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(gentle music) (cheerful music) - [Announcer] And now the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival featuring journalists, newsmakers and innovators from around the country in conversation about the issues making headlines.

Thank you for joining us for "Criminal" with Amanda Knox, moderated by Phoebe Judge.

Before we begin, a special thank you to our founding sponsor, the Killinger Foundation, and our host sponsor, Amazon.

Lastly, events like this one are possible because of the incredible support of our members.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

I'm Phoebe Judge, host of the "Criminal" podcast.

In 2009, Amanda Knox was convicted in an Italian court for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.

Years later, she was acquitted and began the process of figuring out what came next.

Amanda Knox, welcome.

- Thank you so much for having me.

(audience applauding) - I wanna start with the day you got out of prison in 2011.

What do you remember about that day?

- Oh, wow.

Yeah, so it was the middle of the night, first of all.

We got a very, very late in the middle of the night verdict.

And I spent almost the entire day in the office of the prison chaplain, Don Sallow, who had become my dearest friend in prison.

And we talked together, he held my hand, we cried.

And he was 100% convinced that I was going home.

And that was a big thing for me because at that point in my journey, I didn't have faith in the criminal justice system anymore.

It had already failed me once.

And so I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when I walked back into that courtroom.

And so it was handed down, I was going home.

I came, I was driven back to the prison.

Not in a prison van, like a caged animal, but in a, you know, in a police car.

And the entire prison, which had been watching on TV, erupted in cheers, everyone screaming "Liberta, liberta, liberta," banging pots and pans on the window panes.

And I was given a very short amount of time to rush back into my cell, gather a few of my belongings, break my toothbrush, which is customary.

- Why?

- Well, you, so you break your toothbrush so that you, yourself, don't go back to prison.

It's a lucky thing, kind of like salt over your shoulder.

So you break your own toothbrush, and then when you leave, you also brush your foot against the threshold going out of the prison to carry the next person with you.

And then I was put into a car and entered into my "Bourne Identity" phase of my life where I was being chased by paparazzi and helicopters and that lasted for a while.

- I mean, I've always wondered, you know, did you feel like at any moment they can say, "This is a mistake."

When the wheels get up, I'm okay.

- I mean, I think that I lived in a state of surreality for a good week, especially when, so we, again, this "Bourne Identity" phase of my journey when I had to be driven to a safe house because again, it was in the middle of the night and the flight to take me home wasn't until the next morning.

And so I was driven to the safe house where a secret place outside of Rome some supporter had.

And I was there with my mom and an ex-FBI agent who I just met for the first time, who was like our bodyguard.

And we finally laid our heads to rest.

And I found that I couldn't bring myself to fall asleep, not just because of the adrenaline rush, but I was sitting there in this chair, I'll never forget, just watching my mom sleep.

And I was so afraid of closing my eyes because I thought, if I wake up, I'm gonna wake up back in a prison cell.

Like this is all a dream.

- Your case was all over the news, all over the world.

While you were in prison, how did you experience that celebrity?

How much of that did you know was going on?

- Yeah, celebrity wouldn't be the word that I would put to it.

It wasn't a good thing to be the most famous one in prison.

Let's just say that.

And there are complicated political nuances to that.

I think the biggest and most human level one being that the vast majority, the women that I was imprisoned with were forgotten.

No one cared about them.

And so they looked at me and saw, you know, politicians coming to the prison to just do a prison visit, but really to come straight to my cell so that they could say that they talked to the infamous Amanda Knox.

And of course, everyone followed the case, and it was just, it meant that I was living under constant scrutiny, even while I was in a prison cell, which made for a very lonely existence, a lonely and often paranoid, hypervigilant existence.

To be under that level of scrutiny I was aware of in the prison environment to a certain extent, but then it was a whole other level to come home to every single news channel, having my face and my name, you know, people coming to the airport and in a lot of times supportive ways.

Like it wasn't just, you know, paparazzi and people, like, it wasn't just me having to show up at a press conference, there were also people like, holding up signs saying, "Welcome home, Amanda."

My local record store said, "Welcome home, Amanda."

And I was just like, "What is happening right now?"

And here I was like all these years in prison thinking that I was gonna get to go back to being just local, anonymous, like Seattle college student.

And I very quickly realized that that world and that life didn't exist anymore.

And I'll be honest, it was hella awkward.

It's awkward.

It's awkward when people know you for the worst experience of your life.

I knew that there was this figure, this idea of Amanda Knox that was out there, this idea of Foxy Knoxy, but I also knew that that idea preyed upon or played upon people's expectations or their own, what they were projecting onto that image of me.

And so I felt like there was this constant doppelganger version of me that existed between me and other people.

- You know, I wonder if, one of the things you talk about is how scrutinized every action that you did while you were on trial was looked at.

You know, you talk about how you wore a t-shirt on Valentine's Day that said, "All you need is love," and people thought you were being flipped.

You wrote, you know, in your latest memoir, "Free" that when you smiled at your family, you were seen as kind of vamping for the cameras., or if you didn't smile, you were seen as cold and calculating.

And so nothing you could do was right.

Your family suggested at one point that you start wearing a cross when you went to court because they knew how closely you're being watched.

What was the cross going to do?

- Well, in Italian courtrooms, there is a big cross hanging above the judge.

And so it was, they understood that part of what was happening to me was a lost in translation, cultures colliding kind of issue.

And they wanted people to see me for who I really was.

And they noted that the way that I was being represented was through this very stereotypical misogynistic lens.

I was the American girl gone wild.

I was the drug addled whore.

- You were what a father wouldn't want their daughter to be?

- Absolutely.

And I think that the way that the case presented itself to the world was, there are two versions of femininity.

There is the victim who was pure and virginal, and then there's the perpetrator, the drug addled whore.

And when these two women come into contact with each other, what inevitably arises is a pornographic murder scene.

And there was these assumptions about how women naturally hate other women, which I was just really unprepared for.

I mean, I was 20 at the time, so I was really unprepared for the entirety of the thing.

But it's taken me a long time to process how Meredith, my roommate and my friend, who met a brutal end at the hands of a man, a man committed this crime, raped and murdered her, how that was twisted into a fantasy about women hating each other and women committing violence against each other.

- Did you think when you got home about just disappearing?

- Well, that would've been an interesting option were it were available to me.

I think that the helicopters following me back from the airport, and then for the months afterwards, like I lived a pretty quiet lowdown trying to be as invisible as possible life.

- You tried to disappear.

It didn't work.

- No.

- So you wrote a memoir?

- Yeah, I mean, I was still on trial, so I still had a big old target on my back when I wrote the memoir.

And I think what also made it difficult was, I thought, you know, memoirs happening, I get to finally tell my side of the story because there's been a million people out there already, four years in prison where people are putting out there, who is Amanda Knox?

What is her real story?

What's her sex, like, sex life?

Like, just getting really detailed, intimate about me as a person, not just about the case.

And I felt like I needed to put my one voice out there to set the record straight and to clarify some things.

And then the Italian justice system decided to overturn my acquittal right when my book came out.

And so suddenly, any interviews that I might have had would've been about, "Oh, tell us your story about being wrongly convicted," turned into, "Did you or did you not murder your roommate Meredith Kercher?"

And I had to go through that whole experience all over again of being interrogated by what I assumed were my authority figures, these people who I had seen on television, grown up watching on television.

I didn't know what my relationship was to them.

I didn't know, it felt like they had all the power to tell my story.

And so I just had to show up and do exactly what they told me, which is the exact same mistake that I had made with the police.

- I mean, did you think, you know, you had been released from prison, you were reconvicted of murder, but then you were exonerated.

Did you finally think in 2014, listen, this is two times now where it's not me, you know, that this would be the end, that it people would finally get it - For the record if anyone's not clear on what happened.

I was convicted and then I was acquitted, and then I was convicted again because they just did the thing all over again.

And then the Supreme Court in Italy overturned that and definitively acquitted us.

And so it was an eight year ordeal.

And there was that period there between getting out of prison and it being definitively done where I could have been extradited back to Italy at any point.

And so once that was over, I mean, that was, you know, very shortly after I met the man who eventually became my husband.

And that was great because it was like one of the first times where I met someone out in the wild, like one does, and thought, oh my gosh, I can make friends with people now like a normal person.

At the same time, Italy acquitted me of having anything to do with my roommate's murder, right?

They did not say Amanda wasn't there.

They left open the possibility that I was present when this crime occurred and that I witnessed it.

And so, what that meant though was that as soon as that, like I idea remained, maybe she was there when it happened.

It meant that I was the liar.

That I was lying when I said I wasn't there.

That I was keeping information from the world that would've revealed the truth of what had happened to my roommate and I was just choosing not to tell it.

- So earlier this year, Italy's Supreme Court upheld your conviction for slandering your former boss, Patrick Lumumba.

- Yes.

- During your interrogation.

- Yes.

- You had named him as being involved in the murder.

Looking back now, what do you think was happening in that interrogation room?

And and why do you think you did that?

- So what happened is the police from the beginning believed that the crime had been committed by someone who had access to the house.

So they looked at this break-in that had happened.

I called the police, reported a break-in, and my prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, took one look at the crime scene and said, "That is not a real break-in.

That is a staged break-in that is somebody trying to cover up for a crime."

So assuming that they then logically deduced that it was probably me because I was the foreigner, I was the one who called the, I was the first one to the crime scene.

I was the one who was acting a little bit differently than other people not realizing that I was the youngest and I didn't speak Italian, so I was struggling to understand what was going on.

So from the beginning, the police and the prosecution were looking at me.

They, you know, no one else, they didn't tap their phones, they only tapped my phone.

That's how we know.

And then over the course of many days, they interviewed me, unbeknownst to me more than anybody else.

They brought me in for I think 53 hours of questioning over five days.

So I was like inordinate amounts of time at the police's disposal, answering their questions over and over and over again.

And what they were doing over the coast of those days was trying to get me to say things that were inconsistent.

So they would ask me, "Okay, what time did you last see Meredith?"

Or, "What time did you have dinner that night?"

And I was, you know, doing my best making guesses.

I wasn't looking at my clock the entire time.

And at a certain point, they, upon hearing that my mom was going to be arriving in Italy, they realized that they had a last chance to get me to confess.

And so they brought me in and my boyfriend, who was my alibi in the middle of the night, they separated us, and then they started a guilt presumptive interrogation process where they accused us, they bullied us, they lied to us, they gaslit us, they broke my boyfriend first.

Apparently.

He said, well, maybe I fell asleep and I can't account for where she was after I fell asleep.

They come in and tell me, your boyfriend says that you weren't with him that night.

And they tell me that I must have witnessed the crime.

And it was so horrible that I couldn't remember it.

I must have blacked it out.

But there was proof that I had met with my boss, Patrick Lumumba, the night of the murder, because they found a text message on my phone where I had texted him back saying, "Hey, have a good night.

See you later."

He had told me I didn't need to come in that night and for work.

They interpreted that, see you later as an appointment to meet him.

And said, that was proof that I had met him that night and that I was covering for him.

So over the course of hours and hours of being screamed at and lied to and slapped in the back of the head, like I started to doubt my own sanity.

And I started to believe what they were telling me that I had must have witnessed this crime and didn't realize it.

And so I signed statements to those effects after hours, and then they let me sleep.

And once I woke up from a sleep, I immediately told them, this is all wrong.

I need to change my statement.

They said it was too late.

And so I asked for a piece of paper and a pen, and I wrote what is called my memoriale.

It was my retraction.

I retracted what I said.

And then they took me off to prison.

And I remained convicted for that crime to this day, which to them, what their definition of this crime is that I knowingly and willingly, falsely accused a man I knew for a fact to be innocent.

And that, I didn't commit that crime.

But what I did do was sign false statements under coercion.

- One of the most interesting things I think that you did also do is start writing to the man who prosecuted your case.

- Yes.

- In Italy, Giuliano Mignini, someone who had been so certain of your guilt, why did you start writing letters to him?

- Yeah.

That's a big part of the book.

And all these years as I've tried to like process his impact on my life, I've experienced him as a kind of boogeyman.

Here's this man who had so much power over me, who set a course for my life that I am now going to face the consequences of forever.

Like I am forever proving my innocence in response to the accusations that he leveled against me, that in many ways derived from a certain kind of fantasy that he cooked up that was based on nothing.

To give an example, his idea was that I had a, I was in a love triangle between the person who actually committed this crime, the murderer Rudy Guede, and my boyfriend Rafaele.

So he imagined that I was in this love triangle when there is zero, zero evidence.

Like I did not know Rudy's name.

We did not have each other's phone number.

No one ever saw us together.

Like this idea that we had this love triangle going on was completely made up for the sake of justifying his accusation against me.

So I know this person to be very dangerous, but do I know this person?

Do I understand this person?

I wanted to understand why he believed, why he looked at a 20-year-old girl who had never had anything bad happen to her in her life, who had never hurt anyone, who had never, who had no history of violence or criminal behavior, or even a bad grade in school and thought, there's my rapist and murderer.

Why?

Why was this my life?

Why did he do this to me?

And I think anyone who is hurt can resonate with that.

Like, if someone hurts you, you wanna know why.

And you wanna know if they care and you wanna know if they're sorry.

And at a certain point, I was just like, "I should ask him."

And I knew that if I confronted him the way that I had always encountered him, which was in this adversarial justice system, I wasn't going to get anywhere.

He's a lawyer.

He wants to argue, he wants to debate.

What would happen if I approached him, not with, you know, fist cuffs, but with an olive branch.

I reached out to him and I tried to imagine any kind of common ground that we might have which is what I think is the building blocks to any actual discussion that you might have with another human being.

You have to have a foundation of common ground.

And so recognizing that this case blew up in the media and went outta control, and everyone had their own opinion about it, and there were lots of different sides, I thought, I bet he feels misrepresented too.

And so when I reached out to him, I said, "Dr. Mignini, I don't know who you are and I don't think you know who I am, and I think we both have been misrepresented, and I really want to know who you are and I want to understand you."

And he responded.

And you know, to his credit, he responded because another thing that he could have done was completely ignore me and he didn't.

And then finally, like, he started this discourse with me and it just so happened to coincide with the pandemic.

So my original intention of going there and meeting him in person and confronting him face to face was put on hold.

And I spent, I don't know what you guys were doing during the pandemic, but I was corresponding with my prosecutor and talking about, you know, the latest Star Trek episode with him and like learning things about him outside of this criminal justice case that we had found ourselves enmeshed in.

And he was deeply moved by the fact that I cared to know who he was and that I cared to give him the benefit of the doubt to recognize his humanity, to be genuinely curious about him in ways that he had not been curious about me.

And you know, another huge through line in the book is my relationship with my mother.

This was the one time in her entire life where she did not want to support me.

She did not want me to go back.

And she did not understand this.

She thought I was in like, I had Stockholm syndrome or something.

Like, what is going, you know?

Like, she was like, "What are you doing?

Why are you putting yourself back in danger?

Why are you doing this to our family?

Like, everything that this man has put us through, he is not worth it."

And at the time, I didn't have the language to convey to her what I was attempting to do.

I just had this like deep feeling that I needed, I needed him to know who I was.

And so I showed up.

And, you know, I don't wanna give everything away, I hope you all get a copy of my book.

But what I will say is that a holding, like recognizing the humanity of a another person or holding out an olive branch does not mean that you just forget about the bad things that they did to you.

It does not.

And it does not necessitate that.

Like I showed up and I confronted him.

I told him, you know, "You were wrong about me.

I am innocent and this is the level of pain that you have caused to me and my family and so many people that you do not know."

But the flip side of that is that, that for me, like I said that, and then I also, "And you are a person who I genuinely believe thought he was doing the right thing.

I think you believed what you were doing.

And so I don't think that you are a bad person.

And you know what?

I don't even hate you.

I actually am, in a weird way, am grateful to you because there are things that I know about myself and the world now because of you.

I am a better person because of what you did to me.

And because I have the opportunity now to confront you."

And his response was really interesting.

And again, you'll have to read the book, (audience laughing) but to go back to the mom of it all, I told my mom all about it afterwards and her response was, "Too little, too late.

Not good enough."

And my response to my mom was, "It's not about him anymore.

It's not about what he said or he didn't say, what he did or what he didn't do.

It was about me and what I did and what I said and how I showed up."

(audience applauding) It's not his story anymore.

It's not his story to tell anymore.

And when my mom like finally heard that and like, I think it really clicked for her that she understood what I was doing.

But at the same time, like as I talk about in my book, like I'm a mom now too.

The minute that my daughter was born, I recognized that my mom's pain throughout this entire process was more than anything that I experienced.

She would've taken everything upon herself if she could have.

And so her anger and inability to forgive my prosecutor was deeper than mine and different than mine.

And both of those things are valid at the same time.

We can hold each other up and we can hold each other's pain even though they're different and we have different ways of confronting them.

- How do you say to your children, yeah, it's really bad.

You know, that's, - Yeah.

- It's like we can recover and we know when we can recover, but I can't assure you that the world works as it should.

- Right.

And sometimes we don't recover.

Like there were two young women who went to go study abroad in Perugia, Italy, and only one of them survived to tell the tale.

So sometimes we don't recover.

And so far we haven't gotten into the nuance of that yet 'cause my daughter is three, (audience laughing) but she has started to ask me a lot about death because when I first started telling her about this story, I told her that someone hurt her friend.

And everyone thought that mama hurt her friend.

But eventually she dug deeper into that and realized that my friend had died and she didn't quite understand what that meant.

And so we've had to have the conversation of like, dying is when, there is no tomorrow.

And I think she's still wrapping her brain around that.

But like to your point, like it's going to take time for me to say like, "I will always be here for you.

But that doesn't mean that the world is always going to be fair and that everything's always going to be all right.

All I can tell you is that right now in this moment, we are okay."

- Well, I wanna thank you very much, Amanda for talking.

This has been great.

Thank you all very much for coming.

And thank you again, Amanda.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) (cheerful music) (cheerful music continues)