The Psychology of Amanda Knox (2016 Rerun)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, deserving listeners. Today, I thought I would talk about
the psychology involved in the Amanda Knox case. Amanda Knox.
Hopefully you've heard of her. If you haven't, you're going
to learn a lot about her. When this case was
active in the media, I wasn't really paying attention to
the news back then, in the late zeros so I
barely knew anything about it until I looked into it

(00:21):
this week. I remember back then hearing bits and pieces
of the case and the news. I remember hearing there
was this young woman from Seattle involved in some sort
of drug induced satanic sex ring orgy thing, and that
someone was murdered in Italy, and I remember thinking, wow,
sounds like a monster. And then every now and then

(00:42):
I would hear Amanda Knox come up in the news again,
but it just didn't really interest me for some reason.
It just seemed like tabloid crap and didn't really pay
attention to it. And then this week I watched the
new documentary on Netflix. It's actually pretty good. It's not amazing,
you know, it's not like making a murder or anything,
but it's worth a watch, and it's just a I

(01:04):
think it's just like an hour and a half or something,
so it's not a huge commitment, but it really explains
the whole story in a concise manner and a compelling manner.
They have a lot of great interviews and visuals and stuff. Well,
that's what I'm going to talk about today, not the documentary,
but the entire Amanda Knox case. I'm gonna review the
facts of the case, and I'm going to talk about

(01:25):
some of the societal implications sexism, sex and violence media,
and then I'm going to end with a discussion regarding
the research and psychology of false confessions, because there's a
lot of research on false confessions, false confessions. This is
the psychology and Stay out of podcast. I'm your host,
doctor Kirkanda. I'm a therapist and a professor. So the

(01:48):
documentary opens up with Amanda Knox saying something quite compelling. Actually,
there's a number of interviews with her that I think
are quite moving. And she says, either I'm a psychopath
and sheep's clothing, or I'm you, and she elaborates on
that She's just like, either I'm some sort of monster,

(02:10):
you know, someone who is capable of doing horrendous things
for no good reason, or I'm I'm like you. I'm
just I'm just like you, and this could happen to you.
So you're either afraid of me as a psychopathic satanic killer,
or you're afraid that, you know, the thing that happened

(02:30):
to me could happen to you. Either way, it's kind
of scary, and I think that's why she thinks we're
so compelled to her story as opposed to all the
other stories that happened in the world. So this is
the bookends of the documentary. They start off with this question,
either I'm a psychopath and sheep's clothing or I'm just
like you, And it's also the question that is asked

(02:53):
the end of the documentary. And so it would seem
from this opening that the documentary will provide a kind
of discourse between these two places. She's either a psychopath
and sheep's clothing or she's an innocent person just like you.
But really, the documentary I think clearly has an opinion

(03:17):
as to the answer of the question that aman in
Ox adds asked at the beginning, and I think that
it will become clear as I present the information of
the case what the documentary was saying. So the information
I'm about to tell you is all from the Internet,
it's from the documentary, it's from other news sources. So

(03:40):
some of this might be wrong, but so I apologize
in advance. Every once in a while, I do a
podcast about this sort of thing, and I'll get one
or two things wrong, and then I'll get blasted on
the internet. Someone will listen to the entire episode and
pick one tiny little thing I got wrong and email me.
I mean, it's fine to do that, just don't be

(04:01):
a dick about it. If you're going to point something out,
I don't mind being corrected. But you know, imagine yourself
giving a precinct, working hard for weeks to develop a presentation.
You give the presentation and ninety nine point nine percent
of it is solid, and this tiny little detail is wrong,

(04:23):
and then someone comes up to you after the talk.
You're in a lecture hall or something, and they just
all they you know, they they proceed to stand there
and listen to you for two hours, and then they
find one tiny thing and they come up to you
and that's all that they say, well, by the way,
that one thing you said that was stupid, and then
they just walk away. That's what the Internet is like people,
not all the people on the Internet, but you know,

(04:44):
a good amount of people. Okay, So now the history.
So let's go back all the way to the beginning
of Amanda's life. I'm not going to go into too
much detail because I actually don't know that much because
I couldn't really find that much about Amanda's childhood, in
her upbringing or anything. From all accounts, it seems like
she had a total normal, uneventful childhood. So she grew

(05:09):
up from West Seattle. For those of you who aren't
from the area, West Seattle is a part of Seattle proper.
It's like a you know, a borough, shall we say,
a neighborhood in Seattle called West Seattle. It's a pretty
big neighborhood. It's one of the major neighborhoods in Seattle,
and it's a suburb of downtown, and it's southwest of downtown.

(05:31):
It's it's one of the main hills in Seattle. Seattle
has a number of big hills, not big, but you
know hills, and West Seattle is one of the main
hills in Seattle. There's a lot of fancy houses up there,
not super fancy. I mean, now, they're probably worth like
two million dollars given the prices of homes in Seattle.
But but there, you know, there are probably a lot

(05:52):
of them were built one hundred years ago. A lot
of them have been renovated. They have those kind of
nice porches on the front, and I don't know if
they call them craftsman homes, but anyway, it's not all
like that. And they have like cute little shops and stuff.
Some of my favorite restaurants and shops and bakeries are
up there. There's a long beach front. I used to

(06:14):
go there every weekend to exercise. People play beach volleyball
there in the summer. Kids have bonfires or scuba divers.
There's a lot of people get wedding photos in West
Seattle because you can look across the bay at downtown
as you have this wonderful actually the beginning of psychology
in Seattle until recently. The intro for the YouTube videos

(06:37):
was a shot from West Seattle looking across the bay
at downtown. There's a lot of seafood restaurants over there. Anyway,
So she grew up in West Seattle. I couldn't find
much about her childhood and maybe more will come out later,
but this is all that I could really find that
was relevant. She was born in nineteen eighty seven in Seattle.
Her mother was a math teacher. Her father was one

(06:59):
of the vice presidents at Macy's of Finance, so he
was doing pretty well. The parents divorced when she was
a toddler. She was middle class. She played soccer, and
if you're familiar with soccer, at least in the Northwest,
I see a lot of people, maybe girls soccer teams.
They often won't have nicknames. I think it's sort of

(07:22):
a thing. Maybe it wasn't at my high school, but
I feel like a lot of schools. Whenever you get
a chance to have a jersey with your name on it,
a lot of times it's a nickname, some sort of
silly nickname. And her silly nickname, since her name was
Amanda Knox, was Foxy Noxye. So she's playing soccer as

(07:44):
a young teenager and everyone has their own little silly nickname,
and she had this nickname, Foxy Noxye, And that'll come
up later in a big way. She graduated from Seattle
Prep High School. It's a fancy private school, not super fancy,
but you know, private school on North Capitol Hill. It's
actually right by one of my friends' houses, and I

(08:06):
would park in front of Seattle Prep all the time.
And incidentally, it's near Macklemore's house on Capitol Hill if
you're familiar. Familiar. Then she went to the University of
Washington to study linguistics. That's where I went U DUB.
She made the Dean's list, which is a pretty big

(08:27):
deal because University of Washington is, you know, pretty competitive school.
It's it's it's one of the harder schools to get
into in the area, and to actually make the deans
list is a pretty big deal. I was nowhere near
the dean's list when I went to UDUB. She apparently
partied like a typical U DUB student. You know, they

(08:48):
have all the drinking and the you know and the sex,
sing and the young people things that happen in college
that I participated in as well. When I was at UDUB,
friends would say that she was kind and gentle, which
after experiencing her in interviews and in this documentary, I

(09:10):
can see how she would come across to people as
gentle and kind a little obnoxious. They have some but
you know, she's young, so whatever. Her family described her
as being outgoing but naive, So outgoing but naive from so,
let me just speculate a little bit on her childhood.

(09:33):
I think that she was raised in a fairly protective manner.
I think that her parents didn't expose her, probably you know,
for the better, really to a lot of bad things
in life. And so from the looks of it, you know,
by the time she was at the University of Washington,

(09:55):
she wasn't an old soul, let's just put it that way.
I think she had a little bit of an immaturity
to her. Maybe it's normal a level of immaturity for
that age, but she definitely didn't come across like she
was wise, or that she was very responsible or really
knew who she was yet or anything like that. So

(10:18):
as part of her linguistic degree, about halfway through her
time at the University of Washington, she decided she wanted
to go to Italy to study at the University for
Foreigners as an exchange student there for a year. She
was planning on going there for a year, and I
just love the name of that university. I'm sure it
has an Italian name, but I think it's translated into

(10:41):
the university for foreigners. So it's so descriptive. Makes me
wonder what their mascot is, you know, like just a foreigner.
I don't know. Her stepfather incidentally didn't want her to
go to Italy because he thought she was too naive
to travel by herself. So again and just that naivete

(11:02):
to comment on. In the documentary, she describes how she
was basically feeling like she needed to grow up, and
she felt dependent on her family. She was seeming, like
I said, seemingly quite dependent on her family and went
to a private school and then what's u dub which

(11:25):
is actually pretty close to West Seattle, And maybe she
even lived at home. I don't know. But she was
attracted to Italy, this trip to Italy, this big trip,
as a way to grow up and become an independent person.
She said in the documentary, I wanted to find myself
in this new, faraway place. And this is a common
thing for people to do. It's not unhealthy to do it.

(11:50):
It's a bit of a It can go wrong, obviously,
but you know, if you feel like you can't really
grow up without a lot of I've run into this
with clients in my personal life before. There are people
who feel like the only way that can really individuate
and differentiate is if they move far away for a

(12:14):
long period of time. They want to just be free
from the influence of their family. And you know, there's
wisdom to that. There's also some folly to that, but
some wisdom, Okay. So she goes to the university for
Foreigners and it's this small, attractive, little hilltop town in Italy,

(12:36):
and Amanda finds herself roommates with Meredith Kircher, who was
also an exchange student, but she was from London. She
was also Meredith Kircher was also studying linguistics as a
man Inox. And Meredith and I mean, incidentally Amanda are

(12:57):
both good looking young women, attractive young women in a
foreign land, you know, roommates together. And Meredith looks half Persian.
I think her mom is Persian or Pakistani or something
along or Indian perhaps some. But Meredith has, you know,

(13:17):
that kind of like myself, you know, a halfy kind
of look to her. Anyway, within a short amount of time,
Amanda got a job at a bar, and also within
a short amount of time in Italy. This is all
within like the first month or something, she met Raphael
Soslido so so Lisito, so Lisito Raphael at a concert,

(13:41):
she met him and they instantly fell in love. Incidentally,
just fast forwarding here, they their relationship was only for
five days. I mean sometimes if you're familiar a little
bit with the story, you know, you're like, oh, she
had this boyfriend. Well, their relationship lasted for five days
because five days later was when the murder happened. So

(14:03):
they had this this five is you know, five day
relationship and it's just interesting to learn that. But anyway,
so both of them, Rathael and Amanda, said that they
had never really been in love before. This is the
first time that they'd ever been in love and so
and you can tell from video footage of the two

(14:24):
of them and the way that they talked that they
were falling head over heels for each other. You know,
this very nice, shy, inexperienced Italian boy and this naive
American girl from Seattle in a foreign land and she
meets this cute guy and and they're they're just all

(14:48):
over each other. And they said that they spent all
their time together and they would smoke pot and they
would make love, and they would they just you know,
five days of relationship ship bliss. So now, so five
days later, Amanda was supposed to work one night at
the bar, but her boss Patrick, whom I'll get into

(15:12):
more in a second, her boss Patrick texted her and
said that she wasn't needed at the bar, so she
so Amanda spent the night at her boyfriend's instead. And
Amanda and Rafael both talk about how they spend the
night together and they made dinner and they made love.
There's a lot of very descriptive making love stories. And

(15:35):
again it the way they say it. Even at their
age now, which is a lot older. I think, you know,
they're in their late twenties. They just have a kind
of naivete about the way they even talk about life.
You just have to kind of see them. They seem
like younger than they actually are, you know. Anyway. Okay,

(15:57):
So November two, two thousands, So this is the day
after the murder. Amanda returns home at noon the next day,
so she spent the night at Raphael. See. She goes
home and she found and they live in this this
house and there's a bunch of rooms, there's a downstairs

(16:19):
and it's this. You have to see the documentary. It's this.
It's this really great house. It really makes me, I
don't know if I would want to stay in this
house specifically, but it makes me want to go to
this town in Italy and like stay in a place nearby,
because there's this beautiful little hillside and this house has
this deck and it overlooks this valley area or something.
It just looks like this, but it also looks like

(16:40):
a cheap rental house at the same time, so it's
a cheap rental house and a great location with this greenery. Anyway,
so Amanda returns home at around noon and she saw
that the door was ajar and she that didn't alarm
her beak, you know, for whatever reason. And then she

(17:05):
went inside. She got undressed, and she went to the
bathroom because she wanted to take a shower, and she
saw some drops of blood in the sink. And if
you see the pictures, it's actually pretty faint drops of blood.
It's not like a ton of blood. She didn't think
much of it. She just thought, Okay, I guess someone
cut themselves or whatever. And then she takes a shower.

(17:29):
And after she showered, that's when she saw more blood
on the bath mat, and they show a picture of it,
and you know, it's pretty noticeable, red blood on a
white bath mat. It looks like a footprint. And this
doesn't look like, oh, someone just cut themselves. This amount
of blood looks like something was wrong. You know, it

(17:53):
looks like a crime, saying, let's just put it that way.
But she, you know, didn't think much of it. She
saw the blood there and she thought, well, I don't
know what that is. And then she proceeds to blow
dryer hair and then she looks in the toilet and
she sees some feces, some poop and the toilet and
they show a picture of this in the documentary. It's

(18:14):
pretty it's pretty gnarly. The poop is not in the water.
I think it's like up on this. It's like a
you have to see it. It looks like if I
saw this, I would have been like, holy shit, someone
destroyed my toilet. Why didn't they fucking flush it? But anyway,
she looks at the toilet and she just sees this,

(18:34):
you know, toilet destroyed by somebody. And then that's when
she said that that's when something occurred to her, like
something was wrong, and she felt like the creeps and
she felt like someone might be in the house. And
I just find this to be fascinating because you know,
the door's ajar, a little bit of blood on the sink,

(18:55):
takes shower, steps out of the shower, a little you know,
more blood on the bath mat. She doesn't think it
of a single thing. And then she sees poop in
the toilet, and then she starts feeling creeped out because
to me, it's like, logically, poop in the toilet, Okay,
someone pooped in the toilet, didn't flush, no big deal.
But blood everywhere and the door ajar. It seems like
that would add it up. But I'll get more to

(19:17):
that later. So then she gets creeped out and she
leaves and she runs to Raphael. They both return to
the house and he immediately sees a big mess in
the house, as if there was a break in or
some sort of scuffle, and he was surprised that Amanda

(19:37):
didn't react and instead just took a shower, So he
pointed out that he thought it was weird that Amanda
didn't do anything. So they decide to try Meredith's room
because Meredith the roommate, Meredith Kircher, the English exchange student,
abandaged roommate. Her bedroom door was closed, and so they

(20:00):
try Meredith room. They knock on the door, there's no answer.
Raphael tries to break the door down. He can't break
the door down, and so then Raphael calls the police
and they send the police and two officers arrive, and
reportedly these were postal police officers, who usually only investigate

(20:23):
postal crimes, not murder investigations. I don't know if that's
a factor, but I don't even know if that's true,
but I read that summer. The police officers entered the
apartment to investigate. They kicked down the door to meredith room,
and inside they found Meredith's body on the floor, dead,

(20:44):
covered in a duvet that was soaked in blood. And
then they call for more backup and a ton of
police arrived, just tons of police and investigators, and the
media arrives. You know, as the story comes out, the
public starts to question what's happening in the prosecutors and

(21:07):
the investigators start start asking all these questions. They start saying, like,
you know, why did Amanda leave the house without checking
with Meredith? I mean, if she walks in the house
Dori jere you know, multiple places with blood on it,
poop in the in the in the toilet. Why doesn't

(21:28):
she just knock on Mary of the store? Why does
she just bolt? Okay, so that's you know, one question.
So all this is like trying to point at the fact,
you know that a lot of people thought that Amanda
did it because of the way that she reacted in
this situation. You know, why does she take a shower?
How did she not notice that the house was in

(21:49):
disarray when Raphael totally noticed it? How could she shower
with blood in the bathroom? And why would the poop
cause you fear when the blood didn't And at first
I had the same questions as I was watching the documentary,
I was like, what, you know, what's going on here?
But after getting to know her and after seeing the

(22:10):
pictures of the blood, I think she was just naive, immature, young,
and she wasn't used to paying attention to stuff like that.
I think she just sort of comes across as kind
of an oblivious person. Honestly, not stupid, but just not
very worldly. You know, if you come from a totally

(22:33):
protected West Seattle, you know, private school world, and you
see a little bit of blood in the bathroom. My
guess is you're just going to think, well, I'm sure
there's a logical explanation for that, and so or even
it's not my problem. When you're young, you don't tend

(22:54):
to look for reasons to take action. You know, you
just I noticed blood. Okay, moving on in life, as
you grow up and mature and you see blood, you
take on the responsibility for finding out what happens. And
so I think she was just immature. And she's in
a foreign country. She just moved there. She has no

(23:16):
idea what's happening. And I could absolutely see her not
really putting the things together because now we all know
that Meredith was dead in the room next to this
bathroom or near this bathroom in this house, and so
it all makes sense to us because we know. But
just imagine yourself, right, you live with a bunch of

(23:40):
other people that are coming in and out of your house.
I mean, I don't know how many people lived in
the house, but you know, you're in college. People leave
the doora jar sometimes and if it's nice out, you know,
just I don't know, it's the middle of the day,
No big deal. You walk in, you see a little
bit of blood in the sink, you know, a couple drops, Okay,

(24:03):
no big deal there. People you know get cut. Sometimes
you see a little bit more blood on the bath mat. Okay.
I mean, does your brain go to there's a there's
been a bloody murder in my house. No, of course not,
you're if this happened to you, unless you have some
kind of weird radar when it comes to murder. My
guess is you just think, oh, there's someone cut themselves,

(24:24):
and then you see more blood and you're like, wow,
someone cut themselves pretty bad. And I'm sure someone will
tell me that story someday. I don't know. Also, you know,
she could have been groggy, and you know, who knows.
But it's definitely not the sort of slam dunk indication
of guilty of guilt to me, the way that a

(24:48):
lot of people were saying it and the way a
lot of people still say it. Okay, So the police
arrive and they investigate, and they find signs that Meredith,
the English extange student who was murdered, that Meredith, she
was held down and she had this deep cut in
her throat. You know, just there's a lot of things

(25:08):
about this case that remind me of the OJ Simpson case. Actually,
so I don't think it was as deep as the
OJ Simpson case, but it was. It was very deep,
and the body was covered with a duvet. So someone
killed Meredith and then they took the blanket from the
bed next to her and just put it over her,

(25:30):
and there was lots of blood everywhere, and she was
semi naked. They also reported she had little nicks in
her chin from the knife, as if someone had been
taunting her, you know, putting the knife up to her
chin and saying, you know, don't say anything, or you
know whatever, or maybe even torturing her. I don't know.

(25:51):
The police immediately started to think of Amanda as a
suspect because they thought that she was acting inappropriate, but honestly,
I couldn't see that because they have, for whatever reason,
they have video footage of her hanging around the home

(26:12):
right after the murder as the police are there. I
think the police arrived then either a police person is
videoing or the media is videoing or something. And I
don't know, she didn't seem quote unquote inappropriate. So and
I just want to put this into context, because I
think the little bit I did know about this case,

(26:32):
I thought that Amanda and Meredith were like pretty close friends,
but they had only been they'd only known each other
for a few weeks, and so they really barely knew
each other, honestly. Okay, So a media circus begins. Immediately

(26:53):
there's this weird video footage that starts to show up
in the media again, taken by the police. Can't tell.
Amanda and Raphael are hanging around outside as the police
are inside Amanda's house doing the investigation, and Amanda looks
sad and she looks scared, but they're both very very close.

(27:17):
You know, they're like face to face and they're comforting
each other, and they're kissing, and they if you looked,
if you didn't know the context, you would think that
they were making out. You would think they were having
this romantic moment and they were making out. But you
look a little closer and you see that Amanda looks
kind of scared and Raphael looks like he's taking care

(27:38):
of her because you know, to them, they're like, whoa,
there's this murder just happened in my house and it's crazy.
And at the same time, they're this immature, you know,
traumatized young couple that have just completely fallen head over
heels in love with each other, and so they do

(27:59):
what they do in all cases, and regardless of what
they're doing, and they decide to turn it into an
affectionate moment. Also, again, when you look at this video footage,
just without understanding the context, it looks as though a
man is acting kind of weird. I mean, why would
you be making out essentially with your boyfriend. They're not

(28:21):
making out, but it kind of looks like that. Why
would you be making out with your boyfriend directly after
learning that your roommate was just brutally murdered. I mean,
that just seems like weird behavior. Well, Amanda, at this point,
she's all alone, her family is halfway across the world,
and her one friend, Meredith is dead, and so she

(28:43):
is looking to the one person she can really depend
on that's physically there, which is this boy she's fallen
deeply in love with, and so they're embracing each other
trying to hold on. But of course, in the media's eyes,
she was obviously guilty because who would kiss her boyfriend
directly after the murder of your of your roommate. And

(29:11):
I also want to just pause and point out that
in the documentary interviews that happened, you know, I'm guessing
this year all the way back to video footager that
have her of her in high school and then video
just all the different video footage of her, regardless of contact,
she has a kind of weird looking face. Not that
she's ugly, but she has a kind of she always

(29:33):
has kind of a weird expression on her face. And
I think that actually hurt her in a lot of
ways because she has a kind of odd way of
expressing herself. And some people were actually saying they think
she's autistic because of the way she comes across, But
that's just silly. I think she's just quirky, and I
think she I think she's a little unsure of herself.

(29:54):
I think she she seems and I don't know because
I'm not talking to her, but from a lot of
the video footage, regardless of the of what emotional states
she's in, whether she's sad or happy or just talking
or if she's celebrating some legal victory, she always seemed
to have kind of a weird expression to her that

(30:15):
that feels like a little creepy. And I don't know
if it's just me reading into it or whatnot, but
she just kind of has a weird expression. Let's just
put it that way. And whenever Rafael, because there's a
lot of similar footage of Raphael and he's in similar context,
like in the legal situation, in these interviews, Rafael doesn't

(30:37):
have that sort of creep factor at all. When he's talking,
you just feel like you're talking to a regular person.
But there's something there's something a little off about Amanda.
Now that does not mean that she's guilty of brutally
murdering her roommate for no reason. It just it just
I think it's a factor in the way that the
media react, in the way that the public reacted to her. Okay,

(31:00):
so incidentally, they show some footage of later, so I
don't know how long later, maybe even a couple of
years or something. Amanda Knox is being interviewed on twenty
twenty by Diane Sawyer, the famous Diane Sawyer of twenty twenty,
and Diane Sawyer is saying, quote, you can see this

(31:21):
does not look like grief, It does not read as grief,
and then Amanda replies, I think everyone's reaction to something
horrible is different. I'm writing a book right now about grief,
and I give a lot of lectures on grief these days,
and this is just yet another example of how whenever

(31:45):
there's a high profile murder, there is often this assumption
that there's this right way to react after loss or
after trauma. If you don't present that right way of reaction,
then it's presumed that the only reason why you didn't

(32:06):
do the right response is because you're guilty of the
murder yourself. And there's tons of examples of people being
convicted basically based on that, based on the fact that
people don't understand the grief reaction. They have a very
narrow vision of what is quote unquote the right way
to grieve or something, and if you don't do it,

(32:28):
then it's because you're guilty of actually murdering the person,
or you're some kind of cold hearted person. And so
Amanda was guilty or not guilty, she was a victim
of that kind of ridiculousness. Okay, So then the investigation begins,
and immediately it's clear that the cops and the prosecutor

(32:50):
and the police and the government are terrified of looking
like fools in the media. Apparently there was some sort
of high profile legal case just a few years earlier,
five or so years earlier, that the police in this
town in Italy were humiliated over I think I read

(33:11):
that somewhere. And so not only are they on the
heels of that wor you know, humiliating situation, but there's just,
for whatever reason, just tons of media attention on this situation,
and so they're terrified of looking like fools. But you know,
these are small town prosecutors and stuff. They don't have

(33:34):
the you know, the big city resources. Okay, and this
is a major element in all that is about to
happen to the story. If the if there wasn't the
media attention, my guess is his story would have gone
a very different way. Or if there wasn't so much

(33:57):
pressure from the community to find someone right away, this
whole story, my guess would be completely different. But there
was a lot of pressure and the police even during
a press conference publicly the police chief talked about how
there was a ton of pressure from the media, putting

(34:19):
was being put on them to solve the case right away.
So throughout the documentary they keep interviewing this one prosecutor,
and I'm going to be talking about a lot of things,
he said, because he's seen perhaps as one of the
villains of the situation, because this prosecutor seemingly had targeted

(34:42):
Amanda for some weird reason and then just decided to
make the case that Amanda did it when there was
a lot of evidence in that direction. But anyway, so
in the documentary, he says, well, female murderers tend to
cut over their victims after a murder. A man would

(35:03):
never think to do this. So he, you know, he
comes into the house and he sees that the meredith
was covered by this duvet, by this blanket from the bed,
and the prosecutor immediately thinks, oh, clearly this must be
a female murderer, because men would never do this. Right
off the bat. You just have to Now I'm not

(35:24):
a prosecutor, I'm not an investigator, but I have to
imagine that that statement has to be pretty stupid to
anyone who knows anything about, you know, crime. I mean,
maybe there's a there's a tendency for women to do
that more than men. I don't know, but I can't
imagine just looking at a blanket covering the body of

(35:44):
a dead person and going, oh, we have a female.
We have a female assailant here, clearly because men would
never do that. That's just you know, men don't do that.
It just seems like a sign of amateurism or stupidity
or I don't know what, but just something was wrong there.

(36:05):
The prosecutor and the investigators, they quickly conclude that this
was a staged break in, that there was no evidence
of anyone climbing the walls to get in the house,
that someone must have been let in the house and
nothing was stolen, so the little evidence of a break

(36:29):
in that there was, it must have been staged. So
they ask Amanda to come to the home and answer
some questions. They want to find out about the knives
and this sort of thing. And Amanda says that as
they're questioning her about the death of Meredith, they I
think they told her that Meredith had her throat cut

(36:52):
very severely by a knife, and it sort of hit
home with Amanda what had really happened to this person?
And she said she became quote unquote hysterical, and the prosecutor,
watching Amanda have this emotional breakdown, was convinced that this
emotional breakdown was evidence of Amanda remembering the murder. And again,

(37:21):
I just want to point this out. So you ask
this young foreigner some questions, and you revealed her that
her roommate has been brutally murdered, and you start giving
her some details, and then this person proceeds to cry uncontrollably.

(37:42):
Why would you assume that means that she's guilty of
having committed the murder. It just always boggles me. One.
The way that police act sometimes, you know, with their conclusions,
is just like they they're just looking for any excuse
to sport their narrative about a certain thing. And it's

(38:04):
just bizarre. And then again this sort of grief myth
about so earlier, if she doesn't have an emotional reaction,
she's guilty, and here she does have an emotional reaction,
so she's also guilty. It just it blows me away,
the way that people use myths about grief to harm

(38:26):
other people, and that this is a major theme in
the book that I'm writing, actually, which I hope one
day to be done with. I've been writing it for
two years, I think. Okay, So then they pull in
Rafael to question him. They just want to get some questions.
And Amanda accompanies Raphael to the police station because she's

(38:49):
being supportive of her boyfriend, and they mess with Raphael's
young mind. So you know how I'm describing Amanda as
being this young, naive, not worldly, not mature person. Well,
Rafael is exactly the same. He seems extreme, he seems
perhaps even more naive, even though he's it's his country,

(39:11):
he's an Italian guy, but he seems extremely innocent and
kind and nice and timid. And so the police start
interrogating him and they start to and they're convinced that
Rafael and Amanda were involved in this murder. And again,
remember the police are under a lot of pressure to

(39:32):
find someone, and so they start kind of messing with
Rafael's mind and they start lying to him about you know,
Amanda this, and what do you know about her? And
maybe she did it and and we have evidence that
you know, blah blah blah. And so Rafael starts to
under pressure, starts to kind of distance himself a little

(39:53):
bit from Amanda. So then, for some strange reason, which
I'll get into more later when I talk about false confessions,
Raphael tells the police that Amanda was not at his
house that night. Rafael says, well, actually, Amanda didn't arrive
to my house until one am, so she could have

(40:15):
been at home murdering Meredith. And so the alibi doesn't
make sense because the police, if they're going to make
Amanda and Rafael guilty, they have to somehow eliminate the
alibi that they are saying that they were at Rafael's place.
So they immediately grab Amanda and pull her into this

(40:37):
different room, and Amanda's like, what's going on here? Why
am I being interrogated? I just came here down here
to support my boyfriend. At this point, she has no
idea that she's being that she's a suspect, because she's thinking,
why would I be a suspect this, you know, And
so they tell Amanda the police. They tell Amanda that
Rafael has turned on her and is telling the police

(41:01):
the quote unquote truth that she murdered Meredith and didn't
arrive at Raphael's till one I am and so at
this point she's still thinking that she can convince them
of the truth, which is, you know, in her mind,
that she's innocent, and so she hands over her cell phone.
She just says, look, let me give you my cell phone.

(41:22):
You can look through all my texts, you can look
at all my phone calls, and you can see that
my story blinds up with everything. And they find this
one text message from her boss, Patrick, and remember he
was He texted her and said, I don't need you

(41:43):
to come in to work today because I just don't
need you to come in, so don't come in. And
so they start laying into her and they get aggressive.
They interrogate her for one report said something at fourteen hours.
Another report said a number of days, but anyway, fourteen
hours plus. They start hitting her in the back of

(42:04):
the head and saying, you know, tell us the truth.
You know, you got to remember what happened, and we
don't believe your story. They don't give her food, they
don't give her water, they don't let her go to
the bathroom. She asked for a lawyer. They say, no,
that's only going to hurt you. We're not going to
let you talk to a lawyer. And you know, they're
being aggressive. They're in her face and they're saying, you know,

(42:29):
was Patrick involved in this? And why were you texting Patrick?
And she's like, I was testing Patrick because he's my boss,
and he said I shouldn't come in there. And they're
saying it must have been you, you must have did it,
and your boyfriend Raphael, and you know you did it.
You must have done it, and then she says that
she broke She told a story that Patrick, her boss,

(42:54):
who just happens to be black by the way. Patrick,
she tells the story that her boss, Patrick killed Meredith
while Amanda watched. So she was there with Patrick as
Patrick killed Meredith. And I think she might have said
Raphael was there too. So Patrick, Raphael, and Amanda are

(43:16):
all charged with the murder of Meredith and they're all
detained or incarcerated or something. So then the real initial
media circus begins and either the investigators leak information or
the investigators just overtly start telling the press certain details,

(43:38):
and the press start, you know, publishing, and the documentary
really describes this process very well, I think, but the
press really goes with it, you know, they really run
with the information and they say, oh, Meredith, it's not
only just this murder of this foreign person in Italy,

(43:59):
this English in Italy, but there was this there was
a sex orgy some sort of sex orgy thing that
was going on. And this is where I'm like, where
do they There was no evidence of that, so it's like,
what's I mean. She was naked, so I guess perhaps
she was raped. But anyway, so they start piecing, you know,

(44:20):
they're like, Okay, we got a half naked dead girl,
We've got a bloody bra that was off of her,
We've got this American woman, We've got this Italian boyfriend,
and we've got this bar owner Patrick and I can't
remember what country he's from, but he's from some other

(44:40):
country other than Italy. And the it's you know, they're
saying it's some sort of sex game gone wrong, or
it was sex torture involving all the you know, like
some sort of cult ritual sex killing something, and the

(45:00):
media publishes in a documentary, there's all these interviews with
one of the most notorious journalists on the case, Nick
piecea Pisa or Pisa Nick. He's an English guy. I
think seemingly he wrote a lot of the most dominant

(45:21):
speculative stories that were getting a lot of attention. You know,
I think he was making up things like she was killed,
Meredith was killed for refusing sex, and they started labeling
her as a man eater. That Amanda, you know, came
to Italy to you know, enact her her terrible psychopathic ways.

(45:43):
Nick Pisa or Pisa googled Amanda and Raphael and Nick
found Amanda joking around with a Gatlin gun at a
museum and man, if you can google it, you can
find it. But there's this picture of Amanda. I think
she's at a She must be at a museum because
she's behind a Gatlin gun or some sort of old

(46:05):
fashioned ee machine gun. And Amanda has this face like like,
you know, she's shooting the gun and she's like yay,
you know, she's just a kid and she's at a
museum and there's this funny looking gun and she's making
this face. But they published this as like, oh my god,
look at this crazy, you know, American girl with who

(46:28):
takes glee and killing people, and look at her face
as she's shooting this Gatlin gun. And I mean just
I mean one, when I watched this documentary, I'm like,
my god, has journalism just hit an all time low?
Who are these people? And then the second thought I
had is who are these people who read this shit,

(46:51):
I mean, give me a break. People like she's anyway.
So then they also find a picture Raphael him I
think some sort of costume party. He's dressed up as
a mummy and he just happens to have a knife
in his hand. So of course they published that, as
you know in the media, like look at this killer

(47:13):
and this mummy costume. And Nick the journalist, he says,
he just love these pictures. He's like, oh my god,
I can't believe out families, okay. And you know, if
you can remember the times we're talking about two thousand
and seven, two thousand and eight, when it was the
beginning of that phenomenon where you can investigate people online

(47:38):
right where, And there's been a lot of famous, high
profile cases like this where someone will like there was
that one mother whose children died or something, and then
just soon after the death of her kids, there were
pictures of her on Facebook or something, partying with her

(47:59):
friends or something thing and dancing around and dah da
da da. And so this is right at the beginning
of all that, when people started googling people and finding
incriminating pictures, and so they were victims of that. This
Nick journalist guy he's talking about how he was getting
a lot of front pages quote unquote in different publications

(48:21):
because he was he actually flew to this town in
Italy and was there and writing about all this. And
he also went to MySpace, this journalist and you know,
because this is back when people use MySpace, and I
think it was MySpace, and Amanda Knox's profile name is

(48:42):
Foxy Noxy, remember that name from her days of being
a teenage soccer player. And Nick was just he just said,
I can't believe this. Her MySpace name is Foxy Noxy.
This is perfect. And so he published it, and you know,
Foxy Noxy in Murderous Sex Orgy thing and the name

(49:09):
Foxy Noxy stuck and around the world in the different
publications they're referring to as Foxy Noxy, which it does
find to be just just really gross. There's so much,
there's so many gross things about the media and about
the prosecution in this story. It's just really gross. I mean,

(49:30):
I understand if you're like some kind of like sixth
grader and you're some immature boob of some kind, but
you're a grown man, you're a grown person. You should
have professionalism or you should at least have some integrity
or at least some worry about how this is coming across.

(49:50):
It just boggles me the way that some people operate
in their professional lives. But anyway, oh okay, so Patrick,
remember him, the boss of Amanda's, the bar owner. Well
he quickly he so he's being implicated as the main

(50:12):
person who murdered Meredith, the English exchange student. Well, Patrick
quickly provides an alibi because he was working that night.
Remember he texted Amanda said I don't need to come in.
He was working in the bar, and there's tons of
customers who said, no, he was at the bar. We
saw him during the time of the crime. He was working.

(50:36):
So he is quickly, you know, freed. And so now
they're just down to Amanda and Raphael as the suspects,
and they're still incarcerated. And so they the Battalion government,
they test her blood for some unknown reason and I

(50:59):
think maybe to get DNA samples, not sure, but they
tell her that she has HIV. They find well, while
we were doing just our normal test, we found out
you are HIV positive. Maybe it's because you're such an
American slut girl who's been having all this sex and

(51:19):
you should feel bad about yourself. And of course Amanda
freaks the fuck out. She's like, holy crap, I have HIV.
I've been convicted. You know, I'm being accused of murder
and I also have HIV and I'm gonna die. I mean,
this is terrible. But as time passes, it's revealed that
the government Italian government was just playing tricks on her.

(51:42):
She does not have HIV, So I just want to
kind of pause here for a second. They didn't really
explain this all that well, but they hinted at it
that Italy is Catholic country, and there's a lot of
catholic I don't know, as Italy entire Catholic, I don't know,
but there's a lot of Catholicism interwoven into the documentary.

(52:05):
The prosecutor said he was Catholic, and they seem to
be kind of hinting at even in the people as
they're being interviewed, that, you know, Catholicism has a very
fantastical has a lot of fantastical elements to it. Now,
are all Catholics, you know, the same? Absolutely not. There's

(52:27):
millions of Catholics around the world and a lot of
variation and how they think. But if you look into
Catholicism and it's and it's belief system, you know, there's
angels and demons and possessions and exorcisms and and you
know saints, and you know, there's just there's a lot,
there's a pretty elaborate fantasy world. It's it's it's like

(52:54):
Lord of the ringsy kind of you know, And there's
a some of that in I think influencing how the
prosecutor and the people of Italy were kind of looking
at this there because Amanda was seen as this nymphomaniac

(53:16):
from America, there was there's a there seemed to be
a sort of theme of she must be possessed by
the devil because who else has sex with a bunch
of people, because that was the narrative was that was
that Amanda Ox was this nymphomaniac who was having sex

(53:38):
sex orgies in Italy and stuff and was only there
for a few weeks but had had tons of sex
orgies in blah bah blah. So she also kept a
diary while she was in prison. Again just either she
was writing a diary hoping it would be leaked to
the press, and so she was maybe trying to tell

(53:59):
her story through I don't know, but I think more
likely is the case that she was alone in prison,
didn't have anyone to talk to, and so she just
started writing, which frankly, I could see myself doing if
I was in those shoes. But again, the naivete that
she could keep the diary secret. Because the diary was

(54:19):
leaked to the press, and the press got their hands
on it, this Nick piece of guy gets his hands
on it and he starts publishing things from it, and
the documentarians when the Netflix documentarian people, they ask Nick
the journalist, how did you get your hands on this diary?
And Nick says, we never reveal our sources. That would

(54:43):
be that's not good journalism. You don't reveal your sources.
So it's okay to steal an innocent woman's because at
this point she at least she's not convicted. Even if
you think she did it, she's not convicted of you yet.
So not only are you stealing a woman's diary and

(55:03):
publishing it like that's fine for journalism, but to reveal
your sources, WHOA, that's bad journalism. It's just so gross.
And so he starts another journalists start publishing things from
this diary and they start summarizing and saying that that

(55:24):
Amanda is perverted quote unquote, and that she had many lovers.
They're saying, look at her diary, and she talks about
all the men she's had sex with, and she's some
sort of like, you know, she's out to have as
much sex as she can, with as many men as
she can. She's some sort of craze and informniac, murderer,

(55:44):
sex orgy person, satanic devilish person. Well, it turns out
she had only had sex with seven men, and that
was with In her diary, she talks about having sex
with seven different guys. That's the extent to her satanic sexual,
niphomaniac orgy life. Just seven guys. And you know, she's

(56:07):
at this point, I don't know how she has twenty
twenty one or something. Presumably she had sex with a
few guys in high school and a few more guys
in college, and then you add Rafael to the number
to that and you got seven dudes. So so yeah,
many lovers, perverted sex orgy person. Which I'll get into

(56:29):
more later on the sexism and all the strangeness of
all of that. But anyway, so now the investigators start
doing their job and they start looking for evidence to
corroborate the accusation that Amanda and Raphael or the murders.
And they find this knife at Rafael's place. There's a
knife at his house. They tested for DNA and they

(56:51):
find Amanda's DNA is on the handle. Well, this isn't
so surprising. I mean, Amanda spends time at Refael's place,
presumably cooking sometimes and so having a man is DNA
in the handle seems pretty normal. But Meredith's DNA was
on the blade, So this is huge evidence at this point.

(57:14):
So not only do you have Amanda's DNA on a
knife that's at Raphael's place, but on the blade is
Meredith's DNA. So how in the world is Meredith's DNA
on a blade at Raphael's place unless that is the

(57:36):
murder weapon and Amanda was the one that killed her.
So it's pretty incriminating at that point, and now you
know everyone that is like totally convinced that Amanda is
the murderer. They also find this bloody bra clasp, so
that the Meredith when she died, that next to her

(57:58):
was her bra and the bra clasp, you know, the
clasp in the back was ripped off and was not
was a little bit away from the bra itself, and
they found this brad clasp and they tested it for
RNA and this is at the scene of the murder,
and Raphael's DNA was on it. So we have a

(58:22):
lot of DNA evidence now pointing at Raphael and Amanda
as being there when or you know, being the murderers.
But the police are convinced that there's a third person
for some reason. There there's evidence that you know, maybe
there's there's other DNA they can't identify, or fingerprints of
some stuff. So they start investigating this guy named Rudy Guada.

(58:46):
He's from Ivory Coast. He was spending time in this
Italian town and they discovered that rather recently he traveled
to Germany, so directly after for the murder, he mysteriously
decides to travel to Germany and they look into his

(59:07):
criminal history and he has a number of burglaries, or
at least one burglary or I don't know, he's been
convicted of burglary. Okay, So then they somehow get an
informant to call Rudy and have a conversation with him,
like one of Rudy's friends or something, and they record

(59:27):
this this skype call and it's all in the documentary.
It's really fascinating. And Rudy says that he was with
Meredith the night of the murder. So he's talking to
this informant. He's like, yeah, I was with Meredith that night,
the night she died. I was at Meredith's house. But
and I we were trying to have sex. But but

(59:50):
we didn't have sex because neither one of us had
a condom. So because we weren't going to have sex
and we didn't have a condom, I decided to go
to the bathroom and that's when I took that poop
in the toilet. So that poop in the toilet is
Rudy's poop from Ivory Coast. That's some that's his poop.
So so Rudy says, you know, I'm trying to sex with Meredith,

(01:00:15):
and while we don't have a condoms. They're like, okay,
no harm, no foul. Go to the bathroom, take a poop.
And after that, you know, as I'm pooping, I hear
someone screaming outside and so I came quickly out of
the bathroom, and then I saw this guy, but I
didn't see his face because it was dark, and he

(01:00:36):
ran out the front door. And then I looked down
at Meredith and I saw their throat was cut and
she was still alive. And so I embraced her and
she embraced me back, and she got blood all over me,
and I was scared, and I was completely covered in blood,
and so I said, so, you know, I ran because

(01:00:58):
I didn't know what to do. And then as he's
talking to the to the informant, he says, he says today,
you know, as he's talking, you know from Germany, he's like,
I'm really scared about this, and I'm gonna kill myself.
He says, I'm going to kill myself. He says, it's
just so interesting, similar to the OJ case. Remember Oj

(01:01:21):
in the white Bronco driving away from the scene in
the car chase, and how he had a gun to
his head and how he's going to how he wrote
that that suicide letter when the police were converging upon
him after he killed those two people, including his sex wife. Uh,

(01:01:43):
it's it makes sense, but it's it's just interesting how
when people feel the grip of the law coming after them,
that they will often turn to suicide as a way
out of it, you know. Anyway, So so he also
says Rudy in this recorded skype call with the informant,

(01:02:05):
he says, Amanda had nothing to do with this. She
wasn't even there. So Rudy is he's been watching the
news and he's like, oh my god, they're accusing Amanda
and Raphael this murder. And on this phone call that
he doesn't know is being recorded, he's like, and by
the way, Amanda wasn't even there. I don't even know
why they're they're like, you know, pursuing her. So then

(01:02:28):
he's arrested in Germany on an international arrest thing, and
he's brought to Italy and his lawyer decides to quote
unquote fast track the trial. So he decides to just
sort of get it over and done with, probably because
everyone he's worried. Probably my guess is that he's worried

(01:02:48):
that soon the ridiculousness of the case on Amanda and
Raphael will you know, be revealed at some point. So
he's like, a better bring Rudy to trial fast, because
you know, while everyone is still convinced that Amanda and
Raphael are the real killers and that maybe Rudy was
just kind of there. Also, the evidence against Rudy was

(01:03:11):
pretty strong, and so because because so they test the
crime scene and they find evidence of Rudy's fingerprints and
DNA all over the place. So in the room of
the murder, there's there's you have Meredith's DNA everywhere, and
you have and you have Rudy from the Ivory Coast.
You have his DNA everywhere, and then you have this

(01:03:34):
small little bra clasp with a little bit of Raphael's DNA,
and you don't have any DNA from Amanda in that room. Okay.
So they go to trial, and even though Rudy originally
on this on this recorded skype call, said that Amanda

(01:03:55):
wasn't there, I don't know why the police are pursuing her,
he now says in court that he saw a silhouette
of Amanda leaving the house right after the murder. And
I just love this because it's just the perfect defense,
and it didn't work in the end, but it was
a good call to kind of go with this because

(01:04:16):
everyone was totally convinced that Amanda was some kind of crazed,
you know, psychopath. And so for Rudy to be like, look,
I was just in the bathroom taking a poop and
when I came out, then this monster Amanda was there.
You know. It was a good try, but it didn't work.
And Rudy from Ivory Coast was found guilty and he

(01:04:37):
gets sixteen years in prison for his quote unquote part
in the murder. The part of this that's just so
interesting is that Rudy received very little press coverage. There
was no talk about Rudy's nymphomania, or how many sex
partners Rudy had, or what kind of deviant satanic thing

(01:05:00):
he was involved in. I mean, Rudy was convicted. He
was clearly there. He admitted he was there. He never
said he wasn't there. I mean even in court he said, yes,
I was there. I saw this whole thing happen. His
DNA was everywhere. And yet nothing in the media about
his sex life, nothing in the media about him being

(01:05:20):
some sort of satanic person, nothing about his character, just nothing,
you know, So I just want to point that out. Okay, So,
now Rafael and Amanda go to trial, and we're now
at one and a half years after the murder, and
by the way, that's one and a half years of
Raphael and Amanda being in prison. And on the news

(01:05:41):
they're calling it the trial of the decade in Italy,
similar to the oj trial, right, and it's the trial
of Foxy Noxie and they're calling it a drug fueled
sex game gone wrong, over and over and over again,
a drug fueled sex game gone wrong, or dead girl

(01:06:02):
feared to be Knox's sex toy. So they're saying, like
Meredith was Foxy Knoxy's sex toy, and just you know,
it's again when you look at the evidence, it's like
where you get coming up with this shit? Another headline
lucifer like satanic, demonic, diabolical, a witch of deception. It's

(01:06:24):
just all these It just again humans are idiots, swear
to God. Okay. Then the prosecution presents their story and
the prosecutor talks in the documentary about what he thinks happens,
what do he think has happened. He thinks that Raphael
and Amanda and Rudy are using drugs and drinking and

(01:06:45):
just being bad people at their house and at Amanda's house,
and then Meredith, the good girl the good girl from England.
She comes home and she looks at Amanda hanging out
with this black guy from the Avery Coat, hanging out
with this Italian guy, and they're using all these drugs
and they're doing sex things. And then Meredith comes home,

(01:07:07):
this good little girl, and she says, Amanda, you're a
you know, you're being a bad girl. So this is
the whole narrative here, is that Meredith somehow was being
a good person and was saying to Amanda, look, you
shouldn't be a Satanic sex graced person. And then Amanda

(01:07:31):
cannot tolerate that kind of criticism. So Amanda because so
this point, the narrative is that Amanda is some sort
of powerful Satanic ringleader who can put men under her spell.
And so she has Raphael the Italian boy and Rudy
the Ivory Coast boy. She has these two boys under

(01:07:54):
her spell. And because Meredith the English prissy girl, has
insulted a man to then Amanda tells Rudy and Raphael
to punish Meredith for this by raping her. This is
this is what the prosecutor thought happened. This is not
some speculation by Nick the journalist. This is this is

(01:08:18):
the prosecutor of the Italian respected prosecutor. So Amanda tells
Rudy and Raphael, you punish Meredith for insulting me and
calling me a sex crazy person, and I want you
to rape Meredith. And so Rudy and Raphael proceed to
rape Meredith because they're under her spell, they'll do whatever
they want. And they they cut, you know, they torture her.

(01:08:41):
And then Amanda gets a knife and kills her, kills
Meredith in cold blood. So this is this is the story.
This is this is the story. And the verdict when
the verdict was about to be announced, just like in
the OJ trial back home in the States, there's tons

(01:09:05):
of people on the streets. Everyone's on the edge of
their seat, you know, everyone's listening to the radio, watching
the TV, or the verdict's coming out. The verdicts coming out,
and for the most part, it seems like, you know,
different from the OJ trial, where in America you have
like all the black people hoping that OJ is acquitted
and all the white people hoping that OJ is you know,

(01:09:25):
found guilty. In Italy, it seems like everyone wanted Amanda
to be found guilty, and she's found guilty. Raphael and
Amanda found guilty of the murder, and they're sentenced to
twenty six years for Amanda and twenty five years for
Rafael because you know, Rafael was just the sex puppet
for Amanda. So he gets one last year, so a

(01:09:49):
year and a half. You know, fast forward another year
or so, so this is three years after the murder
and they go to an appeal. They start the appeal
process again. Three years of being in prison by this point,
they reevaluate the DNA evidence on the knife and on
the bra clasp, and long story short, essentially, they when

(01:10:10):
experts from the big city come in and start looking
at the practices that the police were using to investigate into.
You know, they found that there were all sorts of
contaminations to the DNA, the bra clasp could have been touched.
They even have a video of it being touched, you know,

(01:10:31):
And so they completely destroy all the DNA evidence. And
it wasn't like the ojhow where it's just like kind
of dubious arguments. The arguments against the DNA was actually
pretty compelling, and so so they destroy the DNA evidence
and again more media circus starts to you know, starts

(01:10:52):
to happen. Now. Now, the narrative in the States is
that Italy botched the investigation and they there's this really
awesome clip of the documentary of someone interviewing Trump, Donald Trump,
and Trump is saying that the president should get involved.
So the president at this point is Barack Obama, and

(01:11:14):
so Trump is saying, you know, the president should get
involved and we should we should boycott Italy now because
of this terrible, uh, this terrible thing that they are doing.
So it's just funny that, you know, given today's landscape,
it's like you have Trump saying that anyway. All right,

(01:11:35):
So the decision comes down from the appeals court four
years after the murder. Now, so the appeal took about
a year, and again the Italians are waiting outside and saying,
we hope that the appeals court court upholds the guilty conviction.
But Raphael and Amanda are acquitted, and the Italians are angry,
and there's mobs of people saying that we're going to

(01:11:58):
take this to the next level and we're going to
make sure that Amanda is convicted. And it just seems
so strange that they're taking it all so personally, honestly,
it's it's interesting when these things happen, how people who
are totally uninvolved in the murder. You know, they're not
a family member, they they're just taking this so personally,

(01:12:19):
and I just find that fascinating. It reminds me of
the Chamberlain case in Australia in the early eighties. You know,
dingo ate my baby or dingo killed my baby all that,
you know that joke, it's from an actual case in
which a dingo literally ate a baby in Australia. The

(01:12:44):
mother her name was is Linda, Linda Chamberlain in this
case with a man in Ox just reminds me a
lot of that in the way that all of Australia
was convinced that Lindy Chamberlain was guilty because her face
didn't look right, she didn't show enough grief and I
don't know, okay, And Meredith's family incidentally, was also angry

(01:13:07):
because Meredith's family was convinced that Amanda and Rafael done
it as well. Okay, so Amanda and Rafael released. Amanda
returns to Seattle. I seem to remember news stories local
news like Amanda Knox returns to Seattle after her four
years of being in prison in Italy for being wrongly
accused of murdering this innocent, you know girl from England.

(01:13:30):
And they show footage of the documentary of the paparazzi
following Amanda around in Seattle, which just looks really gross too.
It's like they're essentially trying to provoke her into giving
good footage. She's just keeping her head down. She's like,
please don't bother me, Please leave me alone, and they're like,
welcome back, Welcome back, Amanda, Welcome back to Seattle, Amanda.

(01:13:51):
How do you like How do you like Seattle, Amanda?
Welcome back? You know that sort of paparazzi bullshit talk.
It just if I was ever famous enough to, you know,
have paparazzi follow me around, I guarantee you I'd be
one of those people that would punch the fucking lights
out of these people. It's like, shut the fuck up.
I know that's the wrong thing to do. You're not

(01:14:12):
supposed to pump the you're not supposed to punch the paparazzi.
That's exactly what they want, but my god, it's it is.
It is very annoying. Okay, So okay, then there's another
court decision. This is six years after the murder. But
now Amanda and Raphael are, you know, living their lives.

(01:14:33):
And there's another court in Italy that that reverses the
reversal and finds them guilty again, and they focused on
circumstantial evidence, including Amanda's behavior, you know. So then there's
a fourth trial. Now this is the Supreme Court, which

(01:14:53):
is the highest court. Right, this is eight years after
the murder, and they're acquitted. So they were found guilty,
then they were acquitted, then they were found guilty, then
they were acquitted again. The Supreme Court, in their ruling
of upholding the appeals acquittal, found quote unquote stunning flaws

(01:15:15):
in the investigation. The court also said that the media
circus caused the police to frantically search for a murder.
The court also said that there was no evidence, no
biological evidence, that linked Amanda and Raphael to the murder.
The court also said that the evidence clearly points to

(01:15:35):
Rudy as the sole criminal involved in this situation. So
the Supreme Court in Italy really came through it seems
if you believe that a man in Raphael didn't do it, Okay,
So where are they now? Well, the prosecutor, the the
you know, the one who. So there's two villains of

(01:15:57):
the story, or really three villains. I guess you have
Rudy them he's a villain. You have the prosecutor, and
you have the journalist Nick Pisa. So the prosecutor whereas
he now, well he's been promoted. He is, you know,
moving on up the ladder. Rudy is still in prison,
but he's soon to start getting released for a good time.

(01:16:19):
Raphael is running a computer company in Italy, and he's
also a crime expert on Italian TV, which I find
it'd be funny occasionally he's interviewed as a crime expert.
Where is Amanda Well? In the documentary, they show her
living in the small house in the woods. They say
it's Seattle, but it doesn't look like Seattle to me.
It looks like outside of Seattle. They show her drinking wine,

(01:16:43):
and I think she had at least three cats living
in her house, which you know I enjoy as a
cat lover. They said that she started working as an
occasional freelance writer for the West Seattle Hair, which sounds
like a you know, awesome sort of newspaper. But I've

(01:17:05):
never read it. I think it's a I think it's
just one of those sort of neighborhood newspapers that you get,
you know what I mean, those like little thin newspapers
you get. I think the Wescl Herald. Maybe I'm wrong,
but anyway, she was occasionally a freelance writer for the
westcl Herald. She finished her degree at the University of Washington.
She wrote a book, a best selling book about her experience,

(01:17:28):
which was released in twenty fifteen, and Amanda advocates for
the Innocence Project, which advocates for people who have been
wrong wrongfully imprisoned. And she has been recently engaged to
this dude in New York City, dude named Colin Sutherland,
who was a friend she has known since middle school.

(01:17:51):
Back in Seattle, Amanda's family reportedly went into a huge
amount of debt from paying all the legal fees, and
the Amanda's family apparently is like bankrupt or something because
they owe so much money. And the proceeds from Amanda's

(01:18:14):
book that she's sold a lot of copies of are
going toward a lot of those legal fees. So it
doesn't seem like Amanda made any money from the book.
It's mainly just paying off the debt from this whole
you know process, which is just another sort of tragedy
if you believe that Amanda was innocent. I mean, just
think about the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they

(01:18:35):
had to, you know, go into debt to sustain an
eight year legal battle. It's just crazy. Okay. So here's
how I see it. Here's here's my take on what happened.
You have this. You have this very naive girl from Seattle,

(01:18:58):
and she's in a foreign country and she just happens
to be roommates with a woman who was brutally murdered
by this dude from the Ivory Coast. And Amanda she's
like swept up in the media and police frenzy, and

(01:19:18):
she gets convicted and spends three years in prison, and
the entire country of Italy and much of the world
still thinks that she's a demented satanic sex psychopath and
her life is forever altered just because she just happened
to be the roommate of this person who was brutally murdered.

(01:19:40):
But I think most Americans incidentally think she's innocent. I
think most Seatollites actually think she's innocent, But just imagine
knowing that a good number of people, particularly in Italy
around the world, think that you're this demented, satanic sex
murderer and that you got a away with it. You

(01:20:01):
know the way that Oj. If you've seen the Oja documentary,
you know Oj, after being acquitted, his life didn't return
to normal. There was a good amount of people who
were convinced he was a terrible murderer and would say
that to his face. It's going to take a toll,
and it just makes you wonder what would have happened

(01:20:24):
if she didn't confess. What would have happened if she
didn't go to Raphael's house tonight. I mean, what would
have happened if she stayed home? Would she be murdered too?
What would have happened if she had just called the
police as soon as she saw blood on the sink,
Maybe the police wouldn't have targeted her as a suspect.
What if she never came home that day and someone

(01:20:46):
else found the body, and then that other person would
have been the suspect. It's just interesting. I'm guessing she
asks herself these questions, or have asked us, Okay, so
I want to get to the themes. I want to
do just some sort of armchair you know, sociology here.
So we look at the media again. Just how ugly

(01:21:09):
the media was. It's just really gross the way that
the writers spun a story out of nothing to get
people to pay attention. And in the documentary, it's just
fascinating the way this nick piece of guy's he said that,
he's like, look, you know, I'm not to blame for
this whole thing, because, you know, at the very end,
it's like, oh, it looks like Amanda was innocent the

(01:21:30):
whole time, and even though I was writing all these
terrible stories about her, Oh, it sounds like she's innocent.
And he's like, but you know, I'm not to blame
for the fact that Amanda was convicted of murder. Here,
and he says, I think now, looking back, some of
the information that came out was just crazy. It was
just completely made up. But hey, what are we supposed

(01:21:53):
to do. We are journalists and we are reporting what
we are being told. It's not as if I can say,
hold on a minute, I just want to double check
that and then let my rival get in there before me,
and hey, I've lost the scoop unquote. So he's really
being blasted about this on the internet right now because

(01:22:13):
he's basically saying, you should never double check a story
that you're getting, should just print every single thing you
hear as if it's truth, you know, all because you're
trying to beat the next journalist to the punch. And
a lot of journalist students, journalist majors are going to

(01:22:36):
be reading this guy's account and mulling over it. And
I really hope that people learn from this guy's mistakes.
At least I hope they're mistakes. I hope that journalists
see this as mistakes. I mean, journalism is supposed to
be trustworthy on some level. That is something I always

(01:22:58):
grew up with. Anyway, You're supposed to at least try
to discover the truth. You're not supposed to try to
get clicks on the internet, you know anyway. Okay, So
one theme is just media. This story just has a
huge theme of media and just a lot of revealing

(01:23:20):
of the way the media and society operates regarding that.
Another theme is sex and murder. You know, we love
stories about sex and violence. There was actually points when
they were talking about the speculation of the way Amanda
had this sex orgy and stuff. It reminded me of
Twin Peaks. I'm a huge fan of Twin Peaks, but
if you've watched Twin Peaks and the movies that followed,

(01:23:43):
it reminded me of Laura Palmer. The Amanda Knox character
reminded me a lot of the Laura Palmer character. Anyway,
another theme here is and I just got goosebumps thinking
about Twin Peaks. That god, that show used to freak
me out. Okay, another theme here is moralism against women
having sex. She was labeled this sex crazed American nymphomaniac

(01:24:10):
org person and she only had seven partners. You know,
people just love to But even if she had fifty partners,
what's the fucking difference. People can have sex with who
they want to have sex with. Stop the fucking moralizing.
And again, no one was speculating about Raphael's past partners.
No one was speculating speculating about Rudy's the actual murderers

(01:24:34):
passed sex life. I mean, he's the one who raped
Meredith and killed her. So all this attention on Meredith's
sex life and how deprave she is and then telling
her she has HIV. It's it's just terrible. You know,
people they like to project and displace a lot of

(01:24:56):
their own conflicts regarding sex onto other people, and I
think Amanda became this perfect screen upon which to project.
Another theme here is just sexual fetishism, particularly the prosecutor
his wild speculations and the wild speculations written in the media,

(01:25:17):
they read like some sort of sick Penthouse Forum story.
The detail that they went into of telling the story
about how she was this sexy witch that would put
sex spells on these boys, and how she had this
sex ritual killing, and it's just it's bizarre given that

(01:25:40):
there was no evidence of that. I mean, it's just
so strange to see people with just the tiniest little
bit of circumstantial evidence expand that into this elaborate story
about sex and murder and ritual and satan. It just

(01:26:01):
like where is your head? Do you know? You just
have to wonder, like what's going on in your mind
at night? You know? Okay. The other theme here is
our love of the charming psychopath. We love stories of
the charming psychopathic killer, you know, the Ted Bundyes of
the world. How can such an innocent looking girl do

(01:26:25):
such a thing? You know, it entices people. Sexism is
actually pretty major theme that I want to go into
for a second. You know, as I've been saying, why
was Amanda targeted in the media in particular, and Raphael
and Rudy seem to be not targeted. I mean, Rudy

(01:26:47):
again was clearly the one who committed the crimes and
raped Meredith. Why wasn't Rudy's sexuality targeted? Well, because Rudy
is a man and Amanda is a woman. And who
controls the media and who controls the police system? Men do?
And you know, there's this, there's a there's a certain

(01:27:09):
brand of sexism and a certain brand of religion frankly,
that paints women as being evil. You know, Eve was
the one who if it wasn't for Eve and her
weak personality, we would all still be living. Eden is
the idea. I'm not making fun of Christians. I've heard

(01:27:33):
people say that before. I've heard people say that women,
according to the Bible, are the weaker sex and the
story about Him and Eve actually demonstrate that. And so
there's a certain amount of sexism that I can detect
as a theme throughout this entire story that is just
again really gross. Another thing that I've been talking about

(01:27:56):
is grief, this lack of visible grief or the visible
grief showing guilt, or the lack of grief showing guilt
again just like the Lindy Chamberlain case. Another theme here
that I haven't talked about yet is the ugly American theme.
It's hard for me to know, and I'm guessing there

(01:28:17):
are pieces in the media about this, but I was
just wondering, you know how many Italians when they first
heard this story, was like, oh, yeah, of course this
American did it, because Americans are terrible people. And me,
as an American, I could say that we can be
very terrible people sometimes as tourists. You know, we think

(01:28:41):
we're better than other people. We treat everything like it's
our own playground. I mean, I'm generalizing. Of course, most
Americans are nice, but many Americans are not. You know,
tourists can just be they just don't know the rules.
You know, in my neck of the woods, you'll see
people from being acting weird, you know, being pushy or something,

(01:29:04):
and so people will start saying, oh, Chinese people are pushy,
and rude, and it's just like, no, you know, it's
just when you're a tourist, you might not understand the rules,
and the rules might be different back, you know. So anyway,
it just makes me wonder, like how many Italians were
influenced to think Amanda was guilty by a sort of

(01:29:31):
you know, prejudice against Americans. I don't know. Also, at
the time two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight,
Bush was president, George W. Was president, and I don't
know if people remember this, but people hated that guy.
Particularly other countries like Italy, they hated that guy. They

(01:29:53):
you know, you would go to an you would go
to another country in you know, two thousand and seven
and and one of the first things that people would
bring up is like, oh, George Bush as your president? Yeah,
what a piece of work? Did you vote for him?
Because my god, that guy is just you know, this
isn't the height of all the terrible wars in the
Middle East that the America was involved in, and you

(01:30:14):
just saw the bad press around that. And I remember,
you know, if you say to your American instantly it
was like, oh, George Bush. You know. Anyway, So it
just makes you wonder like if that was at a factor.
I don't know, maybe I'm stretching. And the last theme
that I was seeing in the media was American elitism

(01:30:35):
against Italy. You know, many Americans think the rest of
the world is fucked. You know, when this case came
out and the DNA started being overturned, a lot of
Americans were like, oh my god, Italy and their terrible
judicial system and they're terrible prosecutors and their terrible legal system.
They're so backward over there. But you know, there are

(01:30:56):
investigations in the United States that are just as bad,
if not worse than this case. So you know, just
see making a murder in these kinds of documentaries. It's
not just an Italy thing, Okay. So who can we blame? Well,
I think we can blame for the injustice that happened,

(01:31:17):
because again, if you believe that Amanda and Raphael are innocent,
which I'm ninety nine point nine percent sure that they were,
who who do we blame for this injustice? Well, I
think you can blame the media. I think you can
blame the way that the media was ugly and just
hungry for you know, salacious stories and just making up

(01:31:41):
terrible things and spinning lies out of nothing and printing
things before they're corroborated. And that influence is the legal system.
I mean, if you're a jury, or you're a judge,
or you're a prosecutor, you're a cop, or you know,
you get influenced. You can't not be influenced by that.
And so I think the media can be blamed. Also,

(01:32:03):
I think the police can be blamed. The prosecutors. They
clearly fuck this up. I mean when you see this documentary,
you're just like, my god, the shoddy police work. And
it's always amazing to me whenever I see these investigations happen.
I always just see tons of cops just trouncing around
the crime scene, and I'm just thinking, is that the

(01:32:25):
way you're supposed to do it? Because to me, it
would seem and I am far removed from this profession,
but I would think that as soon as you have
a crime scene, you rope it off and you don't
let a single person in there except for maybe one person,
and then that one person goes in there and does
a methodical search for items to test for DNA. Because

(01:32:50):
as soon as you start trouncing people around, because the
whole thing about the DNA was like, oh, they have
Raphael's DNA on the brass strap. Well, the his DNA
was likely on the doorknob because remember the door was locked,
and so Rafael probably touched the doorknob to try to
open it earlier that day. And so when the investigator

(01:33:14):
with gloves on his hands opens the door, and he
gets Raphael's DNA on his hand on his rubber glove,
and then he walks into the room and then he
grabs the brass strap and then he places Rafael's DNA
on the brass strap. So just things like that, It's
just like, if I can think of that, then why

(01:33:37):
can't the professionals think of that? I don't know. And
so you can blame the media. I think you can
blame the police obviously, but you know, you can also
blame the people. We should all know better than to
pressure the police to come up with a quick conviction.
We should actually just let the police do their job.
The other thing is is we really have to stop

(01:34:00):
just believing everything that the media gives to us. We
really have to question these salacious stories and we should
stop clicking on bullshit. We should fight back against this
sort of thing. The only reason why this shitty, ugly
journalism exists is because it makes these people money. And
the only reason why it makes the money is because

(01:34:20):
we read it and we click on it, and you know,
we're we're the dumbasses in this, We're the ones driving
all the stupidity. Famous patron Linden just emailed me this
article today and he was like, oh boy, here's here's
a doozy. And it was in the Daily Mail and
they published this story about how this study, so you know,

(01:34:43):
this this this article that was talking about this research
study that proved that couples who have more equality in
the chores are more likely to divorce. Well, as a
marital therapist, that sounded extreme, mamely suspicious to me. So
I started to look into the study and I found

(01:35:04):
that that was a completely false way of presenting the
findings and even the study had a lot of problems
with it. And there's a lot more research saying that
when there's equality and relationships, they last longer, or they're
at the very least they're they're more satisfactory. So anyway, okay,

(01:35:32):
and also just to stay on this equality thing a
little bit, like the writer of the article. They're like, basically,
it seems as though the author is saying, look, equality
is bad. You know, we we shouldn't have it's you know,
it's this, we should go back to our traditional values. Well,
if equality is the problem. It's funny how the article

(01:35:54):
never talks about, well, maybe men should do all the chores. Then,
you know, that's not the conclusion. It's like, well we
should go back to the way it was before, when
women did all the chores. It's just interesting how it's
never like, oh, we should Well, if equality is the problem,
then maybe men should do all the chores and women shouldn't. Anyway,
So when I think about all the evidence, and again

(01:36:17):
this is all from the internet, so god knows. But
here's my story. Here's here's my version of what I
think happened the day of the night of the crime.
I think he brought Rudy. I think he probably broke
into the house intending to burglar the house, and he
didn't know Meredith was there, and he kind of freaks
out and he subdues her, and then he freaks out

(01:36:38):
and he rapes her, which is kind of a weird thing.
But then he panics thinking, oh boy, she knows who
I am, and so he kills her. And then, because
he's never murdered anyone before and he didn't plan it,
and he because he didn't go over there thing I'm
going to murder anyone, he has no idea how to
cover his tracks, and so he leaves his DNA everywhere

(01:37:00):
and he starts to panic even more, and he goes
to the bathroom to try to clean himself, and he,
you know, drops the blood everywhere, and then he suddenly
has this poop attack, and he actually talks about this,
how he had a stomach ache from eating some kebab
earlier that day and so he had a poop attack
and so so even though he had already raped and

(01:37:21):
murdered this poor woman, he has his poop attack, which
you know can happen under stress too. You can have
poop attacks under stress. So he goes to the bathroom
and because he's panicking, he forgets the flush and then
he flees the country. Soon after that, he goes to Germany.
But he feels scared and he feels really guilty for

(01:37:42):
what had happened. So he has to tell someone and
so in this informant, this friend of his calls him
on Skype. He he tells him basically the entire story
except for the fact that you know, he killed Meredith.
So when you just look at you know, Okham's razor
perspective here, his DNA was everywhere, his fingerprints were everywhere.

(01:38:04):
He admitted he was there that night, and his first
version of the story he said, no one else was
there except for this mysterious other man, which is, you know,
a very convenient thing. And you know, you can imagine
if you had killed someone and you knew that there
was a ton of evidence implicating you that a very

(01:38:28):
convenient story is, Oh, I yes, I had sex with her,
blah blah blah. I stepped out of the room for
five seconds and boom, someone at that moment broke into
the house, murdered her and ran away. And when I
came out, it had already happened. You know, it's a
very lame story to itself. So Okham's raiser, Rudy, did

(01:38:48):
it by himself. And this in a typical way that
this sort of thing happens. So another possibility that I
think perhaps happened, the sort of close second, is that
he just got drunk and raped her and then he
killed her in a panic, and then he tried to
stage a burglary, and then he took a poop and

(01:39:08):
then he ran in random. The whole poop thing is
just this bizarre kind of element. But anyway, so but
when the police arrived the next day, they, you know,
feeling all the pressure to immediately find someone to implicate.

(01:39:29):
They target the only suspects that they have available to
them at the time. They only have two suspects. They
have Amanda and Rafael. They have no one else that
are possible. They don't know about Rudy yet and so
they're just so they get him into the the police
headquarters and they start interrogating them in their aggressive way
that they know how to get people to confess. And

(01:39:52):
Amanda and Raphael are kind of naive, weak willed people,
and they easily roll over, but not easily, but you know,
after fourteen hours of interrogation, they start telling stories and
they confess. Then they because of shoddy police work involving
DNA collection, they find actual DNA to back up these confessions.

(01:40:16):
So they announced that the public, Look, we have the killers.
We've done our job. We're awesome police officers. Look at
us and everyone congratulates them and the public feels safe again.
But then when Rudy shows up and his evidence showed up,
the police are already committed to convicting Amanda and Raphael.
They have their confessions, they've come out publicly about this,

(01:40:40):
they have the DNA evidence. But then they have this
Rudy evidence coming up, and Rudy is saying Amanda and
Rafael weren't even there, and so so now the police
are like, oh, maybe it's not Amanda and Raphael, maybe
it's this Rudy guy. Because it clearly looks like it's
this Rudy guy. So instead of saying, Okay, we're gonna

(01:41:01):
scrap the Raphael Amanda hypothesis, let's go with this Rudy
hypothesis because it clearly sounds like this is the better hypothesis.
Instead of just scrapping your previous you know, statements, you
because they don't want to look foolish, they just sort

(01:41:21):
of incorporate Rudy into the story, you know, they just
add a third person into this satanic sex sorgy. Even
though Amanda didn't even really know who Rudy was, she
had seen him a couple of times in the neighborhood,
but she even know who he was. And then they said, well,
how do we how do we get three people who

(01:41:42):
don't really know each other that well, you know, how
do we get this couple, this couple that just fell
in love involved with this random guy from Ivory Coast?
You know, well, how do we get the three of
these people involved in this smurder? I mean, just to
make any sense, Well, how about we make up a
story about it are a satanic sex sorgy thing to

(01:42:02):
explain why all these people would do this sort of thing.
So that's that's how That's what I think happened. Okay,
so let's go into the false confessions, the research on
false confessions. To most people and to me before I
learned about this sort of stuff years ago, it's bizarre

(01:42:25):
to think about that someone would admit to committing a
murder when they hadn't done it. You know, if if
someone accused you of murdering of committing a murder you
hadn't committed, you would imagine that you would just keep
telling the truth. You would just say no, I didn't
do it, and no matter how many times you ask me,
and no matter how many different ways you ask me,

(01:42:48):
and no matter how loud do you yell at me,
I'm still going to tell you the truth, which is
I didn't kill that person. I don't know what I
don't know what to tell you. So it's if unless
you've been in that position, or unless you know about
the research, it's hard to imagine why someone would falsely
admit to killing someone they hadn't, especially when when you

(01:43:10):
confess it's so horrible for you. It just means so
many bad things are going to happen to you. It's like,
why would you confess? It just seems so stupid, right, Okay, Well,
let me talk about the history a little bit of
the false confession research. Well, we have to go back
to nineteen oh eight when Harvard's psychology professor Munsterberg Professor

(01:43:34):
Munsterberg from Harvard Havid. In nineteen oh eight he wrote
in his book on the Witness stand about untrue confessions.
So we have to go back over one hundred years
to find perhaps the first example of discussion around confessions
not being true, which I found pretty surprising given that

(01:43:59):
you confessions have been happening for eons and that false confessions,
you know, wasn't really a thing, but it makes a
lot sense because the powers that be are usually the
government and the lego system, and you know, what benefit
do they get from talking about some of the confessions
being false. You know, they never benefit from that. So

(01:44:21):
systems of oppression have been probably always on the side
of saying no confession is always truthful. Don't even think
that any confession would be false. So then even though
Munsterberg starts writing about these false confessions in nineteen o eight,

(01:44:41):
throughout the twentieth century there's not a lot of attention.
Then in the nineteen sixties there start to be a
little bit more attention in psychology on false confessions. You know,
nineteen sixties are when we start questioning authority, and also
psychology starts to kind of blossom during this time. And
so for example, Zimbardo, the famous Zimbardo of the nineteen
seventy one Stanford prison Experimentzimbardo his psychology researcher from Stanford.

(01:45:07):
In nineteen sixty seven, he published a social psychological analysis
of the way police interrogate people and talked about false
confessions in the first issue of Psychology Today. So it
is an interesting you know, the magazine the popular magazine
Psychology Today. In ninety sixty Sevensimbardo wrote about false confessions.

(01:45:30):
All right, in the eighties, a little bit more attention,
and then up till today, even more attention. Okay, Now,
there are three types of false confessions in the literature.
There's what they call voluntary, and then there's coerce compliant,
and then there's coerced internalized. So three types of false confessions.

(01:45:53):
The first one is voluntary. This is when the false
confession is given voluntarily without coercion. There's no pressure. For example,
during the kidnapping of the Charle Limberg's baby in nineteen
thirty two, because the case was so famous and they're like,
who kidnapped this famous Lindbergh baby? Who kidnapped? Well, apparently

(01:46:17):
two hundred people voluntarily confessed to this crime because they
wanted to be famous. So these are what we call
voluntary false confessions. People voluntarily confessing to crimes they didn't
commit because they want to be famous. Okay, So that's
the first one. That's a silly one. Then you have

(01:46:39):
coerced compliant false confessions. And these are what Amanda and
Raphael what happened to them is you're essentially forced or
coerced and manipulated into complying with the wishes of the police.
The police the investigators are saying, look, all you have

(01:46:59):
to do is confess, and I'll let and I'll give
you this cookie, or I'll let you go to the
bathroom or whatever. And then eventually the person gives in
and like, okay, fine, yes I did it, even though
they didn't do it. Then the third type is coerced internalized,
and this is when you coerce someone into confessing, but
it actually gets under their person's skin so much so

(01:47:23):
that the person actually starts believing, maybe I did do it.
The police seem totally convinced I did it, so maybe
my memory is wrong. You know, you break someone's ego
down far enough, and it doesn't take much to do that,
people will start believing their own lives even if they
even if it doesn't serve them. Okay, So what does
the research show us? What does it tell us? Well,

(01:47:45):
there is actually substantial empirical evidence that false confessions happen
all the time, not maybe most of the time, but
that false confessions are happening in the legal system all
the time. And it's been found that when later DNA
evidence exonerates falsely convicted people, you know how, So someone

(01:48:07):
will be convicted of a crime, they'll go to prison,
and then later on they're like, hey, we have this
new thing called DNA evidence that we can actually test
to see if these people actually did it. And when
they use the DNA evidence, similar to the making a
murderer case, and they test the DNA, they're like, oh,
it actually wasn't that person. So we convicted the wrong

(01:48:28):
person and then that person is exonerated. Well, in thirty
percent of those cases that have happened so far, there
were false confessions so involved that we're contributing factors to
the person being falsely convicted. So false confessions are frequent.

(01:48:48):
They're not a small anomaly in the criminal system. And
so part of what the problem here is the way
that police are trained in the way that they think.
And an influence on this can be found in a

(01:49:10):
book that police will often use to train their interrogators,
reportedly called Criminal Interrogations and Confessions. It was originally published
in nineteen sixty two. It's a manual on how to
interrogate people. It's in its fifth edition in twenty thirteen.
Police in this book are trained to use a highly

(01:49:33):
confrontational accusational process. You know, we all know that we've
seen it in the movies. And by the way, research
is found that this form of interrogation is more likely
to produce defensive behavior in the suspect, which has been
shown by research to make investigators more convinced of their guilt,

(01:49:55):
which makes the person, which makes the police more aggressive,
and so on. So let me explain this because it's
kind of confusing. So, you know, you train investigators to
be aggressive. Okay, so the police go into the interogation
room and they're very aggressive. Well, research shows that where
you're aggressive with an innocent suspect, the innocent suspect starts

(01:50:17):
to get defensive and starts to be like, fuck you,
why are you being such a dick? I didn't do anything. Well,
when the suspect is defensive in that way, research shows
that it makes the investigator even more convinced that the
person is guilty, even though they're only defending themselves because
they're not guilty, And so that causes the investigator to

(01:50:40):
get even more aggressive, which causes the suspect who's innocent,
to be even more defensive and it just goes run
and run around, and police don't necessarily know this. The
book Criminal Interrogations and Confessions. The book claims if you
use the technique that's in this book, you will uncover

(01:51:02):
the truth and detect lies with a very high level
of accuracy. And it claims that there are certain behaviors
that liars will use, you know, when someone's lying. In
this book, it says that people will avoid your gaze,
and they'll fidget a lot, and they'll change their posture

(01:51:24):
a lot. But research has totally debunked these things. And
if this were actually true, I'm lying all the time
because I am fidgeting all the time. I'm when I'm
recording the podcast, I probably shift in my seat, no joke,
thousands of times. Right now, I'm fiddling with my toes.

(01:51:46):
I'm sitting in a kind of yoga position in my
chair and I'm playing with my toes for no reason.
And you know, ten seconds from now, I'll be playing
with my hair or something. I'm a fidgety person, So
I'm always lying according to this book. Apparently okay now,

(01:52:07):
But so the research that this book is based on
is from a single flawed study in nineteen ninety four.
So a lot of the things that this book is
based on is dubious science. So this this book that
interrogators use as a guide for not only their techniques,

(01:52:29):
but for understanding the suspects behavior and lies, it's all
a bunch of crap. Plus, research shows that people are
barely better than guessing when trying to detect lies, and
experts are barely better than the average person, if at
all better. So in other words, there's you know, when

(01:52:53):
they've looked into this quite a bit, can people detect lies?
Is it possible for police to detect one's someone's lying?
You know, this is a very important thing, and there's
a lot of bullshit pseudoscience out there saying that you
can totally tell when someone's lying, you know, if they're
looking up to the right, or they're looking up to
the left, or they're fidgeting or you know, all this

(01:53:13):
all this crap. Well, when they actually empirically look at
this and they set it up, people are actually very
terrible at detecting wise, they're something like instead, you know,
guessing would be fifty percent. You know, it's like, oh,
I don't know, maybe he's lying, maybe he's not lying.
Fifty percent. Well people are have a so if you're

(01:53:34):
just guessing, you'd have an accuracy rating of fifty percent.
Well people when they study have an accuracy rating of
fifty four percent, So they're barely better than guessing, meaning
that they're wrong, you know, forty six percent of the time.
Well experts people that are you know, expert h experts

(01:53:56):
at being able to tell the difference between lying and
not lying. It shows that they're barely better than the
fifty four percent, like fifty six percent or and some
research says they're no better than the average person. So
this notion that you could read a book or you
could take a training as a police officer and be

(01:54:17):
able to tell when someone's lying and when someone's not
lying is pretty dubious. So you know there's that now.
Would I'll say, as someone who talks with a lot
of people, and sometimes people lie to me, teenagers particularly,
I don't teat teenagers currently, but when I have in
the past, you know, I had a wide variety of

(01:54:39):
different kind of clients. Most of my teenage clients, you know,
wouldn't lie to me, but but some would for one
reason or another, and I got, you know, I felt
kind of good at being able to detect lies. So
it's not as though you can't into it lies. But
I can tell you from experience, I've been lied to

(01:54:59):
my face without ever knowing I was being lied to,
you know, like years later I discover, oh, they were
lying to me the entire time, and I was totally
believing it. And I'm not a naive person. I tend
to be kind of suspicious of teenagers in particular in terms,
you know, when they have reasons to lie to me. Incidentally,

(01:55:19):
just as a side note, I would frequently tell my
teenage client to be Look. I'd say, look, I'm not
your parent, I'm not your teacher, I'm not a cop,
and everything you tell me is confidential, so you don't
have to lie to me. You could tell me you
smoked pot all day to day and I can't tell anyone.
And I wouldn't want to tell anyone, because what's it
to me if you smoked pot all day? And yet
teenagers will still lie to me. It's just hard for

(01:55:41):
teenagers to believe that I wouldn't tell someone. And also
it's just sometimes easier for them to lie than to
have to deal with what's really happening. But anyway, okay,
so let's look into more research here. Research shows that
if the police provide fake evidence of guilt, is much
more likely to provide a false confession. In other words,

(01:56:05):
as the police are interrogating the suspect, and the suspect
is innocent and the police say, hey, you know Raphael
in the room next door, he says you did it. Well,
when you do this, it makes it It is a

(01:56:25):
significant factor in motivating this innocent person to provide a
false confession. You know, my guess is is they're thinking, well, geez,
I'm screwed now. I mean, this person just told them
that I did it. Maybe I should just admit it,
you know, so that they'll go easier on me or something. Okay,

(01:56:46):
And that's you know what they did to a man
in Raphael. They I think they provided the sort of
false evidence to try to motivate false confessions from the
two of them. Research also shows that when investigators minimize
the crime, the person is more likely to provide a
false confession. You know, like, hey, you know, she probably

(01:57:07):
deserved to die, right, you know, you were just reacting
like anyone else would have. It's not a big deal.
You know, come on, you can tell us that you
did it. That's called minimization, and that works on people
and it motivates false confessions. So even though you didn't
do it, it motivates false confessions. But here's the most

(01:57:29):
important piece of research that I really want to get across.
If there's one thing you remember about false confessions, it's
this research. Research shows that not everyone is vulnerable to
false confessions. That there's a certain kind of personality profile
of a person that is vulnerable to providing a false confession.

(01:57:51):
For instance, research shows that teenagers are vulnerable, generally vulnerable
to fighting a false confession. Uh, you know, we could
we could imagine why. You know, they're not as mature,
they are perhaps mentally weaker, they are used to being

(01:58:14):
yelled at or something. I don't know. They're they're more
used to complying. Maybe I don't know. Also, adults with
intellectual disabilities are more likely to be vulnerable to false confessing.
You know that kid in making a murder documentary can't
remember his name, but all that kind of comes to mind.
So there are certain kinds of people who are vulnerable.

(01:58:38):
People who are compliant, who generally have a compliant personality,
someone who doesn't deal very well with stress, someone who
doesn't deal deal very well with authority yelling at them.
For for instance, for me, I've been interrogated by the

(01:58:59):
cops before, and I've talked about it before on the podcast,
and there's been more incidents for other random reasons. But
I have never given a false confession because I don't
think my personality is the sort of personality that's vulnerable
to false confessing. Now, if you pushed me for ten days,

(01:59:20):
I'm guessing I probably would become vulnerable. But in the
time that I've been interrogated, I didn't break under pressure
because I just I just sort of I kind of
saw through what they were doing too, as I, oh, well,
you're obviously trying to get me to confess, and I
see through your bullshit. You're trying to intimidate me. It's

(01:59:40):
not going to work. But you know, not everyone knows that.
Not everyone is obsessed with research on this sort of
thing and watches documentaries, and you know, some people they
don't know any better because they don't have a lawyer
and they're worried, and the police start saying things to
them like, look, if you don't confess, then things are

(02:00:02):
going to be really bad for you. We're going to
put you away for fifty years for this. But if
you confess and you know you and you make this
an easier process for us, maybe we can talk to
the judge and get this down to just ten years.
I mean, wouldn't you rather have ten years than fifty years? Well,
come on, just confess. Well, if you're terrified and broken down,

(02:00:24):
even though you haven't committed the crime, you might start
saying to yourself. So it's the difference. They've already got
me on this. You know, they apparently have all this,
all this hard evidence, even though they might not, but
they're just lying. They're going to get me for fifty years.
This is terrible. Maybe I should just admit to doing this.
I'll get ten years and it's the better option. This

(02:00:45):
is what cops do to people, and this is how
they prey on vulnerable minds. Okay, So that's that's something
that we really just have to say. And I think
it's this terrible sort of injustice to vulnerable people, people
who are vulnerable to false confessions. I just feel bad
for them, and they're timid, compliant people. And then they're

(02:01:08):
just being preyed upon by these aggressive police officers. Okay. Also,
research shows that jurors and judges are highly vulnerable to
false confessions. So when court proceedings will present false confessions,
even if there's some evidence that it is a false confession,

(02:01:28):
the juries and judges will are actually quite influenced by
false confessions into influencing their overall decision. Also, research shows
that people are not very good at detecting the difference
between false and true confessions. So they'll, you know, make
up a bunch of false confessions, and they'll make up

(02:01:50):
a bunch of true confessions, and they'll show them to people,
and they find that people have a really hard time
telling the difference between a false confession. And essentially, you're
trying to tell the difference between someone who's lying and
who's not lying. And since we've already established that people
are terrible at detecting that, they have a hard time
detecting the difference between a false confession and a true confession.

(02:02:12):
But here's the kicker. When they study police, the police
are just as bad at detecting the difference between a
false confession and a true confession, but the difference here
is that the police are more confident in their belief
so when the police are wrong, they're very convinced of

(02:02:34):
their conclusions that are wrong, whereas non police are when
they're wrong in general, they're more like, well, I think
he's lying, but I'm not really quite sure. But police
officer looks at this, Oh, he's definitely lying. I'm one
hundred percent sure, even though the guy isn't lying. So

(02:02:56):
it's just interesting. Again, you would think the expert, being
the police officer, would know more about it and say like, well,
you know, I've been lied to before and I've been wrong,
So you'd think the professional would be more realistic about
their ability to gauge lies or not because they're professionals.

(02:03:17):
Like for me, for instance, I'm a therapist and have
been lied to a lot, and the older I get,
the more experienced I get, the more I realize, just anecdotally,
that I'm actually not that great of a detector of lies,
particularly if the person is good at lying and it's
a lie that they're very that's very important to them.

(02:03:41):
If the lie is, you know, like drug use is
often something people will lie about. People can can lie
very well if they have practice you know, you know
addicts who are addicts for years, Over the years, they
become extremely good at lying about it and almost indetectable

(02:04:04):
and so, and I've learned that over time. And so
as a professional myself who is sometimes involved in trying
to figure out if someone's lying or not, I've learned
through experience that it's hard to tell, and so I'm
not confident in when i make the decisions. So it's like,
why are police professionals who are also involved in trying

(02:04:28):
to detectilize, Why are they more confident in their stupidity?
You think they'd be more humble, but of course they're not. Okay,
another study, this is another interesting little study. They found
that they're trying to look for the differences between false
confessions and true confessions. They're trying to find out if
there's any differences linguistically, and they found that in false

(02:04:51):
confessions there's less adjectives, so there's less adjutive adjectives, less
descriptive words, and there's more nouns and verbs so in
relative to adjectives. And this is consistent with other studies
showing that when people lie, they tend to have fewer descriptions.

(02:05:12):
So you know, for instance, if if someone's lying, so
you know, say they you have a kid who smoked
pot that night, went to a party, smoked botany, comes
home and he's talking to his parents and my parents
are like, where have you been all night? And he's like, oh,
I went to the movies. You know, we went to
the movies, and that's all that happened, you know, And

(02:05:35):
so that there's not a lot of description in there, right,
It's just like I just went to the movies. But
if he said, oh, I saw Star Wars at seven
oh five at the Cineplex in Redmond, Washington, and I
was there with Joe and the movie was pretty good.
It's kind of long. The popcorn was good, though, you know,

(02:05:56):
like there's a lot of details in there. And research
shows that when people are lying, they don't have a
lot of those details, which makes sense, right because if
you're lying, how do you come up with a But
it's hard to spin a story, improv a story on
the spot, whereas if you're telling the truth, you have
all that data available to you that you can just

(02:06:18):
sort of riff on because it's in your memory banks,
you know. Okay, So when it comes to false confessions
essentially over time, as the suspect is, as the innocent
suspect is being broken down and you know, badgered and

(02:06:43):
aggressively sort of pressured into telling this lie that they
actually did it, they have this tough decision they have
to make. They either continue telling the truth by not confessing,
and as a result, they incur increasing levels of abuse
and mistreatment, or they can choose to just tell them

(02:07:05):
what they want to hear, and everything will immediately get
better for them. They will immediately get food, water, the
police will get off their back. They might even be released.
So under stress and if you're vulnerable to compliance anyway,
then many just choose to confess. You know, they're just like, Okay,

(02:07:29):
I just want to go home. I just want to
have a glass of water. I just want this person
to get off my back. What do I need to
do to make that happen. Oh, they just want me
to confess and sign this piece of paper and I
can go home. Fine, I'll sign it. Yes, I did it.
You're right, I did it. Let me sign the thing. Okay,
can I go home? Now. That's the essence of false confessing,

(02:07:53):
and it really needs to be understood in the legal system,
and it needs to be understood by the police system too.
There's some regulations that are happening to try to stop
this sort of thing from happening, like recording the entire
interrogation process, which puts the police in a little bit
better behavior because they know they're being recorded, and also
because they know that that entire recording will go to

(02:08:15):
the court and if it comes out that the police
planted a bunch of thoughts in the person's head and
pressured them to falsely confess, then it will throw out
the confession. So police don't want that, and so when
you record the entire interrogation process, it tends to reduce
false confessions. Now some people start actually to believe that

(02:08:39):
they did it. I was talking about those three different
kinds of confessions. You have the voluntary kind where people
just say, yeah, you did it because they have some
sort of weird gain from falsely confessing. And then you
have the coerce compliant, which is the main one I've
been talking about so far. But then you have the
coerced internalized, where people are coerced and falsely confession but
they actually believe that they actually did it. You know,

(02:09:02):
people will get someone to believe that they actually do
This is you know, these people, according to research, are
prone to fantasy, and they're you know, generally compliant, they're
they're generally dependent on other people. So there's certain personality
traits that will lead people to be vulnerable to this

(02:09:24):
internalization process. And this is just fascinating to me. It's
just so interesting that police officers can break someone down
to the level where they can make someone not only
admit that they committed a heinous crime, but to make
the person believe that they did it too. It's crazy,

(02:09:46):
all right, Well, that is it about false confessions. This
episode is over two hours long, and I thought it
was only going to be about half an hour. I
probably always say that, right, I'm always like, oh my god,
this episode is so long. You're probably listening to me
right now, going kirkye. You always say that it's sort
of like my grandma one hundred and one year old
grandma who died earlier this year. Whenever we go to restaurants,

(02:10:10):
we would all order food, and you know, like you
do in restaurants, you order food. Well, she was this tiny,
little Japanese American woman and restaurants, you know, they they
have big plates now, and so we'd all get her food.
Like I remember, just a couple of years ago, we
were in California and we're at this outdoor restaurant and

(02:10:32):
everyone ordered this Tex Mex kind of food and she
ordered like this burger and fries or something. And today
burgers are not the burgers of my youth, and the
seventies burgers were these tiny little things. You know, they're
you know the way that sliders look now, sliders are huge,
those are those were the burgers of the seventies. Well,
the burgers now are They're always they always have to

(02:10:54):
be mamoth anyway. So the plate comes out, sits down
in front of her, and it's this burger and fries,
and she always says, oh my, she always says. She
always says that because there's so much good. Look, you know,
she's this tiny woman, a lot of food. Oh my,
I'm never going to finish, finish all this. Someone's gonna
have to help me with this, she would say. And

(02:11:15):
you know, everyone starts eating and talking and doing our
normal thing. And half hour later we look over at
my grandma's plate and she's polished the entire thing. She's
eating the entire huge, bigger, all the fries. This happened
all the time, so similar to my grandma. I always say,

(02:11:37):
oh my, this podcast is so big. I'm never gonna
I don't know why it got so long, and it
always is that long. It's eleven o'clock, it's my bedtime,
and I'm going crazy. All right, Well, thanks for joining
me out there. Please take care of yourself. Watch the
documentary on a Man of Ox on Netflix high recommend,

(02:12:01):
and have a good night and take care of yourself
because you deserve it.

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