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ITV News
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ITV News
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.
The Independent
26-03-2025
- The Independent
Amanda Knox insists ‘I really honour Meredith's memory' as she defends memoir
Amanda Knox has defended releasing her latest memoir by saying honouring her murdered flatmate Meredith Kercher's past 'does not mean erasing my own'. The 37-year-old criticised Ms Kercher's family's lawyer who said 'the initiatives of Knox continue to be inappropriate and disrespectful', as she told ITV's Good Morning Britain (GMB) that he can 'very politely keep his opinions to himself'. Ms Knox said she hoped Ms Kercher's family would read her second memoir, adding: 'I really honour Meredith's memory.' Officers discovered the body of British foreign exchange student Ms Kercher in her bedroom in Perugia on November 2 2007. They said the 21-year-old's throat had been slashed and she had been sexually assaulted. Ms Knox and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested and later convicted of murder and sexual assault in 2009. The couple maintained their innocence and, after years of legal battles, she and Mr Sollecito were acquitted of sexual assault and murder by Italy's highest court in 2015. Rudy Hermann Guede was convicted of Ms Kercher's murder in 2008. Questioned on whether releasing her second memoir would risk looking as if she was capitalising on her own tragedy, Ms Knox told GMB: 'Well, I would say that my first book was a very different one to this book. 'I'm very proud of Waiting To Be Heard. It was written at a time when I felt like so many people were authoring my experience and saying what it was and I felt like I needed to set the record straight. 'It was written at a time when I was deeply immersed in the legal saga and in proving my innocence. 'Today, I look at this as an opportunity to share a story of, not erasing the past but really learning from the past so that we can live better lives, personally and as a society.' Asked about the impact her book could have on Ms Kercher's family, Ms Knox said: 'I hope that they read my book because I really honour Meredith's memory in the book but I also believe that honouring her past and story does not mean erasing my own. 'I am a person who is continuing to pursue justice in this case but a bigger issue that I try and speak to and free is how do we all overcome the traumas that are in our lives, regardless of whether or not we get what we deserve.' Ms Knox was also asked to respond to the words of Ms Kercher's family's lawyer, Francesco Maresca, who said: 'It's evident that for Knox the Perugia trial continues to be a source of income and a series of opportunities to maintain her name in the media.' In response, Ms Knox told GMB: 'Well, I would say that he's a hypocrite, honestly, as someone who himself has profited not just off the work that he has done on the case but in writing his own book, I think that Mr Maresca can very politely keep his opinions to himself. 'He has always been very much a man who has never, ever considered my humanity and experience and is subject to something that I like to call single victim fallacy. 'The idea that in a tragic event, there can only be one victim, and that is simply not true so I think, I don't really care what Mr Maresca thinks, to be frank.'
