be defined
in the greater you know, human awareness, a crime that
I didn't commit, as opposed to all of the things
that I have done. Like the vast majority of people
when they think Amanda Knox, they don't think of podcaster, journalist, writer,
(36:20):
They think girl who was accused of murder at best, right,
And my challenge has always been, well, first of all,
how important is it to me for me to define
my own narrative and legacy? Is that necessary for me
(36:42):
to live the life, like to live a happy life?
And you know, ultimately it's not necessary, right, Like I
don't have to convince everyone in the world that I'm
innocent in order to live a fulfilled life, because ultimately
living a fulfilled life is on me, right.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
However, one of the more traumatic experiences someone can have
is to not be allowed to define what their experiences
mean to them. So not only like what their experience was,
but what it means to them. And so doing constant
processing work to define for myself what it means to
(37:23):
me is valuable to me and also in turn valuable
to others who are trying to find their own meaning
to their experiences. Because there is no inherent meaning to
any of our suffering, we have to make sense of
it and we have to define what it means, like
how big of a role it is in our life, so,
you know, everything leading up to everything that happened in Italy,
(37:45):
I lived very charmed but naive life. I was, you know,
very sheltered, and you know, had a very limited perspective
on things. I thought that only bad people went to
prison and that I never had to think about those issues.
But I also think, wow, you know, would I be
would I be a good you know, would I be
a good person if I hadn't gone through something so terrible,
(38:08):
Because nothing that had ever happened to me up to
that point, and I sort of took for granted that
I would just be able to have the life that
I wanted in a family and a career without you know,
any problems. Today, I feel like I have a perspective
that I having lived kind of with the lowest possible
hopes and then being able to like take that perspective
(38:33):
and try to give voice to an experience that doesn't
often have a have a voice, and try to like
make those connections between other people suffering and overwhelming experiences
and others, because I think there is this this false
idea that people can't relate to each other if they
don't have the same experiences and it's like, no, we can.
(38:55):
We can do that empathy work. We can understand how
the mind works when it reacts to traumatic experiences. We
can share that with each other, and we only get
better for it. I feel like weirdly better for that experience,
even if I would never wish it upon my worst enemy.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
That's profound. I mean, yeah, look, I think again, maybe
this is just the part of my mind that studies
human behavior for a living, but I feel like there
are so many common threads in psychology that absolutely transcend
the specifics of an experience. In fact, that's one of
the reasons I built this show is to show that,
you know, the cancer patient in the throes of a
(39:34):
stage four diagnosis might have more in common with you
when it comes to psychology than someone who had experience
that in terms of content rivaled yours, right, And so
it is all about finding those commonalities. Yeah, I know
that in present day you're actively involved in something called
the innocence network, which supports the wrongfully incarcerated, and that
you have been warmly welcomed into their family.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah. So when I came home, one of the things
when I came home from Italy, one of the things
that I had sort of resigned myself to was this
idea that I was very alone in my experience, and
I was isolating. I was isolating in a big way,
and my mom was worried about me. She was really
worried about me. I kept doing prison things like washing
(40:19):
my underwear in the sink and generally just kind of
being a loner. And she was reached out to by
the director of the Idaho Innocence Project, who said, Hey,
just so you know, there's this whole world of people
who work to overturn wrongful convictions here in the United
States based off the Innocence Project. We all get together
(40:40):
once a year at this conference. You need to bring Amanda,
and of course my mom brings us to me. And
the last thing that I want to do in the
world is walk into a room full of hundreds of
strangers who are going to recognize me, Like that is
my worst nightmare scenario. And I was still actually convicted
at the time. I had just been reconvicted, and I
(41:02):
was doing all those like facing extradition, what if I
have to turn myself in kind of things. That's the
world I was living in when I walked into that
basement conference room with the bad lighting and the bad
carpet in Portland, Oregon, and I walked into a room.
My mom sort of pushed me into the room, and
(41:23):
these two guys immediately ran up to me and hugged
me and said, you don't have to explain a thing,
little sister. We know. And it's like they knew, they
knew what I was most scared of walking into that room,
that I was going to be recognized and have to
explain myself and be judged. And I was introduced to
(41:47):
a not just a community, but a family of people
who understood and cared even though they didn't know me.
And what they did for me, and that moment, these
two men who had each spent over a decade in
prison for crimes so they didn't commit I could probably
do for someone else too. And that world has introduced
(42:09):
me to some amazing people doing amazing work. And I
try to bring light to that work and shed light
on people's cases and the issues that get people wrongly convicted.
Those are all things that we all can totally understand
and totally fix. It is absolutely within our power and
(42:29):
is so worth it.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Next week Amanda returns
to the show for one of the most moving and
profound conversations I've ever had. We spoke about what it
was like to confront the man who helped put her
behind bars.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
I wanted to understand why, why did this happen to me?
And I realized that the only way to truly understand
was to ask him.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
That's coming up on A Slight Change of Plans. A
Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced
by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our
showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our
(43:43):
producers Britney Cronin and Megan Luvin, and our sound engineer
Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of
Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks
to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks
to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of
(44:04):
Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week.
The The The
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com