From the Archives: Amanda Knox Navigates Labyrinths

Amanda knows about living inside other people’s preconceptions. When she was 22 years old, she was sentenced to 26 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. In 2007, on a study-abroad program in Perugia, Italy, Amanda’s roommate Meredith Kurcher was raped and murdered. The police and the tabloids pinned it on “Foxy Knoxy,” calling Amanda a sex-crazed murderer. After spending almost a decade in the labyrinth of the Italian criminal justice system, Amanda was fully exonerated. Today, she lives in her hometown of Seattle and, with her husband, has a podcast called Labyrinths https://www.amandaknox.com/labyrinths.html about the mazes we find ourselves in. Originally aired March 16, 2021 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. In 2009, Amanda Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison for a crime she didn't commit. You probably remember her case. Amanda was a foreign exchange student in Perugia, Italy in 2007 when her roommate Meredith Kircher was raped and murdered. Despite a lack of physical evidence linking her to the crime, Knox spent almost a decade of her life stuck in the maze of the Italian criminal justice system. Amanda Knox is 33 now and lives in Seattle. Last year, she and her husband launched a podcast called Labyrinths.

• 1:53Alec Baldwin?

  In December, they put out a special episode to mark the release from prison of Meredith Kircher's actual killer, Rudy Gadday.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Well, thank you for being here on this labyrinth with me.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Should he have gotten a life sentence? I don't think so. I would not wish an unreasonably harsh sentence on anyone. I would wish them only true rehabilitation. Gidey's lawyers say he's well along that path. Maybe so. But I do know one thing. So long as he refuses to admit his crimes, to show true regret, I will continue to unjustly bear his infamy, be held accountable for the curtsor's grief, be shamed for not showing remorse for Gidey's crime. He could end all that in a second.

• 2:50Alec Baldwin?

  Amanda Knox knows what it's like to be stuck inside someone else's preconception of you.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  So the work that I'm doing now is I'm a podcaster, I'm a journalist. I very often, especially in my journalism, am focusing on criminal justice issues, not just wrongful conviction issues, but more broad criminal justice issues. I'm on the board of the Frederick Douglass Project, which is working to build bridges between the incarcerated population and the non-incarcerated population. So I'm deeply interested in that divide. But my podcast work, and Labyrinth's being the podcast that I've devoted so much energy and love into this past year, is about how people navigate being lost.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  We just had a 12-episode season that concluded on January 1st with an interview with LeVar Burton, which was super fun.

• 3:45Alec Baldwin?

  And you discussed what with him, for example?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  We talked about his career and how he could have done a lot of different things, like how he was on the path to becoming a Catholic priest, except that this one thing happened. And then he very well could have gone into politics, except that this thing happened. So we had this really fun, we actually had a lot of fun with that episode because Chris and I decided to become super nerdy and go sci-fi. And we created alternate dimensions where we talked to Catholic priest LeVar Burton.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Politician LeVar Burton.

• 4:20Alec Baldwin?

  He's so talented.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a sweetheart. He was so nice. But we cover a lot of ground in the, in the season. And we go from anywhere from like, super, super dramatic stories. Like, we interviewed Samantha Geimer, who was the, the

• 4:34Alec Baldwin?

  The Polanski case.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  14-year-old girl who was raped by Roman Polanski. Yeah. And how, like, interestingly, speaking of, you know, people using individual human beings, like, worst experiences of their lives as entertainment that they're entitled to. And as a profit-making machine, like, that was her story. And she didn't react the way, or didn't want the things that people expected a rape victim to want. And so they vilified her. Because she actually wanted some kind of amicable resolution with Polanski. And they themselves found amicable resolutions behind closed doors. While the rest of society was still trying to churn up this, like, victim and villain narrative.

• 5:18Alec Baldwin?

  What's the name of the podcast?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Labyrinth.

• 5:21Alec Baldwin?

  Labyrinth.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  There was actually a really awesome comic that was drawn and came out shortly after I got out of prison. Which showed me escaping the labyrinth of the Italian criminal justice system. And I felt that that was a really beautiful metaphor. And what I've found is that not only is my own case, you know, it's remarkable and unique in a lot of ways. But it's also totally not remarkable and unique in the sense that it has all the telltale signs of wrongful convictions that happen here in the United States. But also, like, the feeling of going through that experience of being lost and feeling like there's this overpowering force that's like, you can't actually navigate and control.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  You're sort of like, on this journey and you don't know how it's going to end. That's an experience that lots of people have. I remember going back to school and taking a poetry class. And there was a girl in my poetry class who was really clicking with my poetry. And I wasn't, you know, writing explicitly like, I'm Amanda Knox, I was in prison for a crime, but in command. It was more just like, very Emotional and eventually one day she figured out who I was. And she said, oh, my God, you're Amanda Knox. And I was like, oh, no, like, what Google rabbit hole has she gone down now?

• 6:39Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  And instead, she said, no, no, you don't understand. I was gang raped when I was 16. And the feeling of what you went through feels like what I went through when I was gang raped at 16. And I was like, wow. So the fact that like, I sit, I sit in this very weird position where I'm a not very usual wrongfully convicted person.

• 7:05Alec Baldwin?

  In what way?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Well, I'm female, for one thing.

• 7:08Alec Baldwin?

  Who's usually wrongfully convicted?

• 7:10Speaker 04

  People who are usually wrongfully convicted tend to be, especially in this country, tend to be young men from impoverished backgrounds and young men of color.

• 7:21Alec Baldwin?

  And that's because they can't afford a good defense?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  I mean, that's part of it. There's also a lot of biases that go into it. There's a lot of sort of hysteria around youth culture, like even just issues with like gangs. That's an issue where it's like, you know, a lot of people don't understand that kids, just by virtue of living in a neighborhood, are sort of associated with gangs, even if they have never committed a crime. And so suddenly you're like in a gang book and you're identifiable as a gang member, but that's only because you happen to live in that neighborhood and you happen to associate with a number of people who also live in that neighborhood. You know, those kinds of things. But the major thing is that the criminal justice system is a system that was built by men for men.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Because the vast majority of people who are committing crimes are men. And for someone like me to be put through the criminal justice system as a defendant is highly unusual. I come from a middle-class background. I come from an educated background. I have no history of, you know, behavioral problems or anything like that. Like, I'm usually what, I mean, actually, usually the victims of crimes also happen to be young men of color. But generally, when you think of someone like me, the media presents someone like me as a crime victim. And for me to be in a position of being able to both sympathize with what it is like

• 8:49Speaker 04

  to be a young woman who is victimized by a man and to be able to sympathize with the experience of young men who are being put through this incredibly unfair criminal justice process, that puts me in a unique position to like build bridges. And I kind of view my work as bridge building, as like acknowledging the complex humanity of people on both sides of the equation and being able to bring nuance back into the true crime genre, which I tend to feel has been more dominated by scandalous, salacious, black and white presentations

• 9:30Speaker 04

  of stories as opposed to more complicated ones. And a lot of times, like, a lot of people reach out to me thinking that I am going to be able to understand their humanity in a way that other people just don't or refuse to. And so a lot of the stories that I end up talking about are just people who have reached out to me.

• 9:51Alec Baldwin?

  So you're not somebody who people are coming to you and going, "I need you to fix this for me."

• 9:55Speaker 04

  I mean, a lot of people reach out to me asking me to fix things for them, but the truth of the matter is, I'm not a lawyer. So like, a lot of the people who would love for me to be able to do something about someone's case, like, I usually end up being the person who like directs them towards the innocence project that is like closest to their location. What I end up doing is I try to give a voice to the people who have felt like their voice has been stolen from them. And once again, it isn't necessarily someone who's been wrongfully convicted.

• 10:25Alec Baldwin?

  Did you come out of this experience, when you finally were free, did you come out of this with some divine ability to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't?

• 10:36Speaker 04

  No, I don't think anyone has that ability. No.

• 10:40Alec Baldwin?

  They don't.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely not. I think that what it gave me was a perspective that I wouldn't have had otherwise, but also a sensitivity to when I view people as being scapegoated. Whether they did something or not, I am very sensitive to when people become ideas of people and not actual people. And I can see that happening on a day-to-day basis.

• 11:09Alec Baldwin?

  What was the most consistent idea that you represented to people?

• 11:13Speaker 04

  That Foxy Knoxy was a drug-addled, sexually promiscuous, young woman who manipulates men to do her bidding. Like, there's this idea of, I think there was also this sense of, like, female jealousy that was imbued in me. So, basically, everything that is stereotypically bad about being a woman was sort of put on me. I was made to be this, like, jealous, sexually promiscuous, manipulative, druggie woman. And I came to embody that in the minds of people. And on the other hand, I also was, you know, portrayed as this, like, saint-like damsel in distress. And even in the courtroom, people were, you

• 11:58Speaker 04

  know, presenting me as, like, on the one hand, she has the face of an angel, on the other hand, she's really, like, the devil. Like, and it was like, how about, I'm neither? I'm just a young person who, like, my roommate was murdered and I had no idea what was going on, and everyone was speaking in Italian really fast, and I had no idea what was going on, and I got scared, and here I am. So...

• 12:25Alec Baldwin?

  How much time did you spend in the Italian prison, total?

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Four years.

• 12:28Alec Baldwin?

  My god.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  So, from age 20 to 24, I spent in a foreign prison.

• 12:35Alec Baldwin?

  And everybody in there with you was Italian?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Actually, the vast majority of the people who were in there were either Nigerian or Roma.

• 12:45Alec Baldwin?

  Interesting.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  I mean, there were plenty of Italians in there, and a lot of them were very, very poor Italian people who had ties to the drug trade and stuff like that. A lot, a lot of people in for drug offenses, whether they were drug mules or drug dealers.

• 13:02Alec Baldwin?

  Amanda Knox. If you like crime drama where the defendant is falsely accused, then listen to my conversation with filmmaker Joe Berlenger. Berlenger directed the Paradise Lost series of documentaries about the trial of the West Memphis Three.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  I mean, here you have allegedly a crime by three teens who are not professional killers who brought, according to the prosecutor, three little boys out into the woods and slaughtered them to death in this savage beating, and yet there was no blood found at the crime scene. And then you look at the confession, and the confession is riddled with inconsistencies and problems.

• 13:40Alec Baldwin?

  And coaching.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  And coaching. So within months, we knew that something was amiss.

• 13:44Alec Baldwin?

  Hear more of my conversation with Joe Berlenger at hereisthething.org. After the break, Amanda Knox describes the toll that her long wait for justice had on her family. Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 14:23Speaker 06

  Man, I'm a black and Mexican kid from San Pedro, and I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in L.A. was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like what we get to do with what we're given that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though.

• 14:59Alec Baldwin?

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:08Speaker 07

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• 15:40Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. After her release from prison, Amanda Knox wrote a memoir titled Waiting to be Heard. A few years later, Netflix released a documentary called simply Amanda Knox. However, she's resisted offers to participate in a feature film based on her experience.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  I actually very much pushed back against that. I mean, there's kind of a film that's sort of a narrative version of it. It's not worth watching. It's really bad. I mean, what I thought that the documentary did that a film couldn't do was it allowed everyone to sort of present their own thoughts and perspective about what happened. And it didn't claim to be like, it didn't have a scene where I either kill or don't kill Meredith Kircher, right? Like, the problem with having a film be about it is you're making some sort of, you're taking some stance about reality that is built up of a lot of claims of reality, but

• 16:46Speaker 04

  not necessarily reality. And in a situation where so much judgment is attached to that, I found that that was inevitably going to be flawed. Whereas a documentary that genuinely allows everyone to portray what they experienced and what they think about what they experienced...

• 17:09Alec Baldwin?

  And the facts as they know them.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  And the facts as they know them is going to be closer to the truth and also is going to present the crux of this issue. Which is that people are making claims about reality that they can't actually, you know, like sustain with evidence. What do we actually know? I want to preserve this sense of like, well, you know, the person who actually committed this crime, Rudy Gede, who no one ever talks about, is not someone who's forthcoming with what actually happened. We have the evidence of him at the crime scene, of him interacting with Meredith Spotty and leaving his fingerprints and footprints in her blood. We know that.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Do we have a camera on the wall where we see him doing it or we're in his mind? No.

• 17:57Alec Baldwin?

  Or he confesses, yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:59Alec Baldwin?

  And then imagine for you, you want to avoid that where they're going to leave it gray whether you really killed this girl or not. You know, a feature film is always going to be like, well, you know.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:09Alec Baldwin?

  That's a fear I would have.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the unfortunate thing about true crime in general is there is this sort of temptation to treat it fundamentally as an entertainment product. And due to that, like, the thing that is most entertaining is when people can walk away from the movie and just argue about it, you know? Like, if I feel this way about the case, you feel that way about the case, and, you know, now we can argue about it because it's unclear. And I think one of my big frustrations with my own case was that the prosecution, first of all, but also just people in general, always wanted to have this attitude of, well, the defense says this and the prosecution says that, and so, you know, there must be

• 18:55Speaker 04

  some sort of truth in between. Amanda must be guilty of something, we're not quite sure what it is, but she must be guilty of something. And that's actually like, one of the major reasons why I was retried and reconvicted. I don't know if you knew that, or maybe you've followed that in the documentary, but like, in Italy, the double jeopardy laws aren't the same. And so, when the sort of whole forensic case against me came crashing down after my acquittal, I was retried again, but on behavior. So basically, the prosecution said, sure, we can't actually place her at the crime scene, but she just didn't act like an innocent person.

• 19:36Alec Baldwin?

  Something about her.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was just something like, we can't be totally wrong. So like, something's got to be there. And I was reconvicted on that. Like, just on that sort of sense that there must be something there.

• 19:48Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. We don't have the evidence yet, but we're gonna find it, trust me.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, there's some, you know, like, ugh, I just got a vibe. And they bought that. And it wasn't until the Supreme Court, um,

• 19:57Alec Baldwin?

  They can't do that.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  I was on trial for eight years. And it wasn't until the Supreme Court swooped in and was like, where's the evidence? There's literally no evidence.

• 20:06Alec Baldwin?

  Explain to people who don't know, what are the extradition arrangements between Italy and the United States? Did they try to have you extradited? Because when you were convicted again, you didn't go back.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  Right. So the way that it worked was that there is an extradition treaty between the United States and Italy. And so while I was in trial there, I was in prison. And then I was acquitted, and I was allowed to go home. But I was still on trial. Like, they still pursued a case against me, and I was retried in absentia. So they had a whole trial without me in Italy while I was here living in the United States. And while that was going on, I had, I was meeting with lawyers here to see, like, depending on the outcome of this new trial, do I want to make a case to at least potentially serve my sentence

• 20:55Speaker 04

  here in the United States, so it's less of a burden on my family? So here I am, like, trying to go to college and go to school, but also making plans to potentially turn myself into the cops, in case there's a bad outcome in this, in this case, which there was. And I'm trying to, like, plan to, how am I gonna fight my case in court here in the US, to just see if I can try to serve a sentence here in the US as opposed to being trucked all the way back to Italy? Like, that was my twenties.

• 21:26Alec Baldwin?

  That doesn't exist, so you can't serve your time in the US for a crime in Italy, can you?

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Well, the US has discretion over whether or not it actually will fulfill that extradition treaty, like, They can always say, you know what, I don't really care to extradite her. She's going to stay here in the US. But because we want to appease the Italian justice system, we're going to hold her here in the US. She'll serve her sentence.

• 21:50Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, really? I didn't know that. You know, I went through a divorce in California. What's been rechristened, the Parents' Rights Movement, it was the Fathers' Rights Movement. Women were favored so clearly in courts about custody and so forth.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 22:06Alec Baldwin?

  And that's slowly changing. But in an analysis that different organizations I worked with did, California was ranked at the bottom of men's rights. I mean, it was a really, really, really, because, and that breaks down to basically to, you know, the haves and the have-nots. I was in court, and if the guy that walks in the room is a gardener, and he's getting divorced from his wife, the divorce proceedings are over in 15 or 20 minutes.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 22:32Alec Baldwin?

  There's no money for lawyers to mine and pump out of that situation.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:37Alec Baldwin?

  If a famous, whatever, actor, writer, musician, doesn't matter, government official, it doesn't, if somebody prominent, who is presumed to have the resources comes into court, it's like, this is a big business.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:49Alec Baldwin?

  So they say to you, Alec Baldwin, your daughter, who back then she was five years old, she's on the other side of this six-foot concrete wall. Here's a paperclip, start digging. And you're going to start digging. Because if you're a normal human being who has a child, you want to be with that child. You want to parent that child. I know many people drop out, and they give up, and they write it off and go, I'm going to go start another family, because they're so abused by that system. And so abused was I by that.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:18Alec Baldwin?

  That I wrote a book. So I wasn't wrongfully convicted of murder in an Italian courtroom, but I was somebody who did everything they asked me to do. And they just kept punishing me because they knew I was going to keep coming. I'm wondering, in your case, was there just this driving need for you to share with other people what I went through and the lessons of that and how you can avoid what I went through? Was there some of that?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, I just want to say that I'm really sorry that you went through that. And I was going to point out, like, you know exactly what it's like to be made to be the center of a morality play that people feel like they can just, you know, keep taking and like profiting from and profiting from and profiting from. And I'm sure the tabloids had their cut of the pie, too. Like, I get it. Like, it's easy to be made the villain of a story, especially when you're on trial, especially when you're accused. Yeah, like, all of the sort of prejudices and stereotypes that we associate with people but we don't say in polite company. As soon as you're accused of something and you're in court, like, everyone feels comfortable

• 24:29Speaker 04

  bringing those stereotypes and prejudices to the table. Like, it's always, now we're allowed to say, she's a whore.

• 24:37Alec Baldwin?

  Right. Now, when you went to prison, what was the sentence?

• 24:43Speaker 04

  The first time I was convicted, I was sentenced to 26 years. And when I was reconvicted and resentenced, I was sentenced to 28 and a half years. But to your point previously, I think that, especially when we're talking about someone like you being in court for not, you know, a murder, right? Like, this is a situation where it's, and I think it points to the fact that, like, this issue is not just about wrongful convictions. It's broader than that. It's about judgment. It's about mob mentality and mob profit off of an individual human being. And it's about the dehumanization of individual human beings for profit.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  That is something that has repercussions, not just in wrongful convictions cases, where, like, the stakes are highest because, you know, the prosecution...

• 25:34Alec Baldwin?

  The ultimate cancel culture.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:36Alec Baldwin?

  The ultimate cancellation.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:37Alec Baldwin?

  You're going to go to prison for 28 and a half years.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  For a crime you did not commit.

• 25:45Alec Baldwin?

  Amanda Knox. If you're enjoying this conversation, don't keep it to yourself. Tell the world and be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Amanda talks about returning to Italy for the first time since her release.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. How does music actually enter your mind?

• 26:35Speaker 06

  I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me, but I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music. Like, we have listened to so much music, we've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Sometimes I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing and I go, oh, that could be this.

• 27:07Speaker 06

  You know, you just have to be ready for when the inspiration hits.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  It comes. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:20Speaker 07

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 27:52Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. When Amanda Knox was released after four years in prison, she returned to Seattle. It took time for her to rebuild her life. Last year, on February 29th, she married writer Christopher Robinson.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  He's a novelist. He has two master's degrees in poetry. He's, but you know, he's my partner.

• 28:16Alec Baldwin?

  I thought you were gonna say he's an FBI DNA expert.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, no, not at all.

• 28:21Alec Baldwin?

  No, nothing to do with that.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  No. If anything, I've sort of like dragged him into this world and that he, you know, didn't really have that much of a perspective on. He was just like a philosophy poetry guy. But we have a really great dynamic because of that, because you know, he, he can bring his sort of analytical self. I bring my emotional experiential self and then we put that together into what we hope is a really complex nuanced heartfelt, you know, journey that we put people on. To your experience with paparazzi is something that, you know, one of the things that people would tell me when I came home was they would say things like, "I feel really bad for you because it's not like you're a celebrity. It's not like you asked for it.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  You just get, you know, people chasing you down the street."

• 29:10Alec Baldwin?

  Do they do that to you now?

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Today, no, but when I first came home and for many, many, many months afterwards, and actually the entire time I was still on trial, so like I was still in, I was in freedom for four years, but still on trial, like anytime something happened with the case, there would be people outside of my apartment building.

• 29:28Alec Baldwin?

  But that's subsided now.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Yes, it's all finished now. The Supreme Court in Italy definitively acquitted me in 2015. So it's over. Like it's over in the sense that I was definitively acquitted. It's not over in the sense that like my entire life and identity is now associated with a crime that I didn't commit. That is still an ongoing reality.

• 29:51Alec Baldwin?

  Do you feel that way? Do you go places? And do you, I mean, not now, maybe it's died down and where you live is, it's home and maybe you fit in and people are. Much more, you know, kind of polite toward you, if you will. But I mean, I'll walk into restaurants and you just see that look in people's eyes. Someone's eating, they're with a crowd of people. They smack the person next to them. They look at you, they look at them, they talk. Everyone huddles up, they listen. Then all of them look at you at the same time. Five heads go snap. Then they all come back into the hole and start laughing. And you are this fodder for them in this kind of gossipy, tabloidy way.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Well, again, you're an idea of a person, right? Like, they've had you as an idea of a person in their mind this whole time. And the way that I feel when I'm moving through the world is that I have this sort of doppelganger version of me that sort of stands in front of me. And everywhere I go, I see people seeing her. And I have no idea what they're actually seeing. Because what the vision of me that they're actually seeing was constructed out of probably just a lot of media, but what media and who? And like, you know, what are the things that they are projecting onto the name and face Amanda Knox or Foxy Knoxy?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  You know, there's a sense of sort of entitlement because we are not like, I don't think our brains are even really well adapted to understand that a human being that we've seen but never encountered is a real human being. Like, back in, you know, hunter-gatherer days, if you ever heard of a human being who you had never actually met before in your real life, they were a god. Like, that's the only person that you would ever have heard of that you've never encountered on your day-to-day life. And the king would be a god. And so this like, idea of a person is actually something that is very difficult for people to like, genuinely understand.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  So I don't know if that's, you know, something that can help you process or, you know, console yourself or find peace. Is like, we actually generally, our brains are really, really bad at understanding that a human being that we've heard of but never encountered before is a human being like I am.

• 32:09Alec Baldwin?

  I always tell people, the worst thing in life is to be misunderstood. Like, I'll sit there and say, God, if only people really knew who I was. I just don't really think people, you know, what we do, and, you know, my wife and I, what we do philanthropically and all those silly things that you wind up having to resist the desire to point your finger that underline that, but I do this. And here's another thing, you know.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. I'm a human being. Look, there are multiple sides of me.

• 32:34Alec Baldwin?

  But that's the trap that you lunge in that way and you and you start to advertise and you start to respond and say to people, well, I'm really this great guy and you don't get me. You get deeper in the quicksand, unfortunately, when you do that. But my point is, is that in your case, you're wrongfully convicted, but there are people who do these crimes. Someone killed Meredith Kircher.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  His name is Rudy Gade. He was actually recently released from prison.

• 33:03Alec Baldwin?

  He was. I mean, without getting into any ugly details, can you share with us just one moment of when you really, really, when you were in prison and you just hit rock bottom and you thought, what the F am I gonna do? What was that feeling like for you as a person who didn't belong there?

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are a number of moments that come to mind, unfortunately. So first of all, I should describe what was the default setting. The default setting for me in prison was I I had like, I had been this sort of like cheerful, just like having a good life kind of person. And my new emotional default setting was reset to sad.

• 33:47Alec Baldwin?

  Oh.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  So I woke up sad, I lived through the day sad, I went to bed sad. And that was just like my new emotional default setting.

• 33:56Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, my God.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  And I just sort of like lived that and I I became numb to it even. Like, I was just sad and that was just normal.

• 34:05Alec Baldwin?

  What an amazing answer.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  But on top of that, like, there were moments where, you know, depending on the various places that we were in the case, like, very shortly after I was convicted, two years into my imprisonment, because it took that long for the trial to go do its whole thing, my dad came in to visitation and he had just had like a conversation with the lawyers about potentially how long it was gonna take for the appeals process. And, you know, he had to share with me, you know, maybe it's gonna be, you know, another several years, it could be five years, it could be 10 years, we're not quite sure. And.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  I, at that moment, you know, during my visitations, I would very, very, I tried very, very hard to be cheerful and to like have just like this positive moment with my family members because those moments were precious, right?

• 34:58Alec Baldwin?

  I don't want to upset my dad. I'm here wrongfully convicted of murder, facing a 26-year sentence in an Italian prison, but you know, I really, really don't want to upset dad.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  I don't want to upset dad because it's like we only have so, we only have six hours a month that we get to see each other. So like this is my one hour with my dad and I just couldn't hold it together and I started sobbing. And then I did the thing that is like the worst thing that I did in prison, which is that I begged my dad to save me, even though I knew that he was doing everything he could already and there was nothing more that he could do.

• 35:36Alec Baldwin?

  So you were saying to him, "You gotta get me out of here."

• 35:39Speaker 04

  I was like, "Please save me."

• 35:41Alec Baldwin?

  And what did he say?

• 35:42Speaker 04

  I mean, he couldn't say anything. He just started-

• 35:46Alec Baldwin?

  Did he just, was he sobbing as well?

• 35:48Speaker 04

  He started crying and it was the first time I'd ever seen my father cry. It, um, it really, really solidified for me how bad the situation was because I had never seen my dad cry before in my entire life.

• 36:04Alec Baldwin?

  Is that the point where you started to consider at least that you weren't going to get out of there?

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Um, and you know, that was the period of time where I was writing in my journals, trying to imagine what a worthwhile life would look like if it took another five years or another 10 years or another 20 years or if I got out as an old woman, like what was I going to do to make my life worth living? So that was the kind of things that I was thinking about as a 22-year-old.

• 36:37Alec Baldwin?

  And when did the sun come out again and you started to have hope that you were going to get out of the labyrinth?

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Well, like I said, I was afraid to hope, all the way leading up to my acquittal.

• 36:49Alec Baldwin?

  You were prepared for it to go the wrong way.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  I was prepared for it to go the wrong way, and the moment I was acquitted, I lost it. In fact, I lost it so hard that people who were escorting me, thought, like the police, thought that I had misunderstood the verdict. They were like trying to tell me, "No, you got acquitted," and I was like, "I know." And that was the moment of like, "Oh, my God, it's over." And the great irony of that is that it wasn't over. And I entered into a whole new version of this labyrinth where I thought I had got out, and yet here's this yet another four years of labyrinth ahead of me. And like, the sort of true moment of feeling like I'm no longer being hunted anymore was

• 37:33Speaker 04

  after I was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court. Throughout my entire trial, when everything was just getting worse and worse and worse, I kept believing that like it was inevitable that I was going to be found innocent, because I was like, "There's just some horrible misunderstanding, and eventually, the truth is going to come out, the jury's going to see through all this bullshit that the prosecution is saying, and I'm going to be released." So I was convinced, the day that I was convicted, that I was going to be acquitted. And then, once that happened, and the world turned upside down, and everything I thought was true about reality was turned upside down, I, no matter how good it was getting throughout my acquittal, my appeals trial, leading up to my acquittal, I was afraid to

• 38:18Speaker 04

  hope, because I couldn't allow myself to be crushed again. And so even when there was like, big news that like, you know, the independent experts are calling bullshit on all the prosecution's forensic evidence, I was afraid to hope.

• 38:32Alec Baldwin?

  To buy into it, yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  Because I knew that like, I was innocent the first time, like what stopped them from acquitting me, you know, last time? So like, for me, those are the hard moments. The sort of true moment of feeling like I'm no longer being hunted anymore was after I was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court. And honestly, one of my first true experiences was actually when I first met Chris. I was doing arts correspondence for a local newspaper. He wrote his debut novel. I reviewed it for the paper. I asked for an interview. I interviewed him and his co-author. They were two best friends who wrote a novel together. And I had this great experience interviewing them.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  We drank scotch, we watched Star Trek, we wandered around the neighborhood into the night. And at the end of like hanging out with these two guys who I'd never met before, Gavin, his best friend and co-author, gave me this big bear hug. And Chris shook my hand and said, "We should be friends." And I was like, "Oh, my God. I can just make friends with people again. Like, I can just like meet people and make friends now."

• 39:43Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  Like, I don't have to hide anymore.

• 39:46Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. Have a normal life.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Right. And like, you know, my life is not normal, but I was restored that. That feeling that like I'm no longer being hunted. I no longer have to fear people that I don't know in the same way anymore.

• 40:02Alec Baldwin?

  Another thing that occurs to me about this is to have civics classes taught to teach people about what are the things we need to do, one of which is jury participation and jury selection. To use your story as a kind of a template here. Let's say that girl, let's say she slept with everybody in the Perugia phone directory. That doesn't make her a murderer.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Doesn't make her a murderer, yeah. It could have been a professional dominatrix.

• 40:27Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  And it shouldn't have mattered because the evidence wasn't there.

• 40:30Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what bothers me.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I actually think civics would be really, really good to teach in schools. And part of that civics course would be not just your civic responsibilities, but also your rights. So I didn't know what my rights were going into the interrogation room. I didn't know how to recognize that I was being interrogated as a suspect. They certainly didn't tell me that. They certainly refused me a lawyer.

• 40:56Alec Baldwin?

  That wound up costing them.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  So, you know, like, so there are a million ways that we are set up to be ignorant. In the face of these bigger societal structures that have enormous power over our individual lives. And I think that it's an atrocity that we aren't more empowered with the knowledge of how we have power over those structures and also how those structures have power over us.

• 41:23Alec Baldwin?

  I'm always filled with jokey versions of this, but I have this feeling like you get out of prison, you do the four plus years in prison, and you could have been in prison for decades and you get out. How is your relationship with your parents now? Because like my joke version is you call your mom and go, "Mom, I really miss you. Can we go have lunch?" And she's like, "I'm sorry, baby. I have tennis tomorrow." Where are you at with your parents now?

• 41:46Speaker 04

  I mean, we've always been super, super close. Can I talk about a joke, though, that I really appreciated? That, first of all, I loved you on 30 Rock. And one of the first nice jokes about me was on 30 Rock that I encountered.

• 42:01Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, good God.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Maybe there's some nice jokes out there, but most of the time I found when I first came out that people were making jokes at my expense.

• 42:09Alec Baldwin?

  Of course.

• 42:09Speaker 04

  And the first time that I heard a joke that was not at my expense was Kristen Schaal on 30 Rock saying, "It's not hard to be famous. Amanda Knox is famous for not killing someone." And that was like, oh, you can make a joke and not at my expense. Thank you.

• 42:29Alec Baldwin?

  Thank you, Kristen Schaal. But things are good with your family?

• 42:32Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 42:33Alec Baldwin?

  And they appreciate you and hold you close? Because you could be over there right now. In an alternate universe, you could be over there now just really, really struggling.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And their lives all came to a stop when everything happened to me. So it's not like my life was sort of trapped in a hole and theirs went on. Like, everyone in my family, their whole lives just came to a stop. And this was especially difficult on my younger sisters. I have three younger sisters. And one of them was eight years old at the time this happened. Another was 13. One was just going into college. Their lives stopped, like, everything. All my entire family became about saving Amanda. Save Amanda. And it wasn't until I was able to come home that we've all been able to restart our lives. And of course, we all live within walking distance of each other. And it's always been that way.

• 43:25Alec Baldwin?

  Have you been back to Italy?

• 43:26Speaker 04

  I have been back to Italy. So I was invited by the Italy Innocence Project, which did not exist while I was in prison, to come and speak at their first ever annual conference about trial by media. And I felt that like of all the ways to return to Italy, that was the best way possible. Like, you know, I had struggled with the idea of like, how am I going to go back and see the people who supported me and thank them and like to try to do that process? And I returned and the press called it, you know, Amanda's familiar dance with the paparazzi. And it's like, actually, I'm being assaulted by them.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  Like, I can't move because they're throwing themselves at me and my partner.

• 44:16Alec Baldwin?

  The country that originated the word paparazzi, by the way.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, that was a crazy experience. I had many, many good moments.

• 44:24Alec Baldwin?

  Were you scared to go there? Were you terrified to go there?

• 44:27Speaker 04

  I was absolutely scared to go there.

• 44:29Alec Baldwin?

  You're braver than I. I would never go back there again, ever.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Well, like, the crazy thing is these things happen everywhere. Right? Like, it's not like there's anywhere where you're safe from being judged, you know? Like, misunderstood and misjudged and mistreated.

• 44:45Alec Baldwin?

  You're in as much danger here as you are in Perugia.

• 44:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, the one difference being that like here in the US, there's more of a nuanced sentiment towards me, whereas in Italy, there's more of a, she's the OJ Simpson of Italy, kind of thing. And I was surprised, like, the big surprise that I had was when I gave my speech, I was fully prepared to get arrested again, like, to like get shanked, get booed, like, all of that.

• 45:14Alec Baldwin?

  Did you say shanked? What a prison term. You just put a chill in my back. To get shanked.

• 45:21Alec Baldwin?

  What a reveal that was. You really did do four years in prison.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 45:26Alec Baldwin?

  Shit.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  I was surprised when people gave me a standing applause for my talk. And granted, these are the kind of people who are going to show up, who are interested in criminal justice issues, who are interested in the Italy Innocence Project, who are going to show up anyway. So I was a more accommodating audience. But I was not, I was not ready for it. Like, I, I remember like being whisked away because I had to have personal security while I was there. Like, it was, it was not an easy process. And this like personal security guard sort of whisked me away down the stairs, down the hallway, in underground, where I had this like secret sort of underground dungeon bunker thing where I sort of lived throughout the entire conference.

• 46:07Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, God.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  And as soon as we got down the stairs, he gave me a little squeeze and said, perfetto.

• 46:13Alec Baldwin?

  Perfetto.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  And I just started bawling and it was a really great moment where I was like, wow, maybe I'll be given a chance, not even a second chance, like a chance in Italy.

• 46:28Alec Baldwin?

  Journalist, public speaker, and podcaster Amanda Knox. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Kerry Donoghue, and Zach McNeese. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening.

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