October 23, 2019 • 54 mins
This is an updated episode that originally aired on September 17, 2018.
Amanda Knox was convicted of the murder of a 21-year-old British exchange student, Meredith Kercher, who died from knife wounds in the apartment she shared with Amanda in Perugia, Italy in 2007. Amanda and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were both found guilty of killing Kercher, receiving 26- and 25-year prison sentences, respectively. Their convictions were subsequently overturned in 2011, and she was released from prison after serving four years. In early 2014, the Italian Supreme Court ruled that they should both stand trial again, and she and Sollecito were re-convicted. Finally, in March 2015, the Italian Supreme Court overturned both murder convictions, ending their eight-year ordeal. Amanda Knox is currently a *New York Times *bestselling author, the host of the Scarlet Letter Reports on Broadly/Vice, and the host of The Truth About True Crime, a Sundance AMC podcast series.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
My Interview with Amanda Knox originally aired on February six
of two thousand seventeen. It's sort of almost like the
anchor episode of the second season. Now Amanda is engaged
to be married, and I couldn't be happier. They're just
an amazing couple, she and Chris Robinson. And she's now
the host of the Scarlet Letter Reports on Broadly Vice,
(00:24):
in which she sits down with famous women to discuss
the deeply personal journey of being sexualized, scrutinized, and demonized
by the media, and how they've rebuilt their lives after
their most personal details have been made public. There by
the name of Scarlet Letter Reports. Aman is also the
host of The Truth About True Crime, a Sundance AMC
podcast series. Amanda's like my little sister, and I'm so
(00:48):
happy for all the great things that are happening for her.
Please listen through to the end because she drops some
pearls of wisdom at the end of this episode that
really will to you, as they affected me in a
very profound way. I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had
(01:14):
a beautiful life. I went to sleep because September seven
was the first day of my high school year, I
was gonna be a senior. At twenty two, I was
set to start college. I woke up and my life
was never the same again. Cops came out with guns,
drone and I never saw freedom ever ever since after that.
It's like roach moke tow. Once you get in, you
(01:36):
and I getting out. This is wrongful conviction with Jason Flom.
Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason Flam. Today's guest
as Amanda Knox, I had like this year plan of
(01:58):
studying language and study poetry in mind. Amanda Knox was
wrongfully convicted of a crime that happened in Italy in
two thousand and seven, and a Knox verdict has just
been read. Guilty here guilty. Just hours ago, twenty two
year old college student Demanda Knox finally learned her fate.
After eleven hours of deliberations. The verdict was read by
(02:21):
the presiding judge. Amanda and Raphael A guilty of the
murder of twenty one year old Meredith Kircher. Her name
is Amanda Knox, known for the notorious murder of her
British roommate marriage. She served four years in prison and
went through numerous trials, and I thought for months months
(02:41):
of imprisonment that it was just a big misunderstanding and
everything would get worked out because the evidence would come
back and it would prove that I was innocent before
she was fully exonerated with the NA evidence in two
thousand and fifteen, Amanda, welcome to the show. Thanks for
having me. So let's go back in time as we
do on the show. What possessed you to become an
(03:04):
exchange student? Like it's sort of a it's a brave
thing as a young woman. Oh man Uh. For me
that it wasn't that brave because my family came from Germany,
and so I was always aware that there were other
worlds out there where other people were living lives with
other cultures and other languages, and I was I was
(03:26):
familiar with that. I had a knack for languages, so
I was also aware of that in school, I was
interested in what other people we're doing outside of my
little sphere of knowledge. And I mean I spent two
weeks when I was fourteen in Japan because I studied
Japanese in high school. I went with my family to
(03:48):
Germany when I was fourteen as well, Um, So, it
wasn't my first time outside of the country, and it
definitely wasn't unusual for me, Like my family had been
talking about it foreign exchange program since I was in
high school, Like my oma really wanted me to do
some high school in Germany. Well you did like an
access to her at the age of fourteens. Yeah, yeah,
(04:09):
now that I meant think about it, Yeah, it's a coincidence.
But it is funny looking back on it. Um, So
you were somebody who was a world traveler at a
very young age and so yes, and that makes sense.
And how did you settle in Italy while I was
studying Italian and I was studying German, both of them
in college? Um, I wanted to be a linguist, a
translator and interpreter or whatever I could be that had
(04:30):
to do with languages, because I couldn't explain a creative
writing degree to my dad. I couldn't justify it. But
I could justify being um a translator and UM a linguist.
And I liked Italian because I studied Latin in middle
school and it was just weird enough. It was poetic,
(04:53):
and in the meantime there was a poetry program going on. Um,
there's this exchange program with the University of Washington where
I was studying with poetry and I that was located
in Rome, and so I thought, Okay, this is this
brilliant opportunity. I'll go study Italian in Parusia for nine
months and then spend the summer in Rome studying poetry.
(05:17):
And that was the plan. I had, like this year
plan of studying language and studying poetry in mind. How
long were you there before everything started to unravel? How
long at the time of the just over a month, right, so,
and and things were really looking up, right, You had
just fallen in well, I don't know if you could
call it love or poppy love or whatever it was,
(05:39):
but you had a you had a romance going on. Yeah. Well,
I was in classes. I was in this city full
of young people who were from all over the world.
I made a friend there who was from Kazakhs Done
and I had never encountered a person from Kazakhs Done before.
And she would come over after class and we would
play guitar together. So that was just really cool. Or
(05:59):
I to this one dinner UM with other people who
were in my class, and UM, there was this chef
from Japan who was studying Italian cooking there in Rome,
and PRUGEI was kind of traveling around learning how to cook,
and he made a big dinner and I helped make
teremy sue. It was just it was really cool that
to be around so many curious young people, and to
(06:24):
be living with curious young people. Meredith was one of those.
She wasn't in the same school that I was. She
was studying at the University of Prusia and I was
studying at the university, so the university for foreigners, because
my Italian wasn't good enough yet to actually go to
the regular university. Well that was just the way you
(06:44):
said that words are transported me from yeah right, yeah.
How did you end up? You and Meredith end up
finding each other in order to cohabitate, Well, both of
us found separately the house that we ended up living in,
um so just an add in the paper, not even
in the paper. Um. I was wandering around by the
university to um Perstannetti and there was a woman, a
(07:08):
young woman there. I guess she was younger than I
am now crazy. She seemed so old and mature when
I was twenty and she was putting up a notice
like one of those you ripped the bottom off for
a phone number. And she said that she was and
she could speak English, and she said that she was
advertising for this house that was literally right down the
(07:29):
street from the university that I was going to go to.
And I said, oh, my gosh, can I come see it.
I was there with my sister to come visit the
city really quickly before I actually moved there. So I
visited the house before Meredith had ever arrived in Perusia,
and already made like a pact with Philomena and um
(07:50):
and Laura, who were the two Italian young women who
were living there, to to move in as soon as
I came back. And then by the time I moved
back to the house, Meredith had already moved in. She
had also found a notice somehow the same same way,
seriously old school, like the little piece of paper ripping
off the thing and like like that. You didn't find
(08:11):
it on Craig's list exactly, No, no, no, I wouldn't
even know what that looked like in Parusia, right, So
you end up living with these three other young women
and things are looking great, right, I mean, what a
life you have ahead of you and what a place
to be. Oh, definitely. I I was like, the one
(08:33):
thing I can say that disappointed me was I was expecting, UM,
the work, the school work, to be a little bit
more rigorous than it was. It was very relaxed, easy
compared to what I was used to UM, and I
had expected I was going to be learning the language
more quickly. I'm expecting that enrollment's going to go up
(08:54):
after your description among some slackers in the United States.
But that's beside the flight. So fast forward and you
are now you you meet this uh, this young man
and you start this uh little romance. Yes, that's so.
It's so charming how it's depicted in the movie. So
charming he is. He is. He's like charming in a
(09:15):
boyish way. Um. He's he's not intimidating in any way.
He's he's very sweet and considerate, um, but also kind
of just like a puppy, just you know, just bumbling along.
And it's not like we ever had any deep conversations.
(09:35):
But then again, we also didn't really speak each other's
language very well, so it was very it was very sweet.
It was like holding hands and walking along and him
being like, oh, Italian ladies have perfume. You should have perfume,
and oh, let me show you this cool market that
I've I've discovered here in Tody, and you know, stuff
like that. It was really it was just like so
(09:58):
stereotypical of like the kind d of romance that you
find yourself in when you're really young and you're in
another country and you you come across this really cool, nice,
sweet different person that who's coming from a completely different
culture than you. It sounds like a high school relationship
in college. Yeah, kind of um, but really really cute.
(10:20):
So then things go completely haywire. And that's one of
the things that was I found so powerful in the
movie is that there's this juxtaposition right of like you're
going along, you're just having this sweet, wonderful, new, foreign,
beautiful experience, and then one day you show up, well
(10:42):
you showed up at your your home, and things got
a little weird. I mean, so it's sort of unravels
like a horror movie actually, right, Yeah, especially especially in
the sense that, like in the horror movie, you don't
realize what's going on as you're walking through it, even
as like the little things add up ominously right, Like
(11:03):
that was my experience being plunked into a crime scene. Basically,
I had spent the night over at Raphael's, like I
was doing a lot that one week that we were together,
and I came home in the morning and um to
take a shower. And I came home and the front
(11:27):
door was wide open, which was odd because to even
close the door you had to lock it. And that
was the habit that Meredith, Laura and Philomena and I
were in. We we we opened the door with our
key and when we closed it, we locked it to
keep the door closed because otherwise it would just kind
(11:47):
of open. So the door was wide open and nobody
was around. I didn't see anyone. I kind of peecked.
I went inside and I called out, and I go
in to take a shower. And when I go in,
I call out, like Laura, Filamanna, Meredith, anyone home? And
no one was home. And I thought that was odd,
(12:08):
but nothing seemed wrong, Like the the main room that
I was walking into was perfectly normal. Um, Filomena's bedroom
door was closed. UM. I went into my bedroom and undressed,
went to the shower, and that's when I noticed spots
(12:28):
of blood in the bathroom, but they weren't a lot.
It was just eerie enough to be like, that's weird,
on top of the door being open. But what was
going on in my mind was, Oh, maybe someone like
cut themselves and then like ran out to go get
(12:49):
a bandage, or maybe someone I mean, it could also
have been in my like it could also have been like,
you know, when you brush your teeth and if you
haven't flowed in a while, you'll like bleed from your
mouth when you're like, you know, it wasn't a lot.
It wasn't like so much that I thought something was
It was in the sink, anything. I could have been anything,
(13:13):
And I didn't immediately jumped to the conclusion that somebody
had been devastatingly hurt or something bad had happened. I
just thought it was weird, and so I took my shower,
and I stepped out of the shower and onto the
bath mat, and I noticed that there was a larger
splotch of blood on the bath mat, and I thought, Okay,
that's more suspicious, but I still didn't know what to
(13:35):
make of it. I went into my room, I got dressed,
I went and blew dry my hair in the other
bathroom that we had because that's where the hair dryer was.
And when I was in there, I noticed that the
toilet hadn't been flushed. There was feces in the toilet,
and that, on top of everything else, just struck me
like something like I got the creepy feeling that someone
(13:59):
was in the house with me who shouldn't be there,
because Laura and Philomena were really were clean freaks and
they wouldn't forget to flush the toilet, and like that
on top of everything else, like maybe even if it
was just that and everything else was normal, the door
was closed, I wouldn't have thought creepy feeling, but that,
(14:19):
on top of everything else, gave me a creepy feeling.
And so I immediately booked it back to Raphael's. And
I wasn't sure what to tell him, like that some
weird things were at my house, but what what could
he say? Um? But I ended up talking to him
and he said, oh, you should call your roommates and
see what's going on. Maybe something happened with them. And
(14:42):
I called Laura and she was, um, I don't remember
she picked up or not, but she was not even
in the city. She was away in Rome. Philomena picked
up and she had been at her boyfriend's and Meredith
did not pick up. Her phone just rang and rang,
and I tried both of her phone numbers. She had
an Italian phone number and a British phone number, and
(15:04):
it didn't answer. So I told like our mayan. Raphael's
plan had been to just go, you know away for
the weekend, but I wanted him to come take a
look at what was going on in my house with me,
because I needed to figure out what was going on.
Phil Amina said she was going to come home. We
were all going to take a look at it, see
what was going on. She thought that maybe there had
(15:26):
been a break in, and so I went considering that
the door was open, right, And so I went back
with Rafael and we took a more scrutinous look at
the house. We opened up Philomena's bedroom and Philamina's bedroom
was the one that had been broken into. There was
her window was broken. Um there was glass all over
(15:48):
the floor, and um there was you know, it was.
It was a bit of a mess, like there was
a jumble of clothing. I didn't see if there was anything,
Like I looked to see if there was anything stolen
of value, because if it was a break in, you'd
think that there would be something stolen. But her camera
was there, her computer was there, um like our stereo
(16:12):
was still in the house, the TV was still in
the house. I went to my bedroom. My computer was there,
and so I thought, what the heck happened, Like, what
did this person steal if they broke in? And then
by that time, you know, Rafael and I sort of
moved around the house some more noticed that Laura's room
was totally fine, untouched, pristine, and Meredith's room was locked,
(16:38):
which was unusual because the only time that I had
ever encountered her door being locked was either she was
out of town or she had just gotten out of
the shower and like closed the door and locked it
before she got changed and then came out again. And
(16:58):
I asked Rafael try to break it down, because I
knocked on the door and Mereth didn't answer. I knocked
louder and Meredith didn't answer, and the fact that she
wasn't answering her phone, like, I was worried maybe something happened.
So I asked Rafael to try to break down this door,
and he kicked at it, and he kicked at it,
but he couldn't kick it down, so we called the cops.
(17:20):
In the meantime, Philomina came home. She was freaking out hysterically.
An Italian police showed up with this this phone that
belonged to Meredith and they said that they had found
this phone in a garden that was a little bit
like down the road, and um, yeah, so her phone
(17:46):
is in the middle of some yard down the road.
We can't find her, her doors locked, there's like crazy
things going on in the house. And so finally, um,
Philomena says to the cops, like kicked down their door.
And Philamine is there with her boyfriend and their two
friends because they were off doing things together, and so
they all came there and the police said, well, we
(18:07):
don't have the authority to kick indoors, like we're only
you know, we're not criminal. People were just we're just
here to like for these phone issues. They weren't even
like criminal investigator cops, right, they were just regular Joe
Schmo on the block cops who were like trying to
figure out who's lost phone. This was why were they
even looking for that's a strange part of this. Why
were they looking for her phone because it was ringing.
(18:30):
I had been calling it and it was ringing, and
the person whose yard it was found in heard the
ringing and discovered the um like, found the phone in
the yard and then called the cops saying, Hey, there's
this phone in my yard. Can you find out who
this belongs to? So it's it's pretty weird though that
(18:50):
they show up with the phone and they don't. Okay,
so now so well, And indeed, like what's interesting is
they showed up and I thought they had showed up
because me and Raphael had called them and was said like, hey,
there there's this break in in our house. But they
apparently yeah, but these cops weren't coming for that. They
had no idea what we were talking about. The reason
(19:12):
they came was because of the phone, and they knew
that the phone was connected to the house because it
was Meredith's phone and Meredith was convoluted. Meredith was using
a SIM card that belonged to Philomena, and Philomana's name
was registered with the house, so they had discovered the
SIM card and traced it back to the house. So
(19:32):
they showed up for entirely different reasons, and I had
assumed they showed up because of a break in. So
these two just lay cops show up with this phone,
and I'm assuming that they're there because of the break in,
but in fact they are not. So they say, well,
we don't have the authority to kick down this door,
and Philamina says, bullshit, kicked down the store, so they
she and her friends kicked down this door with the cops.
(19:55):
That's Meredith's bedroom door, and I mean Philomena screamed and
um the police yelled out out. Everyone get out of
the house, and there was this big just shuffle and everyone,
like I had no idea what was going on. I
was pushed out of the house the bedroom. No, no,
(20:17):
you just know that pandemonium breaking out and everyone's screaming
in Italian. So I'm trying to keep track of everything,
and I'm asking Raphael to like tell me what everyone's saying,
because you know, it's one thing to have someone speak
to you slowly and calmly in Italian and another one
to have them just like screaming hysterically out loud at
everyone's talking over each other. And so Raphael was like
(20:38):
slowly sort of just trying to translate for me what
was going on. I was pushed out of the house
and um and by then alright, then some more cops arrived.
I think the the phone police guys called in for backup.
And I mean, I don't even know who all these
(21:00):
people were that were showing up to my house. All
I knew was that suddenly I didn't have a house anymore.
I wasn't allowed to go inside, and I was just
standing outside thinking what did they see in Meredith's room?
Like did they see her? Did they see someone else? Like,
and you know, you can think, okay, maybe maybe I
(21:21):
should have known that that it was obviously going to
be Meredith in there, but like by the way that
Philamine was screaming, like she was just saying a foot,
a foot, a foot, and Pierre Pier and Pierre, and
I thought that maybe there was like a severed foot
in there. Like I had no idea what was going on.
And then like I kept overhearing little bits and pieces
something that had to do with the wardrobe, something that
(21:43):
had to do with the blanket of her bed, and
eventually what I pieced and what Raphael was able to
really piece together for me was that Phil Amina, her boyfriend,
and her friends and this one cop had kicked down
the door and scene the crime scene, which was Meredith's
(22:06):
body was lying on the ground, um covered in a
blanket and her foot was sticking out from beneath the blanket. Yeah,
and there was blood everywhere. I mean there was blood
on the walls, there was blood all over the floor,
there was blood on the wardrobe. So there was there
was and like it wasn't just like there was like
splatters of blood and there was like fingerprints and blood.
(22:27):
It was just this terrible, horrific crime scene that showed
absolutely struggle and and uh so I'm really grateful that
(22:51):
I never had to see that in person. The first
time I ever did see that was pictures that my
lawyer showed me um to prepare me for court when
we were going to have to sit there and go
through all the pictures of the crime scene and the
pictures of the autopsy, and let's and let's let's go
(23:13):
to that, but make a stop on the way at
the time of the arrest, because it's odd. I mean,
you there were other people who could have been targeted.
There were some very obvious signs, right, there was a
known burglar in the neighborhood. Had the cops been maybe
(23:36):
let's let's give them the benefits out and say had
they've been more experienced, But let's basically it's really a
question of competency. Um, they're also trigger happy, I think, Um,
there was a lot of like automatically there were Um,
so okay, So what did they have in front of them?
When let's let's put ourselves in the shoes of the
police officers as they come to this place. They have
(24:00):
they have, um, an hysterical roommate, a roommate who doesn't
really understand what's going on and is talking to her
boyfriend all the time in English. Um. They they have
a body out of nowhere. They have some phones that
were found a little bit away. It's a gruesome crime scene.
It looks like a break in, and and what they had,
(24:23):
you know, in the in the hours following was just
all of us standing around outside waiting to hear what happened,
and then bringing us to to the police office to
ask us and question us. Basically, what they had to
go on was there's this horrible thing, and all we
have our people to look at because they sure they
(24:47):
weren't analyzing the crime scene. Um they had you know,
people in their their suits going in and out checking
out everything. But like at that point they were playing
the deta actives in terms of like, okay, let's try
to solve this in forty eight hours type of thing
where you just study the characters of the people who
(25:08):
are around you. And something about me strike them as odd.
They thought that my emotions didn't match up to what
they should have been. Either I cried too much or
I cried too little. I said the wrong thing, I
was doing the wrong thing. They thought that I was weird.
(25:31):
I was being you know, cuddled by my boyfriend who
was trying to comfort me. All of it they just
felt was inappropriate, and that made me suspicious. Were better
equipped to make, you know, decisions about guilt and innocence.
But we are also just flawed human beings who should
remember that when we're drawing conclusions about people, and we
(25:55):
shouldn't rely so heavily on initial impressions because those don't
I actually tell us any relevant information. So in the
meantime they come along and eventually and it doesn't take
that long, right, and we see this again and again,
where you have a small community, a very high profile crime,
and a lot of pressure on the police to solve it.
(26:18):
And then in your case, there was the added pressure
of the press gets ahold of this and things get
really crazy in a way that the world hadn't seen.
For the press in both America and Italy, it wasn't
just the story of the year, it was the story
of the century. And then they have to suddenly like
rise to the occasion, which is this one that they're
(26:40):
not experienced and they're not equipped to do. You know,
it was kind of like when you look back at
them going through the crime scene and like looking through everything,
it's it looks a little bit like kids who are
playing pretend. They're pretending to be forensic experts moving through
a space and like gathering evidence, but you know, trying
to like job a splotch of blood, but like swabbing
(27:02):
the whole sink to get that splotch of blood, or
like passing around evidence like you know, candy. It's it's
it's like they were kids pretending to be doing their job.
It was, And I mean, I know that one of
the issues with the criminal justice system is like the
(27:23):
resources and lack of training. And it would be nice
if when faced with those situations, when you know that
you can't rise to the occasion and the way that
you would, you need to you at the very least
admit it or ask for help do something. In this case,
(27:44):
the Prusia police were wanting to prove themselves to the
world because suddenly the world was looking at them, and
they were very proud, and they were Prussia, being a
city that supported itself on tourism, they couldn't afford to
have some foreign exchange student be murdered without Perugia being
(28:09):
able to rise to the occasion and answer the call
of duty. And they just weren't able to do that.
They were faking it, trying to make it, and they
couldn't make it. You know, an improper forensics is sadly
tragically common. It's the second leading cause of wrongful convictions
in the United States. So I don't want to make
this sound like this was an Italian problem. This is
(28:30):
a worldwide problem. And part of it is the training.
As you just said, I mean, we need better standards
for training our forensic analysts and experts. And anyone who
saw making a murderer saw that as well. I mean,
it's really we want to believe that these people are
scientists with fantastic backgrounds, and we'd like to believe that
they're perfect, and they have principles and standards that would
(28:53):
be good too. And there are a lot of very
good forensic scientists out there, but they're the bad ones
are capable of inflicting incredible amounts of damage. And we've
seen some who are really bad actors who do it
over and over again until they're eventually caught, and then
all these cases have to be unraveled at tax pair expence.
And of course, the human tragedy is that so many
people get wrongfully convicted as a result. You were one
of them. Although over there, but I do want to
(29:13):
highlight the fact that it happens in America with alarming frequency.
So you get arrested and thrust into this world you
have no understanding of right in so many ways, including
the language, barried everything else, and now what what happens?
Like what's going through your mind? And how did it
get to trial? And then besides, you know the whole
(29:36):
issue of the course of interrogation that authors of false
confession speeding past that because I've talked about that often.
Finding myself in a prison environment was incredibly surreal and confusing. Um.
I had been given the impression initially that I was
there for my own protection, so they they, the police,
(29:58):
told me that I was going to the prison because
that was the safe place for me. I thought I
was a witness to the case, and I had no
idea what was happening to me. I didn't realize that
I had been accused of her murder, you know, And
it sounds so dumb, Like it sounds dumb, like I
had handcuffs on me and they put me in prison.
(30:18):
How could I not realize what was going on? But
like the idea that I would be accused of a
murder I didn't commit was so foreign to me that
I was making every excuse in my mind to explain
what was happening to me that wasn't exactly what was
happening to me, which was the most absurd thing that
(30:40):
I could possibly imagine, Like, it wasn't it wasn't in
my radar to be wrongfully convicted of something that I
didn't do, especially something so brutal and terrible as the
murder of my roommate, like this I. I was blaming
myself for like seeming confusing to people. I was under
(31:01):
the impression that I was a witness. And then when
it was finally brought to my attention that I was
actually accused of murder, I thought that there was this
big mistake. I asked I I asked to be interrogated
again because I was like, no, I you misunderstood me.
It was my fault. I'm sorry. Like I I was
so young and and naive and and idealistic and manipulable,
(31:27):
Like I thought that I was on the side of
the police and there was just this big misunderstanding, and
I thought, for months months of imprisonment, that it was
just a big misunderstanding and everything would get worked out
because the evidence would come back and it would prove
that I was innocent. And like, I spent eight months
like that, and um, I spent eight months hoping I
(31:54):
was just I was going to go home and um,
and that didn't happen. It it took them eight months
to formally charge me and with you know, so I
was the way that they do in Italy is they
can arrest you and then they can continue their investigation
to actually come up with charges against you, and I'm
held without bail. Yes, So I was in prison for
(32:17):
eight months without formal charges, and then finally those were
laid down on me, and of course I I what's
crazy is that, you know, as everything kept getting worse
and worse and worse, I kept hoping, like my hopes
kept rising that things would finally turn out in the end,
(32:38):
because it couldn't keep getting this bad. It couldn't like
it was just impossible. It didn't make sense why this
would be happening to me, and um, and I kept
thinking that it's it's gonna figure itself out in the end,
even if it's not figuring itself out now, even if
it's taking months and the police just don't get it,
Like a jury of my reasonable peers are going to
(33:00):
see how ridiculous this is and they're going to put
a stop to it. And the closer we get to
my conviction, the more I thought I was going to
go home, and um, you know, it took. I was
in prison for two years prior to my conviction, and
then I was convicted, and that changed everything. That was
(33:21):
when I I finally had to face my reality with
with full awareness of what had happened and what was
going to happen to me? And I was, um, my
mom didn't like the way that I started writing letters. Um,
(33:45):
she thought that I was depressed, and you know, it
could it could be. That is true. It is true
that after a while, especially post my conviction, UM, the
world was just sad because you know that life isn't fair.
(34:08):
Everyone tells you that, but you never think that you're
going to be that person with that unfair story, that
that you're the you're that one person and you know,
I'm not the only person in history who's ever had
this happened to them, Like there have been horrible things
throughout history that human beings have done to one another,
(34:30):
and you just you never think that you're going to
be that which who's going to be burned or you
know the or sure. I mean, I think everybody can
relate to that, because you know, and people have varying degrees.
Everyone's had some experience where they were like, wait, why me,
but yours just happens to be very extreme. And then
(34:53):
they had a number of inconvenient issues, right, I mean,
they forget for a second the fact that they were
overlooking the obvious suspect who was this guy who who
they knew had been burglarizing, and this was a burglary
homes in the neighborhood. Ultimately, of course he was convicted
and right, well, he That's that's the frustrating thing about
(35:17):
my case, and that I think is a repetition of
things that happened in wrongful convictions cases where a prosecution
gets invested in a theory and they're so invested in
that theory that they're willing to fudge, distort, and completely
ignore truthful elements in order to sustain that theory. So
(35:38):
in my case, the prosecutor was so invested in the
police were so invested in my guilt that they let
off the person who actually did it, whose blood, whose
DNA was everywhere inside Merit's body, inside her purse, all
over the crime scene, his fingerprints in her blood, all
(35:58):
over the crime scene. They let him off as not
guilty of the murderer. They have him guilty of raping her,
and they didn't find him. That's why he got a
lower sentences because it was more worth it to them
to let him, the actual murderer, off, you know, on
a lesser charge, so that they could sustain their theory
(36:20):
of me. And in addition to that, to sustain that theory,
they had to ignore, Like we were talking about forensic
evidence and how yes, in my case there was bad
forensic evidence because you know, there was contamination. That was
the issue with the brack clasp. There was this knife
where like they said, there was Mereth's DNA on it,
but there wasn't in the end. But even more than that,
(36:42):
like that, I understand that people are sort of fascinated
by those elements because you know, maybe there's you know,
smoking gun elements, but really, like the smoking gun element
in this case is one that the police completely ignored,
which is whose DNA was in the crime scene, may
Meredith's and Rudy gadays the actual killer. That's it. It's
(37:09):
impossible for a reasonable person, even if you don't have
a background in investigations or anything else, right to rationalize
the fact that your DNA wasn't there. Well, they came
up with all the excuses like, oh, she was able
to clean it up, which is laughable, Which is laughable.
(37:32):
It's it's impossible. You can't just look around this room
that we are in right now and I'm like, okay, well,
your DNA is right there, So I'm going to leave that,
and my DNA is right there, Like DNA is invisible,
it's you can't identify like, oh that you know, sweat
stain is from me versus this sweat stain is from you.
You can't do that. It is physically impossible also to
(37:53):
even like move around a crime scene without leaving traces
of yourself unless you're in a in one of those suits.
But even that, yeah, but even that, like it's no guarantee.
You have to be very if if you The reason
why forensic experts have to move around in a crime
scene in those suits is because it's so easy to
contaminate a crime scene. And the prosecution because they were
(38:17):
so invested in the idea of my guilt, they were
so invested in it that they just had to believe
that it was possible for me to have done this,
to have cleaned up all trace of me connecting me
to the crime, right, which would be even if you
had endless amounts of time resources, the most sophisticated equipment,
(38:38):
which of course and and and you would still have
to have. Also, you'd have to be some combination of
a fairy and an alien in order to float in
there avoid leaving any traces, clean it up without leaving
any traces as well, Right, So you would have had
to either commit the murder in a hazmat suit and
uh and have and and I've sort of been floating
(38:58):
above uh and or come back with your team of
experts from some laboratory who would have been able to um,
you know, mad you know, scrub part I don't know,
it's all too crazy. And also without leaving traces of cleaning,
because of course you can't leave traces of having cleaned.
(39:21):
So yeah, yeah you did it, by god, breeze in there. Like,
I mean, we can laugh about it right now, but
like that was legit, and like that happens all the time,
the kinds of ways that bad investigators contort their minds
(39:45):
in order to shape it around an idea instead of
allowing the context of the situation of relevant information to
inform them that that is a devastating factor in wrongful convictions.
And it's one that's relevant in my case, it's one
that's relevant in most cases where you're just either going
(40:07):
out of your way to not find any other evidence
that's relevant to the case or bury it or you're
just doing incredible mental gymnastics to justify what you want
to justify instead of what you can. In this this project,
(40:27):
research has shown that many forensics techniques such as hair microscopy,
bite mark comparisons, firearm tool mark analysis, and shueprint comparisons
have not been subjected to sufficient scientific evaluation and have
resulted time and time again in tragic errors. No, in
your case has things in common with the Center Part
(40:48):
five case as well, right, another super high profile case
where the DNA evidence was available and was hidden and
lied about. And that's all that story, right, Like it's
all about a story or where the idea of well,
I mean you saw the documentary, so you saw how
Nick Pisa was all like girl on girl crime Like
(41:11):
people were just eating up the idea of some fem
fatale version of me that was able to hypnotize two
guys into doing my bidding and then commit murder and
then somehow criminally, mastermindedly get away with it. So you
were now this crazed sex killer, except for you weren't gay,
(41:33):
and you weren't a killer at all. You weren't a
violent person whatsoever, never had any criminal problems ever, never
had any behavioral problems. Ever, it was just an interesting story.
And I think that's what's most scary that I've learned
about the criminal justice system, at least right now, is
(41:53):
that often enough, what compels is not the facts. What
compels is the story. And if the defensive story is
a story that we've heard before where there's a burglar
who breaks in, take it, takes advantage of the person
who was home, and then runs away from the country, that,
(42:14):
despite the fact that that's what the evidence is pointing to,
is not the story that compels. It's not the story
that sells, and it's not the story that ends up
being stamped with everyone's approval. And that is the scariest
thing about the criminal justice system, where it's treated like
(42:34):
in this like really morbid way, like entertainment. And what
counts is what compels, what you know, stimulates our most
base instincts in relation to other people. Like it's just
it's so weird how we think there's this like this
upstanding institution that has so many you know, safeguards against
(42:57):
that kind of thing, against authorities taking advantage of their position,
and against you know, people being found guilty for things
where there's no evidence of that, Like, it still comes
down to people getting riled up about something and whether
or not it's fake news. And if the fake news
is compelling enough, and if you hear it enough, and
(43:17):
if it's if everyone's talking about it in this specific
way enough, then that becomes the truth. And and that
ends up defining my life unless I can somehow compel
you otherwise, then that's crazy. I shouldn't have to compel anyone.
I'm just a regular person walking around in this world
(43:39):
and had this thing dropped on me. And the ability
for an authority to drop that kind of devastation on
your life should be justified, and so often it is.
And and very good prosecutors won't go after someone unless
they have very good reason to. But other people have
other intentions, and they have other agendas, and and they're
(44:04):
proud and they're flawed and they don't want to admit it.
So back to you. You end up in prison, case
gets overturned on appeal, you get reconvicted. I mean this,
this is but in the meanwhile, you're just sort of
languishing is probably a nice way to put it. In
an Italian prison for a crime you didn't commit, and
(44:28):
I was so touched to hear you say how you
maintain this idealistic notion that if you just told the truth,
eventually people would get it. They would they would want
to not persecute you if you just told them the truth.
I mean, so here, I'm about to break your heart.
(44:48):
I held that belief, that idealistic belief, up until my conviction.
And then I thought, oh wow, this is the type
of world. Oh yeah, okay, this is the type of
world where I can be innocent but still be convicted
and still have my life completely redefined by something I
didn't do, and that could be the rest of my life.
That could be my life. I could be that person.
(45:10):
And you know, I faced another two years in prison
with the prospect of being that person, of living my
the rest of my life in prison. No matter how
innocent I said it was, that didn't mean that I
was ever going to say fine, I did it, Like
that's that was never going to come out of me,
because like that was absurd and offensive, and it was
(45:30):
offensive to Meredith's memory, and it was offensive to everything
that every principle that I had in myself. But I
also recognized that this world is one in which sometimes
we humans make mistakes in relation to each other, and
I could have been one of those who just got
(45:51):
forgotten and I did not know if I was ever
going to get out of it. I had to wrap
my mind around the idea and come to peace with
the idea that I was just going to live my
life in prison for something that I didn't do, no
matter what I said. And you know, even after everything,
even after I was acquitted and I was freed, I thought, oh, well, okay, wow,
(46:15):
I'm I'm lucky. There are plenty of people who were
in my situation who never got out. And then I
had to come to peace with the idea that, okay,
so I am free and I do get to have
my life back. It's just, you know, I'm going to
be one of those people who everyone in the world
is going to think as a monster or suspect as
a monster for the rest of my life, and I'm
just gonna have to come to peace with that. And
(46:36):
you know, like when the Twitter trolls just roll in
every day and like reaffirm that for you, I just
had to come to peace with that. And then you know,
the documentary comes out and suddenly people who just like
really quickly drew conclusions about me that suggested that I
was guilty. As soon as they saw that and saw
that the that I'm a real person, for one thing,
(46:59):
and that the case was more complex than what they thought,
suddenly they started vocalizing that they were sorry, Like people
were saying sorry to me for like jumping to conclusions
about me. And I never expected that to happen, Like
I I had come to peace with the idea that
unless you met me, you probably hated me. And as
(47:20):
soon as I walk into a room, there's a doppleganger
version of myself that's preceded me that you're all judging
prior to me even entering that room, And I'm going
to have to relate to that doppleganger Verton of myself
before I'm ever going to be able to interact with
you as a person. And I am continually finding like
(47:40):
I'm the type of person who doesn't believe something unless
I like I see it and I can and there's
proof of it, And so I am finding proof. I mean,
I believe that human beings are good deep down, and
I think that we're smart deep down, and so I
feel like as soon as we come face to face
with each other. We are we're able to recognize each
other humanity. Um, what I am finding with great joy
(48:04):
is that some people don't even need to see me
face to face in order to realize that I'm a
human being. And that means the world to me, because
I had come to peace with the idea that that
wasn't going to be my reality, that was just going
to be my fate to be that girl that people
suspected forever and didn't really think of as a person
and judged not as a person. So I don't know,
(48:25):
I'm sorry. I hope it doesn't like break your ardor
like skew your understanding of what kind of person I am.
But I'm just practical. It would be nice if I
could say, like, no, I knew in the end that
it was going to work out. But the sad thing
is you don't. Anyone who's wrongfully convicted doesn't know if
it's going to work out for them, And it sucks,
and it's sad, and your world is sad, and that's
(48:47):
just the reality of it. And it takes people like
you and people like me and people like our listeners
to care about that situation enough to do something about it,
because it's not just gonna work itself out. It doesn't
work itself out. People undo their mistakes, and it requires
people to do it, and and nobody wins. My wrongful
(49:09):
conviction occurs because there's no favor there to the victim
or the victims family, or to society, which in many
cases allows the well in almost all cases allows the
actual perpetrator to roam free and commit new atrocities. And
of course then there's the very human toll on people
like yourself. So I want to wrap up by talking
(49:33):
about Amanda. Now. Now it's wonderful because I'm no longer
being hunted down by some big, you know, crazy legal
authority that's an entire country, Like, I'm no longer having
to deal with that kind of pressure in my life.
And I can actually look forward, as opposed to just
sort of like be really present and be constantly aware
(49:54):
of like what's coming at me. I can actually just
like breathe, look forward and kind of put myself out there.
And I'm writing a lot. I'm coming up with these
creative projects to try to to try to, you know,
share my ideas with the world. And I'm here talking
to you and and I'm going out of my way
to vocalize my thoughts and experiences in ways that I
(50:17):
didn't feel like I was able to before because I
wasn't in a position of safety or or ability. Even
I I thought for the longest time that my life
was going to be one where I had to live
in the shadows and cower, and that was going to
be my life And that's not what's happening to me now.
And I'm so grateful for that, because I hated the
(50:40):
idea that somehow I had to pay with my life
for this thing that I didn't do, for the mistakes
that the prosecution make, for the terrible crime that Rudy
get A committed, Like somehow I had to pay with
my life for that. And like people told me all
the time, like, oh, you should just change your name
so you don't have to deal with it. And eventually,
you know, ten years from now, you're not going to
(51:00):
look the same, so it's not going to be different.
And it's like, you know what, No, there's nothing wrong
with being Amanda Knox. Amanda Knox didn't do anything. I'm
a I'm a good person. I'm just fine. And in fact,
if you just gave me the chance to be a person.
You would see that too. So I didn't like the
idea of like my myself being compromised somehow by something
(51:23):
that had nothing to do with me. And um, and instead,
you know, I've I've now been able to like embrace
the fact that this happened to me and that it's
a part of me. But it's not, you know, the
thing that defines me. The thing that defines me is
how I've reacted to it, and um, and that feels
wonderful and like I'm I feel recognized in a way
(51:46):
that I never imagined that I was going to feel.
And it's so I'm so grateful, Like I'm so grateful
that people are like seeing me as a human being
and and seeing what I went through and caring about
it like no one had to do that, no one
had to care about me, and and they and they
do and that means the world to me. Um, and
(52:08):
I just I just want other people to feel that.
You know, well, I can tell you that it's it's
quite extraordinary just being around you and soaking up the
sort of energy that you put out there because it's
so positive and it's so healing. And it's been, like
(52:30):
I said, in a humbling experience for me to be
able to have you on the show now twice, and
I look forward to watching you continue to grow and
heal and excel. And you know, and I know we'll
be seeing each other again at various events and we
(52:51):
will both continue to fight for justice because that's what
we're here for. You've been listening to Wrongful Conviction with
Jason fla Um and our guests, the Amazing, the one
and only Amanda Enough. Thanks for listening. We'll see you
next week on Wrongful Conviction. Jason flam don't forget to
(53:18):
give us a fantastic review. Wherever you get your podcasts,
it really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the
Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in
supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future
wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn
how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank
our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music
(53:41):
on the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer
Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction podcast. Wrongful
Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one will
be Good.
My Interview with Amanda Knox originally aired on February six
of two thousand seventeen. It's sort of almost like the
anchor episode of the second season. Now Amanda is engaged
to be married, and I couldn't be happier. They're just
an amazing couple, she and Chris Robinson. And she's now
the host of the Scarlet Letter Reports on Broadly Vice,
(00:24):
in which she sits down with famous women to discuss
the deeply personal journey of being sexualized, scrutinized, and demonized
by the media, and how they've rebuilt their lives after
their most personal details have been made public. There by
the name of Scarlet Letter Reports. Aman is also the
host of The Truth About True Crime, a Sundance AMC
podcast series. Amanda's like my little sister, and I'm so
(00:48):
happy for all the great things that are happening for her.
Please listen through to the end because she drops some
pearls of wisdom at the end of this episode that
really will to you, as they affected me in a
very profound way. I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had
(01:14):
a beautiful life. I went to sleep because September seven
was the first day of my high school year, I
was gonna be a senior. At twenty two, I was
set to start college. I woke up and my life
was never the same again. Cops came out with guns,
drone and I never saw freedom ever ever since after that.
It's like roach moke tow. Once you get in, you
(01:36):
and I getting out. This is wrongful conviction with Jason Flom.
Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason Flam. Today's guest
as Amanda Knox, I had like this year plan of
(01:58):
studying language and study poetry in mind. Amanda Knox was
wrongfully convicted of a crime that happened in Italy in
two thousand and seven, and a Knox verdict has just
been read. Guilty here guilty. Just hours ago, twenty two
year old college student Demanda Knox finally learned her fate.
After eleven hours of deliberations. The verdict was read by
(02:21):
the presiding judge. Amanda and Raphael A guilty of the
murder of twenty one year old Meredith Kircher. Her name
is Amanda Knox, known for the notorious murder of her
British roommate marriage. She served four years in prison and
went through numerous trials, and I thought for months months
(02:41):
of imprisonment that it was just a big misunderstanding and
everything would get worked out because the evidence would come
back and it would prove that I was innocent before
she was fully exonerated with the NA evidence in two
thousand and fifteen, Amanda, welcome to the show. Thanks for
having me. So let's go back in time as we
do on the show. What possessed you to become an
(03:04):
exchange student? Like it's sort of a it's a brave
thing as a young woman. Oh man Uh. For me
that it wasn't that brave because my family came from Germany,
and so I was always aware that there were other
worlds out there where other people were living lives with
other cultures and other languages, and I was I was
(03:26):
familiar with that. I had a knack for languages, so
I was also aware of that in school, I was
interested in what other people we're doing outside of my
little sphere of knowledge. And I mean I spent two
weeks when I was fourteen in Japan because I studied
Japanese in high school. I went with my family to
(03:48):
Germany when I was fourteen as well, Um, So, it
wasn't my first time outside of the country, and it
definitely wasn't unusual for me, Like my family had been
talking about it foreign exchange program since I was in
high school, Like my oma really wanted me to do
some high school in Germany. Well you did like an
access to her at the age of fourteens. Yeah, yeah,
(04:09):
now that I meant think about it, Yeah, it's a coincidence.
But it is funny looking back on it. Um, So
you were somebody who was a world traveler at a
very young age and so yes, and that makes sense.
And how did you settle in Italy while I was
studying Italian and I was studying German, both of them
in college? Um, I wanted to be a linguist, a
translator and interpreter or whatever I could be that had
(04:30):
to do with languages, because I couldn't explain a creative
writing degree to my dad. I couldn't justify it. But
I could justify being um a translator and UM a linguist.
And I liked Italian because I studied Latin in middle
school and it was just weird enough. It was poetic,
(04:53):
and in the meantime there was a poetry program going on. Um,
there's this exchange program with the University of Washington where
I was studying with poetry and I that was located
in Rome, and so I thought, Okay, this is this
brilliant opportunity. I'll go study Italian in Parusia for nine
months and then spend the summer in Rome studying poetry.
(05:17):
And that was the plan. I had, like this year
plan of studying language and studying poetry in mind. How
long were you there before everything started to unravel? How
long at the time of the just over a month, right, so,
and and things were really looking up, right, You had
just fallen in well, I don't know if you could
call it love or poppy love or whatever it was,
(05:39):
but you had a you had a romance going on. Yeah. Well,
I was in classes. I was in this city full
of young people who were from all over the world.
I made a friend there who was from Kazakhs Done
and I had never encountered a person from Kazakhs Done before.
And she would come over after class and we would
play guitar together. So that was just really cool. Or
(05:59):
I to this one dinner UM with other people who
were in my class, and UM, there was this chef
from Japan who was studying Italian cooking there in Rome,
and PRUGEI was kind of traveling around learning how to cook,
and he made a big dinner and I helped make
teremy sue. It was just it was really cool that
to be around so many curious young people, and to
(06:24):
be living with curious young people. Meredith was one of those.
She wasn't in the same school that I was. She
was studying at the University of Prusia and I was
studying at the university, so the university for foreigners, because
my Italian wasn't good enough yet to actually go to
the regular university. Well that was just the way you
(06:44):
said that words are transported me from yeah right, yeah.
How did you end up? You and Meredith end up
finding each other in order to cohabitate, Well, both of
us found separately the house that we ended up living in,
um so just an add in the paper, not even
in the paper. Um. I was wandering around by the
university to um Perstannetti and there was a woman, a
(07:08):
young woman there. I guess she was younger than I
am now crazy. She seemed so old and mature when
I was twenty and she was putting up a notice
like one of those you ripped the bottom off for
a phone number. And she said that she was and
she could speak English, and she said that she was
advertising for this house that was literally right down the
(07:29):
street from the university that I was going to go to.
And I said, oh, my gosh, can I come see it.
I was there with my sister to come visit the
city really quickly before I actually moved there. So I
visited the house before Meredith had ever arrived in Perusia,
and already made like a pact with Philomena and um
(07:50):
and Laura, who were the two Italian young women who
were living there, to to move in as soon as
I came back. And then by the time I moved
back to the house, Meredith had already moved in. She
had also found a notice somehow the same same way,
seriously old school, like the little piece of paper ripping
off the thing and like like that. You didn't find
(08:11):
it on Craig's list exactly, No, no, no, I wouldn't
even know what that looked like in Parusia, right, So
you end up living with these three other young women
and things are looking great, right, I mean, what a
life you have ahead of you and what a place
to be. Oh, definitely. I I was like, the one
(08:33):
thing I can say that disappointed me was I was expecting, UM,
the work, the school work, to be a little bit
more rigorous than it was. It was very relaxed, easy
compared to what I was used to UM, and I
had expected I was going to be learning the language
more quickly. I'm expecting that enrollment's going to go up
(08:54):
after your description among some slackers in the United States.
But that's beside the flight. So fast forward and you
are now you you meet this uh, this young man
and you start this uh little romance. Yes, that's so.
It's so charming how it's depicted in the movie. So
charming he is. He is. He's like charming in a
(09:15):
boyish way. Um. He's he's not intimidating in any way.
He's he's very sweet and considerate, um, but also kind
of just like a puppy, just you know, just bumbling along.
And it's not like we ever had any deep conversations.
(09:35):
But then again, we also didn't really speak each other's
language very well, so it was very it was very sweet.
It was like holding hands and walking along and him
being like, oh, Italian ladies have perfume. You should have perfume,
and oh, let me show you this cool market that
I've I've discovered here in Tody, and you know, stuff
like that. It was really it was just like so
(09:58):
stereotypical of like the kind d of romance that you
find yourself in when you're really young and you're in
another country and you you come across this really cool, nice,
sweet different person that who's coming from a completely different
culture than you. It sounds like a high school relationship
in college. Yeah, kind of um, but really really cute.
(10:20):
So then things go completely haywire. And that's one of
the things that was I found so powerful in the
movie is that there's this juxtaposition right of like you're
going along, you're just having this sweet, wonderful, new, foreign,
beautiful experience, and then one day you show up, well
(10:42):
you showed up at your your home, and things got
a little weird. I mean, so it's sort of unravels
like a horror movie actually, right, Yeah, especially especially in
the sense that, like in the horror movie, you don't
realize what's going on as you're walking through it, even
as like the little things add up ominously right, Like
(11:03):
that was my experience being plunked into a crime scene. Basically,
I had spent the night over at Raphael's, like I
was doing a lot that one week that we were together,
and I came home in the morning and um to
take a shower. And I came home and the front
(11:27):
door was wide open, which was odd because to even
close the door you had to lock it. And that
was the habit that Meredith, Laura and Philomena and I
were in. We we we opened the door with our
key and when we closed it, we locked it to
keep the door closed because otherwise it would just kind
(11:47):
of open. So the door was wide open and nobody
was around. I didn't see anyone. I kind of peecked.
I went inside and I called out, and I go
in to take a shower. And when I go in,
I call out, like Laura, Filamanna, Meredith, anyone home? And
no one was home. And I thought that was odd,
(12:08):
but nothing seemed wrong, Like the the main room that
I was walking into was perfectly normal. Um, Filomena's bedroom
door was closed. UM. I went into my bedroom and undressed,
went to the shower, and that's when I noticed spots
(12:28):
of blood in the bathroom, but they weren't a lot.
It was just eerie enough to be like, that's weird,
on top of the door being open. But what was
going on in my mind was, Oh, maybe someone like
cut themselves and then like ran out to go get
(12:49):
a bandage, or maybe someone I mean, it could also
have been in my like it could also have been like,
you know, when you brush your teeth and if you
haven't flowed in a while, you'll like bleed from your
mouth when you're like, you know, it wasn't a lot.
It wasn't like so much that I thought something was
It was in the sink, anything. I could have been anything,
(13:13):
And I didn't immediately jumped to the conclusion that somebody
had been devastatingly hurt or something bad had happened. I
just thought it was weird, and so I took my shower,
and I stepped out of the shower and onto the
bath mat, and I noticed that there was a larger
splotch of blood on the bath mat, and I thought, Okay,
that's more suspicious, but I still didn't know what to
(13:35):
make of it. I went into my room, I got dressed,
I went and blew dry my hair in the other
bathroom that we had because that's where the hair dryer was.
And when I was in there, I noticed that the
toilet hadn't been flushed. There was feces in the toilet,
and that, on top of everything else, just struck me
like something like I got the creepy feeling that someone
(13:59):
was in the house with me who shouldn't be there,
because Laura and Philomena were really were clean freaks and
they wouldn't forget to flush the toilet, and like that
on top of everything else, like maybe even if it
was just that and everything else was normal, the door
was closed, I wouldn't have thought creepy feeling, but that,
(14:19):
on top of everything else, gave me a creepy feeling.
And so I immediately booked it back to Raphael's. And
I wasn't sure what to tell him, like that some
weird things were at my house, but what what could
he say? Um? But I ended up talking to him
and he said, oh, you should call your roommates and
see what's going on. Maybe something happened with them. And
(14:42):
I called Laura and she was, um, I don't remember
she picked up or not, but she was not even
in the city. She was away in Rome. Philomena picked
up and she had been at her boyfriend's and Meredith
did not pick up. Her phone just rang and rang,
and I tried both of her phone numbers. She had
an Italian phone number and a British phone number, and
(15:04):
it didn't answer. So I told like our mayan. Raphael's
plan had been to just go, you know away for
the weekend, but I wanted him to come take a
look at what was going on in my house with me,
because I needed to figure out what was going on.
Phil Amina said she was going to come home. We
were all going to take a look at it, see
what was going on. She thought that maybe there had
(15:26):
been a break in, and so I went considering that
the door was open, right, And so I went back
with Rafael and we took a more scrutinous look at
the house. We opened up Philomena's bedroom and Philamina's bedroom
was the one that had been broken into. There was
her window was broken. Um there was glass all over
(15:48):
the floor, and um there was you know, it was.
It was a bit of a mess, like there was
a jumble of clothing. I didn't see if there was anything,
Like I looked to see if there was anything stolen
of value, because if it was a break in, you'd
think that there would be something stolen. But her camera
was there, her computer was there, um like our stereo
(16:12):
was still in the house, the TV was still in
the house. I went to my bedroom. My computer was there,
and so I thought, what the heck happened, Like, what
did this person steal if they broke in? And then
by that time, you know, Rafael and I sort of
moved around the house some more noticed that Laura's room
was totally fine, untouched, pristine, and Meredith's room was locked,
(16:38):
which was unusual because the only time that I had
ever encountered her door being locked was either she was
out of town or she had just gotten out of
the shower and like closed the door and locked it
before she got changed and then came out again. And
(16:58):
I asked Rafael try to break it down, because I
knocked on the door and Mereth didn't answer. I knocked
louder and Meredith didn't answer, and the fact that she
wasn't answering her phone, like, I was worried maybe something happened.
So I asked Rafael to try to break down this door,
and he kicked at it, and he kicked at it,
but he couldn't kick it down, so we called the cops.
(17:20):
In the meantime, Philomina came home. She was freaking out hysterically.
An Italian police showed up with this this phone that
belonged to Meredith and they said that they had found
this phone in a garden that was a little bit
like down the road, and um, yeah, so her phone
(17:46):
is in the middle of some yard down the road.
We can't find her, her doors locked, there's like crazy
things going on in the house. And so finally, um,
Philomena says to the cops, like kicked down their door.
And Philamine is there with her boyfriend and their two
friends because they were off doing things together, and so
they all came there and the police said, well, we
(18:07):
don't have the authority to kick indoors, like we're only
you know, we're not criminal. People were just we're just
here to like for these phone issues. They weren't even
like criminal investigator cops, right, they were just regular Joe
Schmo on the block cops who were like trying to
figure out who's lost phone. This was why were they
even looking for that's a strange part of this. Why
were they looking for her phone because it was ringing.
(18:30):
I had been calling it and it was ringing, and
the person whose yard it was found in heard the
ringing and discovered the um like, found the phone in
the yard and then called the cops saying, Hey, there's
this phone in my yard. Can you find out who
this belongs to? So it's it's pretty weird though that
(18:50):
they show up with the phone and they don't. Okay,
so now so well, And indeed, like what's interesting is
they showed up and I thought they had showed up
because me and Raphael had called them and was said like, hey,
there there's this break in in our house. But they
apparently yeah, but these cops weren't coming for that. They
had no idea what we were talking about. The reason
(19:12):
they came was because of the phone, and they knew
that the phone was connected to the house because it
was Meredith's phone and Meredith was convoluted. Meredith was using
a SIM card that belonged to Philomena, and Philomana's name
was registered with the house, so they had discovered the
SIM card and traced it back to the house. So
(19:32):
they showed up for entirely different reasons, and I had
assumed they showed up because of a break in. So
these two just lay cops show up with this phone,
and I'm assuming that they're there because of the break in,
but in fact they are not. So they say, well,
we don't have the authority to kick down this door,
and Philamina says, bullshit, kicked down the store, so they
she and her friends kicked down this door with the cops.
(19:55):
That's Meredith's bedroom door, and I mean Philomena screamed and
um the police yelled out out. Everyone get out of
the house, and there was this big just shuffle and everyone,
like I had no idea what was going on. I
was pushed out of the house the bedroom. No, no,
(20:17):
you just know that pandemonium breaking out and everyone's screaming
in Italian. So I'm trying to keep track of everything,
and I'm asking Raphael to like tell me what everyone's saying,
because you know, it's one thing to have someone speak
to you slowly and calmly in Italian and another one
to have them just like screaming hysterically out loud at
everyone's talking over each other. And so Raphael was like
(20:38):
slowly sort of just trying to translate for me what
was going on. I was pushed out of the house
and um and by then alright, then some more cops arrived.
I think the the phone police guys called in for backup.
And I mean, I don't even know who all these
(21:00):
people were that were showing up to my house. All
I knew was that suddenly I didn't have a house anymore.
I wasn't allowed to go inside, and I was just
standing outside thinking what did they see in Meredith's room?
Like did they see her? Did they see someone else? Like,
and you know, you can think, okay, maybe maybe I
(21:21):
should have known that that it was obviously going to
be Meredith in there, but like by the way that
Philamine was screaming, like she was just saying a foot,
a foot, a foot, and Pierre Pier and Pierre, and
I thought that maybe there was like a severed foot
in there. Like I had no idea what was going on.
And then like I kept overhearing little bits and pieces
something that had to do with the wardrobe, something that
(21:43):
had to do with the blanket of her bed, and
eventually what I pieced and what Raphael was able to
really piece together for me was that Phil Amina, her boyfriend,
and her friends and this one cop had kicked down
the door and scene the crime scene, which was Meredith's
(22:06):
body was lying on the ground, um covered in a
blanket and her foot was sticking out from beneath the blanket. Yeah,
and there was blood everywhere. I mean there was blood
on the walls, there was blood all over the floor,
there was blood on the wardrobe. So there was there
was and like it wasn't just like there was like
splatters of blood and there was like fingerprints and blood.
(22:27):
It was just this terrible, horrific crime scene that showed
absolutely struggle and and uh so I'm really grateful that
(22:51):
I never had to see that in person. The first
time I ever did see that was pictures that my
lawyer showed me um to prepare me for court when
we were going to have to sit there and go
through all the pictures of the crime scene and the
pictures of the autopsy, and let's and let's let's go
(23:13):
to that, but make a stop on the way at
the time of the arrest, because it's odd. I mean,
you there were other people who could have been targeted.
There were some very obvious signs, right, there was a
known burglar in the neighborhood. Had the cops been maybe
(23:36):
let's let's give them the benefits out and say had
they've been more experienced, But let's basically it's really a
question of competency. Um, they're also trigger happy, I think, Um,
there was a lot of like automatically there were Um,
so okay, So what did they have in front of them?
When let's let's put ourselves in the shoes of the
police officers as they come to this place. They have
(24:00):
they have, um, an hysterical roommate, a roommate who doesn't
really understand what's going on and is talking to her
boyfriend all the time in English. Um. They they have
a body out of nowhere. They have some phones that
were found a little bit away. It's a gruesome crime scene.
It looks like a break in, and and what they had,
(24:23):
you know, in the in the hours following was just
all of us standing around outside waiting to hear what happened,
and then bringing us to to the police office to
ask us and question us. Basically, what they had to
go on was there's this horrible thing, and all we
have our people to look at because they sure they
(24:47):
weren't analyzing the crime scene. Um they had you know,
people in their their suits going in and out checking
out everything. But like at that point they were playing
the deta actives in terms of like, okay, let's try
to solve this in forty eight hours type of thing
where you just study the characters of the people who
(25:08):
are around you. And something about me strike them as odd.
They thought that my emotions didn't match up to what
they should have been. Either I cried too much or
I cried too little. I said the wrong thing, I
was doing the wrong thing. They thought that I was weird.
(25:31):
I was being you know, cuddled by my boyfriend who
was trying to comfort me. All of it they just
felt was inappropriate, and that made me suspicious. Were better
equipped to make, you know, decisions about guilt and innocence.
But we are also just flawed human beings who should
remember that when we're drawing conclusions about people, and we
(25:55):
shouldn't rely so heavily on initial impressions because those don't
I actually tell us any relevant information. So in the
meantime they come along and eventually and it doesn't take
that long, right, and we see this again and again,
where you have a small community, a very high profile crime,
and a lot of pressure on the police to solve it.
(26:18):
And then in your case, there was the added pressure
of the press gets ahold of this and things get
really crazy in a way that the world hadn't seen.
For the press in both America and Italy, it wasn't
just the story of the year, it was the story
of the century. And then they have to suddenly like
rise to the occasion, which is this one that they're
(26:40):
not experienced and they're not equipped to do. You know,
it was kind of like when you look back at
them going through the crime scene and like looking through everything,
it's it looks a little bit like kids who are
playing pretend. They're pretending to be forensic experts moving through
a space and like gathering evidence, but you know, trying
to like job a splotch of blood, but like swabbing
(27:02):
the whole sink to get that splotch of blood, or
like passing around evidence like you know, candy. It's it's
it's like they were kids pretending to be doing their job.
It was, And I mean, I know that one of
the issues with the criminal justice system is like the
(27:23):
resources and lack of training. And it would be nice
if when faced with those situations, when you know that
you can't rise to the occasion and the way that
you would, you need to you at the very least
admit it or ask for help do something. In this case,
(27:44):
the Prusia police were wanting to prove themselves to the
world because suddenly the world was looking at them, and
they were very proud, and they were Prussia, being a
city that supported itself on tourism, they couldn't afford to
have some foreign exchange student be murdered without Perugia being
(28:09):
able to rise to the occasion and answer the call
of duty. And they just weren't able to do that.
They were faking it, trying to make it, and they
couldn't make it. You know, an improper forensics is sadly
tragically common. It's the second leading cause of wrongful convictions
in the United States. So I don't want to make
this sound like this was an Italian problem. This is
(28:30):
a worldwide problem. And part of it is the training.
As you just said, I mean, we need better standards
for training our forensic analysts and experts. And anyone who
saw making a murderer saw that as well. I mean,
it's really we want to believe that these people are
scientists with fantastic backgrounds, and we'd like to believe that
they're perfect, and they have principles and standards that would
(28:53):
be good too. And there are a lot of very
good forensic scientists out there, but they're the bad ones
are capable of inflicting incredible amounts of damage. And we've
seen some who are really bad actors who do it
over and over again until they're eventually caught, and then
all these cases have to be unraveled at tax pair expence.
And of course, the human tragedy is that so many
people get wrongfully convicted as a result. You were one
of them. Although over there, but I do want to
(29:13):
highlight the fact that it happens in America with alarming frequency.
So you get arrested and thrust into this world you
have no understanding of right in so many ways, including
the language, barried everything else, and now what what happens?
Like what's going through your mind? And how did it
get to trial? And then besides, you know the whole
(29:36):
issue of the course of interrogation that authors of false
confession speeding past that because I've talked about that often.
Finding myself in a prison environment was incredibly surreal and confusing. Um.
I had been given the impression initially that I was
there for my own protection, so they they, the police,
(29:58):
told me that I was going to the prison because
that was the safe place for me. I thought I
was a witness to the case, and I had no
idea what was happening to me. I didn't realize that
I had been accused of her murder, you know, And
it sounds so dumb, Like it sounds dumb, like I
had handcuffs on me and they put me in prison.
(30:18):
How could I not realize what was going on? But
like the idea that I would be accused of a
murder I didn't commit was so foreign to me that
I was making every excuse in my mind to explain
what was happening to me that wasn't exactly what was
happening to me, which was the most absurd thing that
(30:40):
I could possibly imagine, Like, it wasn't it wasn't in
my radar to be wrongfully convicted of something that I
didn't do, especially something so brutal and terrible as the
murder of my roommate, like this I. I was blaming
myself for like seeming confusing to people. I was under
(31:01):
the impression that I was a witness. And then when
it was finally brought to my attention that I was
actually accused of murder, I thought that there was this
big mistake. I asked I I asked to be interrogated
again because I was like, no, I you misunderstood me.
It was my fault. I'm sorry. Like I I was
so young and and naive and and idealistic and manipulable,
(31:27):
Like I thought that I was on the side of
the police and there was just this big misunderstanding, and
I thought, for months months of imprisonment, that it was
just a big misunderstanding and everything would get worked out
because the evidence would come back and it would prove
that I was innocent. And like, I spent eight months
like that, and um, I spent eight months hoping I
(31:54):
was just I was going to go home and um,
and that didn't happen. It it took them eight months
to formally charge me and with you know, so I
was the way that they do in Italy is they
can arrest you and then they can continue their investigation
to actually come up with charges against you, and I'm
held without bail. Yes, So I was in prison for
(32:17):
eight months without formal charges, and then finally those were
laid down on me, and of course I I what's
crazy is that, you know, as everything kept getting worse
and worse and worse, I kept hoping, like my hopes
kept rising that things would finally turn out in the end,
(32:38):
because it couldn't keep getting this bad. It couldn't like
it was just impossible. It didn't make sense why this
would be happening to me, and um, and I kept
thinking that it's it's gonna figure itself out in the end,
even if it's not figuring itself out now, even if
it's taking months and the police just don't get it,
Like a jury of my reasonable peers are going to
(33:00):
see how ridiculous this is and they're going to put
a stop to it. And the closer we get to
my conviction, the more I thought I was going to
go home, and um, you know, it took. I was
in prison for two years prior to my conviction, and
then I was convicted, and that changed everything. That was
(33:21):
when I I finally had to face my reality with
with full awareness of what had happened and what was
going to happen to me? And I was, um, my
mom didn't like the way that I started writing letters. Um,
(33:45):
she thought that I was depressed, and you know, it
could it could be. That is true. It is true
that after a while, especially post my conviction, UM, the
world was just sad because you know that life isn't fair.
(34:08):
Everyone tells you that, but you never think that you're
going to be that person with that unfair story, that
that you're the you're that one person and you know,
I'm not the only person in history who's ever had
this happened to them, Like there have been horrible things
throughout history that human beings have done to one another,
(34:30):
and you just you never think that you're going to
be that which who's going to be burned or you
know the or sure. I mean, I think everybody can
relate to that, because you know, and people have varying degrees.
Everyone's had some experience where they were like, wait, why me,
but yours just happens to be very extreme. And then
(34:53):
they had a number of inconvenient issues, right, I mean,
they forget for a second the fact that they were
overlooking the obvious suspect who was this guy who who
they knew had been burglarizing, and this was a burglary
homes in the neighborhood. Ultimately, of course he was convicted
and right, well, he That's that's the frustrating thing about
(35:17):
my case, and that I think is a repetition of
things that happened in wrongful convictions cases where a prosecution
gets invested in a theory and they're so invested in
that theory that they're willing to fudge, distort, and completely
ignore truthful elements in order to sustain that theory. So
(35:38):
in my case, the prosecutor was so invested in the
police were so invested in my guilt that they let
off the person who actually did it, whose blood, whose
DNA was everywhere inside Merit's body, inside her purse, all
over the crime scene, his fingerprints in her blood, all
(35:58):
over the crime scene. They let him off as not
guilty of the murderer. They have him guilty of raping her,
and they didn't find him. That's why he got a
lower sentences because it was more worth it to them
to let him, the actual murderer, off, you know, on
a lesser charge, so that they could sustain their theory
(36:20):
of me. And in addition to that, to sustain that theory,
they had to ignore, Like we were talking about forensic
evidence and how yes, in my case there was bad
forensic evidence because you know, there was contamination. That was
the issue with the brack clasp. There was this knife
where like they said, there was Mereth's DNA on it,
but there wasn't in the end. But even more than that,
(36:42):
like that, I understand that people are sort of fascinated
by those elements because you know, maybe there's you know,
smoking gun elements, but really, like the smoking gun element
in this case is one that the police completely ignored,
which is whose DNA was in the crime scene, may
Meredith's and Rudy gadays the actual killer. That's it. It's
(37:09):
impossible for a reasonable person, even if you don't have
a background in investigations or anything else, right to rationalize
the fact that your DNA wasn't there. Well, they came
up with all the excuses like, oh, she was able
to clean it up, which is laughable, Which is laughable.
(37:32):
It's it's impossible. You can't just look around this room
that we are in right now and I'm like, okay, well,
your DNA is right there, So I'm going to leave that,
and my DNA is right there, Like DNA is invisible,
it's you can't identify like, oh that you know, sweat
stain is from me versus this sweat stain is from you.
You can't do that. It is physically impossible also to
(37:53):
even like move around a crime scene without leaving traces
of yourself unless you're in a in one of those suits.
But even that, yeah, but even that, like it's no guarantee.
You have to be very if if you The reason
why forensic experts have to move around in a crime
scene in those suits is because it's so easy to
contaminate a crime scene. And the prosecution because they were
(38:17):
so invested in the idea of my guilt, they were
so invested in it that they just had to believe
that it was possible for me to have done this,
to have cleaned up all trace of me connecting me
to the crime, right, which would be even if you
had endless amounts of time resources, the most sophisticated equipment,
(38:38):
which of course and and and you would still have
to have. Also, you'd have to be some combination of
a fairy and an alien in order to float in
there avoid leaving any traces, clean it up without leaving
any traces as well, Right, So you would have had
to either commit the murder in a hazmat suit and
uh and have and and I've sort of been floating
(38:58):
above uh and or come back with your team of
experts from some laboratory who would have been able to um,
you know, mad you know, scrub part I don't know,
it's all too crazy. And also without leaving traces of cleaning,
because of course you can't leave traces of having cleaned.
(39:21):
So yeah, yeah you did it, by god, breeze in there. Like,
I mean, we can laugh about it right now, but
like that was legit, and like that happens all the time,
the kinds of ways that bad investigators contort their minds
(39:45):
in order to shape it around an idea instead of
allowing the context of the situation of relevant information to
inform them that that is a devastating factor in wrongful convictions.
And it's one that's relevant in my case, it's one
that's relevant in most cases where you're just either going
(40:07):
out of your way to not find any other evidence
that's relevant to the case or bury it or you're
just doing incredible mental gymnastics to justify what you want
to justify instead of what you can. In this this project,
(40:27):
research has shown that many forensics techniques such as hair microscopy,
bite mark comparisons, firearm tool mark analysis, and shueprint comparisons
have not been subjected to sufficient scientific evaluation and have
resulted time and time again in tragic errors. No, in
your case has things in common with the Center Part
(40:48):
five case as well, right, another super high profile case
where the DNA evidence was available and was hidden and
lied about. And that's all that story, right, Like it's
all about a story or where the idea of well,
I mean you saw the documentary, so you saw how
Nick Pisa was all like girl on girl crime Like
(41:11):
people were just eating up the idea of some fem
fatale version of me that was able to hypnotize two
guys into doing my bidding and then commit murder and
then somehow criminally, mastermindedly get away with it. So you
were now this crazed sex killer, except for you weren't gay,
(41:33):
and you weren't a killer at all. You weren't a
violent person whatsoever, never had any criminal problems ever, never
had any behavioral problems. Ever, it was just an interesting story.
And I think that's what's most scary that I've learned
about the criminal justice system, at least right now, is
(41:53):
that often enough, what compels is not the facts. What
compels is the story. And if the defensive story is
a story that we've heard before where there's a burglar
who breaks in, take it, takes advantage of the person
who was home, and then runs away from the country, that,
(42:14):
despite the fact that that's what the evidence is pointing to,
is not the story that compels. It's not the story
that sells, and it's not the story that ends up
being stamped with everyone's approval. And that is the scariest
thing about the criminal justice system, where it's treated like
(42:34):
in this like really morbid way, like entertainment. And what
counts is what compels, what you know, stimulates our most
base instincts in relation to other people. Like it's just
it's so weird how we think there's this like this
upstanding institution that has so many you know, safeguards against
(42:57):
that kind of thing, against authorities taking advantage of their position,
and against you know, people being found guilty for things
where there's no evidence of that, Like, it still comes
down to people getting riled up about something and whether
or not it's fake news. And if the fake news
is compelling enough, and if you hear it enough, and
(43:17):
if it's if everyone's talking about it in this specific
way enough, then that becomes the truth. And and that
ends up defining my life unless I can somehow compel
you otherwise, then that's crazy. I shouldn't have to compel anyone.
I'm just a regular person walking around in this world
(43:39):
and had this thing dropped on me. And the ability
for an authority to drop that kind of devastation on
your life should be justified, and so often it is.
And and very good prosecutors won't go after someone unless
they have very good reason to. But other people have
other intentions, and they have other agendas, and and they're
(44:04):
proud and they're flawed and they don't want to admit it.
So back to you. You end up in prison, case
gets overturned on appeal, you get reconvicted. I mean this,
this is but in the meanwhile, you're just sort of
languishing is probably a nice way to put it. In
an Italian prison for a crime you didn't commit, and
(44:28):
I was so touched to hear you say how you
maintain this idealistic notion that if you just told the truth,
eventually people would get it. They would they would want
to not persecute you if you just told them the truth.
I mean, so here, I'm about to break your heart.
(44:48):
I held that belief, that idealistic belief, up until my conviction.
And then I thought, oh wow, this is the type
of world. Oh yeah, okay, this is the type of
world where I can be innocent but still be convicted
and still have my life completely redefined by something I
didn't do, and that could be the rest of my life.
That could be my life. I could be that person.
(45:10):
And you know, I faced another two years in prison
with the prospect of being that person, of living my
the rest of my life in prison. No matter how
innocent I said it was, that didn't mean that I
was ever going to say fine, I did it, Like
that's that was never going to come out of me,
because like that was absurd and offensive, and it was
(45:30):
offensive to Meredith's memory, and it was offensive to everything
that every principle that I had in myself. But I
also recognized that this world is one in which sometimes
we humans make mistakes in relation to each other, and
I could have been one of those who just got
(45:51):
forgotten and I did not know if I was ever
going to get out of it. I had to wrap
my mind around the idea and come to peace with
the idea that I was just going to live my
life in prison for something that I didn't do, no
matter what I said. And you know, even after everything,
even after I was acquitted and I was freed, I thought, oh, well, okay, wow,
(46:15):
I'm I'm lucky. There are plenty of people who were
in my situation who never got out. And then I
had to come to peace with the idea that, okay,
so I am free and I do get to have
my life back. It's just, you know, I'm going to
be one of those people who everyone in the world
is going to think as a monster or suspect as
a monster for the rest of my life, and I'm
just gonna have to come to peace with that. And
(46:36):
you know, like when the Twitter trolls just roll in
every day and like reaffirm that for you, I just
had to come to peace with that. And then you know,
the documentary comes out and suddenly people who just like
really quickly drew conclusions about me that suggested that I
was guilty. As soon as they saw that and saw
that the that I'm a real person, for one thing,
(46:59):
and that the case was more complex than what they thought,
suddenly they started vocalizing that they were sorry, Like people
were saying sorry to me for like jumping to conclusions
about me. And I never expected that to happen, Like
I I had come to peace with the idea that
unless you met me, you probably hated me. And as
(47:20):
soon as I walk into a room, there's a doppleganger
version of myself that's preceded me that you're all judging
prior to me even entering that room, And I'm going
to have to relate to that doppleganger Verton of myself
before I'm ever going to be able to interact with
you as a person. And I am continually finding like
(47:40):
I'm the type of person who doesn't believe something unless
I like I see it and I can and there's
proof of it, And so I am finding proof. I mean,
I believe that human beings are good deep down, and
I think that we're smart deep down, and so I
feel like as soon as we come face to face
with each other. We are we're able to recognize each
other humanity. Um, what I am finding with great joy
(48:04):
is that some people don't even need to see me
face to face in order to realize that I'm a
human being. And that means the world to me, because
I had come to peace with the idea that that
wasn't going to be my reality, that was just going
to be my fate to be that girl that people
suspected forever and didn't really think of as a person
and judged not as a person. So I don't know,
(48:25):
I'm sorry. I hope it doesn't like break your ardor
like skew your understanding of what kind of person I am.
But I'm just practical. It would be nice if I
could say, like, no, I knew in the end that
it was going to work out. But the sad thing
is you don't. Anyone who's wrongfully convicted doesn't know if
it's going to work out for them, And it sucks,
and it's sad, and your world is sad, and that's
(48:47):
just the reality of it. And it takes people like
you and people like me and people like our listeners
to care about that situation enough to do something about it,
because it's not just gonna work itself out. It doesn't
work itself out. People undo their mistakes, and it requires
people to do it, and and nobody wins. My wrongful
(49:09):
conviction occurs because there's no favor there to the victim
or the victims family, or to society, which in many
cases allows the well in almost all cases allows the
actual perpetrator to roam free and commit new atrocities. And
of course then there's the very human toll on people
like yourself. So I want to wrap up by talking
(49:33):
about Amanda. Now. Now it's wonderful because I'm no longer
being hunted down by some big, you know, crazy legal
authority that's an entire country, Like, I'm no longer having
to deal with that kind of pressure in my life.
And I can actually look forward, as opposed to just
sort of like be really present and be constantly aware
(49:54):
of like what's coming at me. I can actually just
like breathe, look forward and kind of put myself out there.
And I'm writing a lot. I'm coming up with these
creative projects to try to to try to, you know,
share my ideas with the world. And I'm here talking
to you and and I'm going out of my way
to vocalize my thoughts and experiences in ways that I
(50:17):
didn't feel like I was able to before because I
wasn't in a position of safety or or ability. Even
I I thought for the longest time that my life
was going to be one where I had to live
in the shadows and cower, and that was going to
be my life And that's not what's happening to me now.
And I'm so grateful for that, because I hated the
(50:40):
idea that somehow I had to pay with my life
for this thing that I didn't do, for the mistakes
that the prosecution make, for the terrible crime that Rudy
get A committed, Like somehow I had to pay with
my life for that. And like people told me all
the time, like, oh, you should just change your name
so you don't have to deal with it. And eventually,
you know, ten years from now, you're not going to
(51:00):
look the same, so it's not going to be different.
And it's like, you know what, No, there's nothing wrong
with being Amanda Knox. Amanda Knox didn't do anything. I'm
a I'm a good person. I'm just fine. And in fact,
if you just gave me the chance to be a person.
You would see that too. So I didn't like the
idea of like my myself being compromised somehow by something
(51:23):
that had nothing to do with me. And um, and instead,
you know, I've I've now been able to like embrace
the fact that this happened to me and that it's
a part of me. But it's not, you know, the
thing that defines me. The thing that defines me is
how I've reacted to it, and um, and that feels
wonderful and like I'm I feel recognized in a way
(51:46):
that I never imagined that I was going to feel.
And it's so I'm so grateful, Like I'm so grateful
that people are like seeing me as a human being
and and seeing what I went through and caring about
it like no one had to do that, no one
had to care about me, and and they and they
do and that means the world to me. Um, and
(52:08):
I just I just want other people to feel that.
You know, well, I can tell you that it's it's
quite extraordinary just being around you and soaking up the
sort of energy that you put out there because it's
so positive and it's so healing. And it's been, like
(52:30):
I said, in a humbling experience for me to be
able to have you on the show now twice, and
I look forward to watching you continue to grow and
heal and excel. And you know, and I know we'll
be seeing each other again at various events and we
(52:51):
will both continue to fight for justice because that's what
we're here for. You've been listening to Wrongful Conviction with
Jason fla Um and our guests, the Amazing, the one
and only Amanda Enough. Thanks for listening. We'll see you
next week on Wrongful Conviction. Jason flam don't forget to
(53:18):
give us a fantastic review. Wherever you get your podcasts,
it really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the
Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in
supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future
wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn
how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank
our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music
(53:41):
on the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer
Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction podcast. Wrongful
Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one will
be Good.
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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