Read by Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox’s story has been picked at by print and
television almost to tedium and there can be few people who are unaware of the
details of Knox’s flatmate Meredith Kercher’s brutal death, and the trial and
appeals of Knox, fellow accused Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede. Guede was
tried separately at a fast-track trial, found guilty in October 2008 of having
sexually assaulted and murdered Kercher, and is now (in 2014) apparently
eligible for day-release from prison, having served over five years of his
sentence. Meanwhile, Knox and Sollecito were tried and found guilty; acquitted
at a second-level trial and released; found guilty once more at a retrial; and
are currently waiting for a further appeal to be heard – Sollecito in an
Italian prison, Knox at home in America, protesting her innocence and vowing
never to allow herself to be extradited.
Knox is now a celebrity, something it is hard to believe
would have been so had she not been such a young and attractive woman, with her
side of the case argued for by some indefatigable and expensive American public
relations people, and now her own story told for (almost) all to read in a
six-figure book and audiobook deal.
The book and audiobook are not on sale in Europe, although
copies can be shipped unhindered from America, presumably because lawyers for
publishers HarperCollins believe that some of the comments Knox makes with
regard to the Italian prosecutors and police might be deemed actionable. And,
concurrent with the first retrial of Knox and Sollecito was a libel case
initiated by the Italian police challenging the allegations Knox made of police
brutality in her interrogations, some of which were apparently not recorded or
videoed.
With so much contradictory evidence and simple mistruths
circulating it is impossible to know what really happened that evening in
Perugia. The fact that the interrogations and trials were conducted in Italian
didn’t help matters for Knox, whose Italian almost certainly was not good enough at the time, neither does the complete foreignness of Italy’s legal
system and the conviction, sometimes unspoken, that only the American legal
system can give a defendant a fair trial and that all other courtrooms are
inferior and worthless. A quick read of Douglas Preston’s excellent Monster of
Florence certainly informs one’s view of the Italian police and judiciary, but cashless American prisoners stuck for years in the nightmare of American
courts will clearly disagree with this chauvinist nonsense. The only person who
could possibly shed light on the whole situation is of course Rudy Guede. But
he is keeping his silence and serving out his ever-decreasing time.
Nonetheless, Amanda Knox’s own story, in her own words and
narrated by her own self, is very thought-provoking. Far from revealing herself
as the Devil with an angel’s face, which many newspapers (especially in the UK)
would like us to believe is the true Amanda Knox, ‘Foxy Knoxy’ comes across as
simply a naive and ordinary small town American twenty-year-old, who found
herself out of her depth trying to grow up quickly in a foreign land with a
completely alien culture to one she enjoyed back home.
Whatever Knox’s fate, her story (and that of the victim
Meredith Kercher) is a salutary one which perhaps all parents might want their
children to read before leaving home.
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