Is Amanda Knox guilty of a gruesome murder committed in Perugia, Italy? Who the hell knows? One certainly won’t learn the ultimate truth in a memoir—penned for a hefty advance of several million dollar—by the accused herself.
What one will learn in this book about a nightmare, wrapped in a bad dream, inside a horrid hallucination, is that the Italian justice system is archaic and often corrupt. You’ll learn that prosecutors everywhere are similar in their blood lust and it frequently makes them blind to human realities, truth, and even justice.
None of these lessons are new or unexpected. Neither is the sense that Amanda Knox was guilty of being a bit of a jerk. She implanted herself in a foreign country without finding out an awful lot about the culture, language, and mores of that country. Does the old phrase “ugly American” fit here? Perhaps. Knox also failed to realize or admit the seriousness of her situation until she was figuratively bludgeoned with it.
Amanda Knox went to Perugia as a student. As soon as she arrived there she began the kind of explorations that many, perhaps most, young people do when they leave home for the first time and go to college. She started testing the limits of everything that had been bound and restrained while in the family nest. She released her own sexuality and watched it fly. Did the disapproval of her Italian neighbors contribute to the images of Amanda Knox as an irresponsible and uncaring freak who was capable of murdering another human being? The dicey reputation Knox garnered was certainly one of the many elements that brought her world crashing down on her head.
In November, 2007 Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kerchner, was brutally slaughtered. Knox was horrified by the murder, but she failed to see the threads of the web that was being woven to tie her to the crime. She tried to be flippant and apply some of the dismissive insouciance that would have been appropriate for an innocent character in a detective movie, and questionable even within the protected environment of Knox’s own country. In the small city of Perugia, Italy, the behavior didn’t fly at all. Amanda Knox was accused, and every word, every gesture added to the circumstantial case against her.
In 2009, after a trial that was waged partly in the international press, she was found guilty. The inconsistencies and blatant errors in the trial were swept under many rugs. The nightmare was now in full swing and Amanda Knox was about to learn first hand of the gruesome realities of an Italian prison. She spent four years there while appeals went back and forth. As Knox points out, even as their obvious errors were revealed, the Italian police simply refused to back down. When the case against her had been thoroughly deflated, the conviction was reversed and Amanda Knox went home to Seattle.
Unfortunately, the saga doesn’t end there. The Italian justice system has demanded a retrial and Knox’s freedom hangs by yet another thread.
Could another young American, 20 years old and coming from a protected environment, have blundered into a similar tragedy of horrors? The answer is yes—and that is the nightmare aspect of Knox’s tale. People travel and carouse. They take their hometown sense of safety with them. True, there are dangers in the hometown. Add the label of “foreigner” and remove the comfort of a native language and the algorithm changes radically.
Knox describes her feeling of vulnerability when her new friend, Meredith Kerchner was killed. It’s true. She was vulnerable. She could have been the murder victim and Meredith Kerchner could have been waiting to be heard. The story then is only partly about guilt and innocence. The story is about the frivolous nature of fate—and about the vulnerability of all of us.
