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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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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. It was just this terrible, horrific crime scene that showed absolutely struggle and and uh so I'm really grateful that 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.