2 days ago
How Amanda Knox tells her kids their mummy was jailed for murder
Amanda Knox's every move has been scrutinised for nearly all of her adult life.
The murder of Meredith Kercher - and the subsequent arrest, trial, conviction, imprisonment, acquittal and release of Knox, then her retrial, second conviction, and ultimately her definitive exoneration by Italy's Supreme Court in 2015 - is a story that has made headlines around the world for almost twenty years.
Amanda is now 37, a wife to an author and podcaster, Christopher Robinson, and a mother of two children, Eureka and Echo, but still - as she put it to me - she is "forever branded the girl accused of murder".
I first met Amanda Knox when I worked for ITV in the US in 2013. I had negotiated with her legal team and her family for months, for her to agree to do an interview with us.
As soon as she agreed, we travelled from the East coast to the West to meet her, in her hometown of Seattle.
On the day we were to record the interview, we set up, and then just sat and waited and waited and waited for her to arrive at the hotel, and I was nervous. Would she turn up?
What would she really be like?
Was she a murderer or not?
When I met her, she had been cleared and freed two years earlier and flown straight back to the US, but here we were, 24 months on, and she was about to be retried in absentia for Meredith Kercher's murder. Knox was terrified of being extradited back to Italy.
I was a journalist, yes, but I had watched everything the British public had watched, everything they'd read in those six years, since her name first hit the headlines in 2007.
My fascination was heightened even further because, at 21, I too had gone on a year abroad to a foreign country to study a different language, and had a British roommate.
I was gripped, completely gripped, by the intrigue that encircled Amanda Knox. The salacious details of the case and the relentless media circus that surrounded her, had fuelled it.
I knew I'd be adding to that by doing this interview, but she wanted to do it to plead her innocence again, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to meet her.
When she turned up that day in Seattle, she was softly-spoken, polite and articulate, yet deeply traumatised.
Twelve years on from that meeting, and she was similarly calm and composed, but within minutes of us saying "hello", that calmness was interrupted by her 18-month old son Echo.
He'd burst into the room at her end, just as the Zoom call was beginning.
He doesn't ever like to be parted from her for long, she told me.
For me though, it was a sudden realisation how her life has changed and evolved, and that time does move on, even though perceptions often don't.
She had agreed to chat to me this time, because her second book, Free - My Search for Meaning, has just been published.
Naturally, she wants to promote it and she is no stranger to putting pen to paper.
Her first book was called Waiting To Be Heard, so I asked why she felt the need to write another one, and if she does now finally feel free.
"I'm not known for something I did; I am known for something that I didn't do and am treated as a morbid curiosity," she told me.
"When people think of this case they don't remember Meredith's name, they remember mine. They don't even remember the murderer's name, they just remember mine.
"This is the story of how I have survived that experience, how I navigated the prison environment and how I discovered upon being released from prison, that I did not go back to being an anonymous person.
"My very identity is tied up and attached to the death of my friend."
I then asked her if every day feels like she's on trial - people in the street, Mums in the playground - wondering, did she or didn't she? "I feel like I am going to spend the rest of my life proving my innocence," she replied.
Amanda moved to Perugia in Italy to study, aged 20. So had Meredith Kercher, but her body was found in the home they shared. She had been raped and brutally murdered on 2 November, 2007.
Both girls' lives changed forever. Suspicion soon fell on Amanda and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
They'd only being seeing each other for four days at that point.
Amanda and Raffaele were both found guilty of Meredith's murder in a high-profile court case, that was as much a media battle as a legal one.
She was cemented into the public's psyche as "Foxy Noxy," which was a nickname given to her in 5th grade because she was a good soccer player, and it was picked up by the media from her Myspace page after she was arrested in Italy.
But, it is the prosecutor in her murder trial - Giuliano Mignini - who put her in jail for 4 years - who is the person she holds responsible for creating the "she-devil, femme fatale" narrative around her.
"He, from the very beginning, has been a nightmarish figure in my life," she said. "He created a monster from an innocent person."
In her new book, Amanda writes about the relationship she has since established with him, and her need to return to Italy - after the pandemic - to meet him face to face.
Her family did not want her to, but she did. I asked her about it: "You went back to Italy because you wanted to meet him. Why did you do that? What did you want from that?"
"I think that everyone who has been hurt by another human being wants to know why and wants to know if the person who hurt them realises what they did," she replied.
"Did you want him to change his mind, Amanda?"
"Of course I did"
"Did he?," I pushed.
"I would say, yes," she said. "His perspective about the case has evolved with time and with coming to know me as a human being. He does not believe that I am capable of the crime now."
We also talked about the mistakes she's made since being released, her struggles with what freedom really means for her, her friendship with Monica Lewinsky, another vilified woman in the United States, and the ultimate effect it's had on her family.
Amanda got emotional several times in the interview about how, now that she is a mother, she finally understands how her own mother felt watching her be wrongfully convicted, go to prison and be helpless to do anything about it.
She said the first thing she said to her own daughter, just minutes after Eureka was born, was, "I'm sorry."
Amanda is fearful that she will pass on her trauma, and the stigma that she lives with, to her children.
Then, she went on to tell me what I have never heard her say before.
How she has explained her murder conviction to her daughter. This is what she said to Eureka, who is three years old:
"When Mummy was young, Mummy went to go study in a foreign country, and it was beautiful, and she made friends. And then out of the blue, someone hurt her friend really badly and they thought Mummy hurt her friend and so they put Mummy in jail. And then Mummy had to prove that she was innocent and she got out of prison and she got on with her life. She met papa. She had you. The end."
But how Eureka has interpreted the story made me gasp.
Amanda revealed: "She'll now want to play 'Mummy Goes to Italy' with me. So, she'll have me re-enact being behind prison bars or she'll pretend to be Mummy.
"Like if we see a playground where they have bars, she'll be like, oh look, 'I'm Mummy in prison'.
"She is processing it the way children process things, which is through play."
Despite what Amanda Knox and her family have endured, I was at pains to talk about Meredith.
She is the 21-year old at the heart of this story.
A young, British girl murdered on her exciting, year abroad by Rudy Guede, a known burglar, who served 13 years of a 16 year sentence for the crime.
I asked Amanda if she thought about Meredith.
"Oh my God, every day. She was just like me, she was one year older than me, she liked to read, she was studying journalism, she loved the Italian culture and the Italian language.
"We had so much in common, and everything was taken from her. I think about her a lot."
The Kercher family has never wished to engage with Amanda.
"Does it bother you that they perhaps don't think you're innocent?" I asked her.
"It 100% bothers me. I've literally never had access to Meredith's family, ever. I've never met them.
"They don't know who I am, and they only know me through the worst context possible."
I was curious as to what she would say to them now, after all this time has passed.
"I want to grieve with you. And, it's not fair what happened, it's not. And I understand why it feels like [they] never got justice for her because [they] didn't. And, and I care about that."
Whatever your own thoughts are on Amanda's innocence or guilt, the legal facts remain.
She has been definitively exonerated of Meredith's murder.
Meredith's killer was tried, jailed, and has served his sentence and been released from prison.
The legal purgatory is over for Amanda Knox, but the cultural purgatory will probably always remain.
