Headsup: Unsurprisingly, Knox chickens out of presenting her "proof" on 10 April of being forced to frame Patrick for Meredith's murder when actually under no stress. She's not a good liar. She could face Patrick's tiger of a lawyer and many officers she has slimed. Trial is closed to the press, like the most damning parts of the 2009 trial; a pity that. And see links here for Knox's false framing #2: Rudy Guede as sole killer.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Italian News Through February Will Be Dominated By A Surprise Election

Posted by Peter Quennell



[Above: Pier Luigi Bersani, the probable next prime minister of Italy]


Prime Minister Monti is leaving, with most of his reforms pushed through, after Ex-PM Berlusconi’s party withdrew support.

Berlusconi announced he would again seek to be Prime Minister but his flouting of law, slimy ethics and previous wrecking of the economy don’t exactly make him the front-runner.

The front-runner in fact is Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the center-left Democratic Party, who has said he will sustain the reforms his party helped Mr Monti put in place.

Italy doesn’t usually have primary elections but the other day it did and Mr Bersani really trounced a leadership bid by the young mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi (image below).

Mr. Bersani, 61, who has been the secretary of the Democratic Party since 2009, ran as the favorite, with nearly the full support of the party apparatus and its elected officials. He easily defeated Mr. Renzi, winning nearly 61 percent of the vote.

But Mr. Renzi’s message of change rang forcefully with a sizeable chunk of the center-left electorate, with over one million supporting him. He also attracted a considerable number of mostly young center-right voters whose frustrations with Italy’s influential and pervasive gerontocracy obliterated party lines.

It is a message that Mr. Bersani may have heeded. Speaking to supporters on Sunday night, he said his greatest challenges were to change the center-left and to “prepare paths and spaces to give opportunities to new generations.”

Austerity as a precursor to strong growth had already been taking a lot of knocks as the evidence that it is a cure-all is pretty slim and it creates terrible unemployment. Center-left governments (as in the US) are doing well these days.

The IMF was once the grand inquisitor of the austerity movement but is increasingly inclining toward the Asian mixed model, in part because it is there the IMFs cash and leadership increasingly come from.

This might be quite a help to Mr. Bersani as he confronts harder-line EU leadership and bond markets.


[Below: Matteo Renzi who lost primary but may affect Italy’s direction anyway]

Posted by Peter Quennell on 12/10/12 at 03:56 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The wider contextsItalian contextComments here (8)

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Knox Defense Utters A Rather Hypocritical Whine About Lifetime TV Movie Airing In Italy Monday

Posted by Peter Quennell


Breaking news from Italy on the “legal threat” to the Lifetime movie airing tonight. Mediaset is the Italian agent for Lifetime here. From the Mediaset website our main poster Jools translated this: 

**************

MEDIASET: NO FORMAL NOTICE OR PETITIONS

“Mediaset has not received neither formal notice or petitions” from the lawyers of Amada Knox on the airing of the film of the same name. The company in Cologno Monzese [Milan] explains: “Mediaset has only received a letter with an invitation from the lawyers requesting to transmit the film in accordance with the requirements of the law. Which is something Mediaset does with every program that goes on air”.

**************

Good grief. Are the Knox-Mellases paying good legal fees for this wimpish note?! Or is their PR/media effort as so often blowing smoke to hide the hard truth that they have yet again over-reached?

Sympathy for Amanda Knox seems in total meltdown these days.

Unlikely to turn around soon. The very ugly campaign run by Curt Knox’s hatchet men and the hyper-aggressive book we’re apparently promised next April seem to demonstrate a disastrous tin ear.

Knox has had almost a full year to do the patently obvious: get out in front of some TV cameras, and explain once and for all to everybody interested in truth and justice what really happened between her and Meredith in the house. She has had several years to answer the hundreds of open questions reflected on this site which she still ignores.

Kindly translated by our main poster Jools, this is the flailing Knox defense lawyers’ complaint about the airing on Italian TV of the Lifetime movie this next Monday.

Perugia- A formal legal notice not to air on Monday the film based on the murder of Meredith Kercher was sent to Mediaset [Lifetime] by Amanda Knox’s lawyers Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga. The Seattle young woman’s name and surname forms part of the title of the fiction scheduled for evening prime time on Channel 5 on Monday December 3.

“There is an ongoing process” said Ghirga “and therefore we believe it is inappropriate to be aired”. “I do not like the film” meanwhile Knox said from the USA to her lawyer. In the United States in fact “Amanda Knox Murder on Trial in Italy” was aired often around a year ago, and the Seattle student has already seen it. “She asks us” said her lawyer Ghirga “to do what we can so it is not aired in Italy”. And furthermore, concludes the lawyer ironically “I don’t like the actor who plays me”.

Knox was convicted in the first instance with her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the Kercher murder, but they were both later acquitted on appeal and are now awaiting the decision in March 2013 from the Supreme Court on the appeal brought by the Prosecutor General of Perugia and the Kercher family.

Our Italian lawyers note that the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS could be applied to the manipulative, innaccurate piece of fiction Honor Bound put out a few weeks ago by Raffaele Sollecito.

As that book parrots many of the spurious, puerile claims made by Curt Knox’s hatchet men, they seem to have had a major hand in it. But the Sollecito and Knox lawyers have issued NO complaint about that book - even though Sollecito’s own father admitted it is defamatory of the prosecution.

If there is a real difference between the legal implications of the Lifetime movie and the Sollecito book, we’d like to know what it is. Lifetime lawyers, please take note.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 12/01/12 at 11:53 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The officially involvedThe defensesNews media & moviesMovies on caseComments here (18)

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Knox Depicter Hayden Panetierre Shows Real Talent As Country Singer On A Critically Praised New Show

Posted by Peter Quennell



Okay, we were pretty skeptical of actress Hayden Panettierre’s talent and motives prior to the Liftetime cable TV channel airing their Knox TV movie early in 2011.

But as Panetierre depicted Amanda Knox as impetuous, jealous, vague and narcissistic (quite possibly because of this) we generally concluded that the depiction was not a million miles from the truth. The Knox and Sollecito families had conniptions and filed suits, though they seem to have quietly gone away.

Now Panetierre co-stars in a new TV show Nashville on ABC which began last month, where her mesmerizing presence as a hustling young country singer seems to be the most compelling new thing on TV.

Interesting how those who take sides with Knox so often go down, while those who side more with Meredith so often go up.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 11/29/12 at 12:09 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in News media & moviesMovies on caseComments here (4)

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

What New York And Venice (Surprise Surprise) Suddenly Find They Have In Common

Posted by Peter Quennell


1) New York










Plus more images down below in Comments.


2) Venice










Plus more images down below in Comments.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 11/21/12 at 04:25 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The wider contextsItalian contextComments here (10)

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Fervent Knox Supporter Tom Wright Seemingly Strongarms Knox High School Into “Honoring” Her

Posted by brmull





One thing is for sure. Not many schools - maybe none, ever - have accepted the creation of a scholarship to honor a convicted felon who, until the Supreme Court signs off, still stands accused of a very cruel crime.

Seattle Preparatory School is a fee-paying Jesuit Catholic school about a mile north of Seattle downtown, on the south side of Portage Bay from the main campus of the University of Washington. See Google Earth image at bottom. The school’s student role is estimated at around 650.

This announcement of a new scholarship in the name of Amanda Knox was recently published: “The fund, established by past parent [and co-founder of the advocacy group Friends of Amanda Knox] Tom Wright, will provide tuition assistance to students in need.”

Early in 2011 Tom Wright [seen reading a statement in a black shirt below] presided over a seriously loopy panel presentation at Seattle University, attended by a sparse crowd of about 35, which garbled all the hard evidence in the case and accused Italian officialdom of a number of crimes. See for example our reports here and here.





Tom Wright apparently had to kick in at least $50,000 for initial fund of the endowment, and he hopes that others will feel impelled to contribute as well.

For him this is certainly a labor of passion, since Knox with her book advance has more than enough resources of her own to set up an endowment if she wished, though to date we have seen no indication that Knox has made any charitable donations. Tom Wright seeks to make it look noble.

Sara [his daughter] and Amanda were good friends at Prep… With this fund our family wants to honor the courage of Amanda and her family. They displayed great dignity and fortitude enduring a wrongful prosecution on foreign soil. During years of unjust incarceration, the school supported Amanda through prayers and letters of support. Prep acted in the Jesuit spirit by seeking social justice and helped to win a fight worth remembering.

According to the announcement applicants should demonstrate the same “moral courage, strength of character under duress and a sincere desire to help others in need” that was supposedly exhibited by Amanda Knox.





Let’s pause right there.

Claims of “wrongful prosecution” and “years of unjust incarceration” are way premature, and contradicted by all these posts here.

“Moral courage” means taking a risk in order to do what one believes is right. Put aside for a moment the overwhelming evidence that Knox did murder Meredith Kercher. To what instance of moral courage could the school possibly have been referring? We don’t have a clue.

“Strength of character under duress” is pretty much expected of any upstanding member of society. But if there’s one person to which it surely doesn’t apply, it’s someone who was convicted of falsely accusing her kind boss of murder and wrecking his business. Billions of people have a “sincere desire to help others in need.” What makes Knox notable here?

Why else might Knox have been deserving of a scholarship in her name? It’s often said that she was an “honor student” but we wonder why she wasn’t wearing any honor cords at her graduation while other students had them. Author and Knox innocence proponent Nina Burleigh wrote that she “almost flunked” a religion class and was made to take summer school.

Knox has also been described as a “star soccer player.” The team she played for, however, endured “four bleak, losing seasons” according to Nina Burleigh’s book.

A few teachers and students spoke up rather listlessly and doubtfully for Knox after she was arrested and put on trial. Several are believed to have said that they were really not too surprised to hear of the mess she was in.



;Above: school president Dr Kent Hickey]


Is there ANY solid reason in the public record why Knox is deserving of this singular honor?

Tom Wright seems to have been motivated above all by his desire to memorialize “a fight worth remembering.” As much as anything else, that fight consisted of himself and a small group of like-minded diehard parents appropriating the school’s good name and resources for the purpose of a nasty, bigoted, defamatory, strong-arming campaign which played fast and loose with the facts.

Dr Kent Hickey [image directly above] became president of Seattle Prep two years after Knox graduated. He didn’t know her at all, and he may not even have met her face to face before the school accepted a scholarship in her name. Nonetheless, he described her to the media as “a good and thoughtful girl”.

He defended the school’s decision to raise funds for her by saying “We can’t pick and choose the graduates we help.”  Yet Seattle Prep DOES indeed pick and choose, all the time. The school routinely punishes and expels students for everything from minor insolence to felonies. We can’t find any other instance in which it has held fundraisers for any alum—let alone a convicted felon—despite 8,000 alums living in the Seattle area.

And so Seattle Prep parents and onlookers might be forgiven for thinking that Dr Hickey is grasping at straws to justify his school’s very strange action.



[Above: scholarship creator Tom Wright]


One angered parent commented on the PR campaign as follows in an excellent investigative report by James Ross Gardner in the local magazine Seattle Met late in 2010:

It is true some of the Seattle Prep families have allowed their students to support Amanda Knox. I do not believe that it is a 100%. A number of families have felt their students were pressured into supporting Knox without having a choice. That is not the Seattle Prep I knew from my years there as a student, nor is it what my husband experienced.

In our years as Prep students we were allowed choice rather than pressure. Because of the pressure, a number of family are not making their annual donations to Seattle Prep. I, for one, will be glad when the verdict in the appeal is handed down so perhaps we can all move past this event. Yes, event.

Seattle Prep has made it into an event and it takes away from the students discussing other news and issues. I do not wish Knox ill but my children did not go to school with her and do not know her. They have no idea if she is guilty. They are more worried about their close friend that is fighting cancer. It is time to un-focus on Knox. That’s just my opinion.





An angered alum of Seattle Prep offered this opinion to the reporter from Seattle Met:

I went to Seattle Prep, and did a full year in Italy. I learned Italian and the culture and saw a lot of Americans and Italians from the South that studied in Central and Northern university towns go a little nuts with all the freedom away from home.

Since I started following this trial, I could totally see how immoral behavior could lead to Amanda doing what she was accused of doing. Drug use, jealous roommates, and illicit sex are not a good mix, especially when people need money to support such habits. Amanda seems to have a lobby of easily-swayed-by-propaganda lab rats who bought in to the PR agency story and don’t bother following the case in its entirety.

I do not know the background of the Seattle Prep Principal, but I think he is getting in way over his head by getting into this case, and as a prior poster mentioned, he is putting a lot of pressure on people to get on the pro-Amanda bandwagon. So sick to sway young students’ minds on what to think.

This sounds like our post-modern decaying American mentality of choosing sides and voicing misdirected-emotions in forming opinions. The Principal does not sound like a well educated, worldly individual to put the Academic Institution and its students, employees and graduates in the middle of this fiasco. It reeks of “We Support Our Troops,” military campaigns to coerce and intimidate people into believing in a “popular” movement.

It’s a cruel joke that needy students who are not in a position to turn down financial aid will be forced to associate themselves with Amanda Knox and an ignominious campaign of bigotry, defamation and intimidation.

It is to them and the real victims, Meredith and her family, that Seattle hearts should go out.







Saturday, October 20, 2012

Exploding Nightmare For Lawyers Of The Defense: Torrent of “Mistakes” In Sollecito’s Hapless Book

Posted by Sara





More and more and more wrong facts and libels are being turned up in Sollecito’s pathetic book, both by us here and by an irritated officialdom in Rome and Perugia.

Amanda Knox is rumored to perhaps be mentally unstable and figuratively locked in the attic in Seattle. Now Sollecito seems to have been disappeared back in Italy for his own good as well.

Sollecito’s own lawyers (who have in the past threatened to walk) and his own family have already thrown him to the wolves on Italian TV over just one highly libelous claim and there are an estimated two dozen more still to surface.

Not really a good idea to write a shrill “I’m the real victim here” book unchaperoned, when you have the smug mentality of a 12-year-old. The facts strongly against you. A very bright prosecutor. And a ghost writer whose slobbering over a laughably fictional Sollecito suggests he has a something of a boy-crush.

Raffaele Sollecito has made many stupid claims in his book, but perhaps none is so obvious and more idiotic than his claims about the “lost” emails.

What is it with this guy and the emails? He seems to think (or perhaps, thinks that the readers are stupid enough to believe) that if a computer or a hard drive is destroyed, all the emails in it are lost as well. Come on already, surely they taught him the mechanisms of email in his computer classes.

Look at his statements regarding emails. In chapter 2 (Love and Death) of his book, he describes the morning after the murder -

I’d been up several times in the night””listening to music, answering e-mail, making love””and wanted only to go back to sleep

Right, so he got up many times in the night to answer e-mails. You’d think that this would be his biggest alibi for the night of the murder, right? No, wrong. Raffaele could not prove his alibi because, in his own words -

I did not yet know that the Polizia Postale””supposedly experts in handling technology issues””had seized two of my computers along with Amanda’s and Meredith’s and somehow wrecked three of the four hard disks while trying to decipher them. The bottom line was that the damaged disks were now deemed unreadable. That left just my MacBook Pro to provide an alibi for the night of the murder.

But modern emails DON"T EVEN RESIDE on local hard drives unless one DELIBERATELY downloads them. And even if one does (and hardly anyone ever does) there rarely is reason to completely delete the original, and here there seems about zero reason to do that.

And even if the original IS deleted Facebook and email services have shown under legal pressure that they maintain complete backups going back many months. No way Sollecito’s supposed emails on the night could have been made to simply no longer exist.

Again, when he talks about Amanda and Meredith’s friendship, he says -

If either Meredith’s or Amanda’s computer had survived the police examination, there might have been photographs, emails, and other evidence to point to a more meaningful interaction

Here we go with the elusive emails again. Will someone explain the point of email to this guy? What difference would the local computers surviving or not surviving make to any emails residing on his host’s servers?

He actually has the nerve to criticize the Polizia Postale’s technical competence after making a statement to the effect that he and Amanda could not retrieve their emails as the hard disks were damaged.

Whether the hard disks were destroyed or not, whether it was the Polizia Postale’s fault or not is hardly important here. Admittedly, Amanda is not a “technical genius” (After all, she does not know how to delete messages from her sent items).

But what is stopping this resident technical genius from simply accessing his email box from some other computer or iphone, and printing out a copy from his sent items? Why doesn’t he ask even one of the happy recipients of his emails - by the way, who were they? - to forward it back to him?

Did all of them delete his mails from their in boxes and trash too? Even if we defy all logic and accept that they did, what’s stopping at least one of them from coming forward and testifying that they received a mail from him that night? Did all of them get selective amnesia at the same time too?

Similarly, if any emails that proved the “close friendship” between Amanda and Meredith existed wouldn’t they still be retrievable from Amanda’s mailbox? She could have printed a copy any time. Did she go around deleting all of Meredith’s mails the minute they arrived as well as her own replies to them, and clearing her trash box and all her host’s backups as well, just to be doubly sure they can’t be retrieved?.

Ok, let’s say the emails were deleted. What about the photographs? If there had been any photographs that would establish their “close” friendship, wouldn’t they be there on the camera or phone from which they were taken? Or wouldn’t either Meredith or Amanda have sent them to someone or posted them on their Facebook?

How did EVERYTHING vanish without a trace? If neither of them ever sent the photos to anyone or posted them online anywhere, or even kept them on file, you really have to wonder what was the point of taking them at all.

No one is claiming that Amanda and Meredith were at loggerheads all the time, they might even have gotten along initially. Meredith was not a person who judged people harshly. By all accounts, she did try her best to get along with Amanda, trying to include her in outings and defending her when she got into trouble.

It was Amanda who pulled away saying she wanted to socialize only with Italians. But the fact is that there were clashes and there were differences between them.  Trying to make out that they were the best of friends by claiming the destruction of non-existent proofs is not only unbelievable but also utterly stupid.

Like our main poster Hopeful summarized it: this claimed computer genius has never in four years been able to prove he sent an email? Ridiculous.


Thursday, October 18, 2012

The Sunk Ship: This Week’s Closed Hearings Required The Conversion Of This Theater

Posted by Peter Quennell





The international media presence at the hearings in Grosetto matches those at the end of the trial and the appeal in Perugia.

But despite the conversion into a court of the large Theater Moderno shown here, the media is not getting to observe the hearings first-hand. The judges decided that they all have to wait outside.

So many passengers and relatives of victims wanted to attend to look Captain Schettino in the eye that they occupy all of the several thousand seats.

This hearing is similar to the hearing presided over by Judge Micheli in October 2008 to decide whether to remand Knox and Sollecito for trial. We should know in a few days if Captain Schettino and several other officers and company officials will face trial for manslaughter and other crimes.

Perhaps the most shocking fact to emerge from the reports prepared for the hearings is that once the ship was gashed in the side it was almost instantly mechanically incapacitated. If a brisk headwind had not stopped the ship and pushed it around onto an underwater shelf, it might have sunk in minutes, perhaps with several thousand drowned.

The captain has just been fired. He in turn is strenuously trying to shift the blame for the disaster to his fellow crew, many of whom had weak English and no Italian, and also to the cruise company.

The cruise-line business has now recovered but, as with the Titanic, a lot is being learned around the world about ship construction, emergency ship management, and the relevant law.






















[Below: Captain Schettino, now fired by his company, arrives from Sorrento for the hearing]




[Below: Giulia Bongiorno reopresents some passenger and seeks a class action suit]




[Below: the ship now shows up on Google Earth. The rocks it hit are at lower left]

Posted by Peter Quennell on 10/18/12 at 11:17 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The wider contextsItalian contextComments here (4)

Monday, October 15, 2012

Professor Snape Saves 99.9999% Of Seattle From A Pestilent Raffaele Sollecito

Posted by Professor Snape





It has been awhile since I last reported on the perceptions of average Seattleites regarding the ongoing Meredith Kercher murder trial saga. 

The recent arrival of Raffaele Sollecito in Seattle on the final stop of his book promotion tour provided an excellent opportunity to revisit this interesting and telling topic.

By the time Raffaele had arrived in Seattle it was well known that his book sales would ultimately be dismal, and that his father was overly busy in the Italian media strenuously disavowing the major claim of the book; the claim of illegal backroom corruption that is central to the book’s “Honor Bound” title. 

And where Sollecito wasn’t lying outright, it had become painfully obvious that many of the new claims in his book directly contradicted statements he had previously made in his prison diary, or that can readily be found in other early sources of case information.





With this in mind, under protection of his invisibility cloak Professor Snape casually strolled into a cold and nearly empty auditorium on the University of Washington campus to find out firsthand exactly who would be attending such an event. 

He found himself among no more than 60 aging and grayish FOA groupie types, most with Raffaele’s book tucked carefully underarm in high anticipation of a dynamic evening, as if a prized show horse were about to enter an arena.

It seemed that in spite of extensive national and local promotion the good people of Seattle had stayed away entirely!  In fact, Snape observed one woman who showed up at the door in response to a local radio ad, but then walked away in disgust upon learning that she would have to pay a $5 entry fee if Raffaele’s book were not purchased onsite. 

So as it turned out, this was going to be an evening for friends and family only, with absolutely no groundswell of grass roots support from Seattleites, or even Amanda Knox herself for that matter, who sent her mother and sister instead to honor the imagined savior, Raffaele Sollecito.





As a welcoming gift, Snape threw down the Permanent Sticking Charm causing an uncomfortable delay to the program.  Event organizers began complaining of a Jinx in the audio or video equipment and one loudmouth attendee sarcastically suggested that the press photographer might be able to do a better repair job than the UW AV staff.  This was followed by chuckles and chest pounding causing Snape to consider invoking the Reparo Charm, but instead he provided only his trademark sly sneer.

The show finally started.  Everyone seemed to have their books out in hand, except for Snape who could be singled out because he was one of the few who possessed a half torn gold admission ticket.  The audience eagerly awaited juicy and triumphant tales from the currently ex-con Sollecito, as if his narrative would be somehow bold and charged with ownership.  However, things quickly stagnated into pathetic mumbling and unbelievably boring descriptions of irrelevant events. 

One could easily assume that Raffaele was under the influence of a Babbling Curse, but he didn’t require any of Snape’s help whatsoever.





News anchor Dennis Bounds from Seattle’s KING 5 TV succeeded spectacularly in bringing the interview to an even lower than anticipated standard.  Bounds declared at the outset that the two had spent a great deal of time the day before preparing for this supposedly spontaneous interview.  At the beginning of the interview it seemed as though the audience was ready to reach out and pet Raffaele’s adorable made-over hair as if he were a poodle on a podium. 

But all too soon his ho-hum responses caused even this adoring crowd’s anticipation to plummet like facebook stock values.

Bounds tried very hard to extract meaningful replies from Raffaele, but Raffaele remained unfocused and glazed over as if on some kind of stardom high; stupidly cheerful and starstruck.  Bounds provided Raffaele with obviously rehearsed and leading questions from his cue-sheet, along with tips and reminders for answers when Raffaele stumbled or hesitated.  At times Bounds even had to resort to guessing what Sollecito might have felt, when there was no ready response.





At times during the program a larger than life photograph of Meredith Kercher mysteriously appeared on the large screen above Bounds and Sollecito.  This happened on three separate occasions, which became odder still because Bounds and Sollecito just kept right on talking, never once pausing to address or acknowledge Meredith’s presence. 

Furthermore, you could hear a pin drop when this happened and the entire audience seemed to be frozen in a shock state.

A few heads looked pensively towards the event organizer; a woman in a red dress who ran swiftly up to the projection booth to erase the image. Heads turned again when Meredith’s picture came up a second time, while the UW AV crew in the back chuckled and snickered.  After Meredith’s 3rd appearance before the crowd an ominous “power off” signal appeared on the screen and Meredith was gone; all the more strange because none of this seemed to have anything to do with the ongoing and terribly bland program.

Sollecito continued regurgitating shallow prefabricated answers, apparently borrowed from previous book signing engagements. His voice was in no way authoritative, but instead came across as low and unsure.  At times he did not seem to recall the responses that he had been coached to provide. And then Bounds finally got around to asking Raffaele what he thought about Prosecutor Mignini and the home team audience roared with laughter, for the first and only time, as if they knew they were going to finally get what they came to hear.





Mignini could have been a topic that would get fur flying and put Sollecito into a much more animated mood.  But no sparks flew.  There were no gasps into the microphone, no fingers pointed or arms flinging in the air, and in the end nothing but a “Riddikulus” and mundane reply from Raffaele, “I do not know what Mignini thinks of me because Mignini never talked to me.”  Bounds seemed taken aback and asked again about Mignini, but Sollecito was completely unable to offer any unkind words, which must have been a devastating letdown for this particular audience.

Bounds pressed Sollecito about the possibility his of coming to Seattle to live, work, and possibly attend the UW, but Raffaele seemed ambivalent while agreeing that it could be a possibility. Before wrapping up the interview Sollecito answered selected questions taken from index cards passed around the audience. 

While this only served to extend the bore-fest, Professor Snape successfully inquired if Sollecito felt his book might have an impact on the upcoming prosecutor’s appeal to the Court of Cassation in Italy and if so, how.  Sollecito seemed unable to provide his own coherent response and instead relied upon Bounds and the audience to first suggest, “yes, hopefully in a positive manner.”





With that, Snape prepared to wrap up his investigative mission (with no book under cape) as three women approached, one after the other, insisting that Snape identity himself and the nature of his business at the event.  When asked for his name by a crazy lady Number One, Snape defiantly asked back, “What is your name”, to which Number One replied, “I am a nobody”; truthfully spoken, as Snape’s Veritaserum cologne worked its magic.

Crazy lady Number Two demanded to know why Snape was taking pictures and Snape replied that it was because he found the event interesting.  Number two pressed on, asking “Why do you think it is interesting?”  Perhaps Number Two missed noticing that this was, in fact, a highly promoted book-selling tour and not a FOA backyard BBQ, or that the Barbara Walters top 10 most interesting people of 2011 included a subject mentioned conspicuously in the title of Raffaele’s book.

Unfortunately Number Two felt the need to make a hasty retreat, apparently under the influence of the Banishing Charm, before attempting to answer any questions from Snape.





Crazy lady Number Three was only slightly more civil and carried on in a polite but entirely too nosey manner, boldly asking who Snape was. “Oh, I have never heard that name before!” Number Three exclaimed under the influence of the Confundus Charm.  Number Three herself had been taking countless pictures of everyone present all evening, explaining that she was a journalist for a small Seattle-area town.  Honestly, though, she seemed much more like a bored hairdresser/plastic jewelry artist who might blog for an imaginary audience while waiting for imaginary customers.

As Snape departed he was nearly overrun by a couple of Seattle beat cops who were busy dragging out one of the attendees; a poor chap who lost his glasses and all hope of redemption during a defiant struggle.  Following this one bit of excitement in an otherwise pointless evening, a flick of the levitation wand swiftly carried Snape away into the dark Seattle sky.



Friday, October 05, 2012

Foolish Claims In Book By Raffaele Sollecito: His False Timeline Conflicts With Other Evidence

Posted by willsavive



[Above and below: The front door of Sollecito’s apartment building on upper Via Garibaldi]


Raffaele Sollecito finally speaks out about the murder of Meredith Kercher and his involvement in the desperate hope that somehow he can gain an advantage.

With all of the highly questionable recollections from Sollecito in this book, and there are many, it seems practical decision to analyze one thread of the book, and compare Sollecito’s new version of events to the plethora of information available.

In this post we look at Sollecito’s story/perspective in regard to the night of the murder. Sollecito’s story sounds somewhat plausibly up until the night of 1 November 2007 (night of the murder).

Knox had stayed over at Sollecito’s flat the night before. She woke up around 10am and arrived home at around 11am. Sollecito arrived at Knox’s apartment at 2pm for lunch. Meredith, Amanda Knox, and Sollecito were the only three in the house at the time.

Meredith left the apartment around 4pm and Sollecito and Knox say they smoked a joint soon after, and then they left the cottage at Via della Pergola at around 5pm and wandered into town for some shopping.

Later that evening they arrived back at Sollecito’s flat.

Soon after, Sollecito’s Serbian friend, Jovana Popovic, rang the doorbell and asked if he’d mind driving her to the bus station at midnight to pick up a suitcase that her mother was sending. Sollecito agreed.

Popovic testified that this was around 5:30-5:45p.m. She testified that she had to leave at that time because she had a meeting at 6pm.

Jovana left, and then Sollecito and Knox began watching the movie Amélie. Sure, everything sounds good up to that point, but here is where Sollecito’s story of fantasy begins.

Sollecito next states that they had to keep pausing the movie as there were several interruptions. First, he states that “Amanda got a text from Patrick (her boss) telling her it was a slow night because of the holiday and he didn’t need her to come into work after all.”

Phone records show that this text was as late as 8:19pm, and Knox replied to Patrick via text at 8:35pm.

Sollecito writes that he received a phone call on his cell from his father at 8:40pm. This is corroborated by phone records and his father Francisco Sollecito’s testimony.

Sollecito then writes that Knox turned off her phone at 8:35pm and he turned off his phone after the call from his father, at 8:42pm, which is corroborated by phone records. He claims they next discussed what to make for dinner.

Sollecito then claims that after the movie ended he went into the kitchen to do dishes. It was at THIS time he claims the pipe under the sink began to leak.

Then he writes”¦”“Don’t you have a mop?” Amanda asked. I did not. She offered to pick one up from Via della Pergola the next morning and bring it round.” After that he claims that they cooked a fish dinner. Then he washed the dishes a second.

However Amanda Knox testified that they ate dinner later at around 10-11pm and THEN just the once he did dishes, at which much later time the pipe began to leak for the first time (Massei, pg. 69). Again, Amanda has made it clear, by stating several times during her testimony, that they “ate dinner, AND THEN, while Raffaele was washing the dishes, from the sink, a leak was noticed: water was leaking below and he looked at it; he turned off the water and then looked below the sink, and this pipe had become loose, so the water that was coming from the faucet was leaking out” (Massei, pg. 69).

However Sollecito’s own father, in contradiction, testified that during the 8:40pm call Raffaele had told him that “while he was washing the dishes he had noticed water leak under the sink that had spilled onto the floor,” and he had specified that he was with Amanda (Massei Report, pg. 63). 

This is highly significant because, one can firmly theorize, that dinner and doing dishes occurred BEFORE 8:40pm.

So by telling this obviously fictional tale of eating dinner and doing dishes later, at around 10-11pm, retroactively more of an alibi is attempted for the couple, as the murder is estimated to have taken place at around or shortly after that time.

By placing the dinner later in the night, the couple would have shattered the theory of the Prosecution. But Sollecito’s own father stopped this dodge.




Thursday, October 04, 2012

Foolish Claims In Book By Raffaele Sollecito: The Courts Are The Most Reviled Institution In Italy

Posted by Machiavelli





It seems that the writers or publishers did not run Sollecito’s verror-prone and defamatory book past any lawyer in Italy.

His own lawyers Maori and Bongiorno seem to have been blindsided. The book-agent, shadow-writer and poublisher clearly did not even run it past any well-infomed and mature person at all in Italy (his own father included).

Francesco Sollecito says the book was not accepted for publishing in Italy because there was no demand. Perhaps the real truth is “the book was not even offered for publishing because any publisher or reader would have instantly nailed Sollecito’s lies”?

Lying 1/3 of a world away in English to an ill-informed and gullible American public is a lot easier to get away with than lying in Italian in his own back yard.

In the Preface to his book Sollecito has a passage defaming the Italian Justice System and includes this bizarre claim. “The courts “” tainted by politics, clubbishness, pomposity, and excruciating delays “” are the most reviled institution in the country.”

In actual fact the Italian justice system is remarkably NOT tainted by politics, as even the most surperficial watcher of the trials of ex Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi would know.

And on the issue of popularity we have previously posted this and this and also this.

Here are the collected compelling statistics on how the Italian citizenry actually perceives their justice system

For comparison, in 2011 the percentage of Italians who declared they trust the justice system “a lot” or “enough” was 53.3%. By comparison, the percentage of Italians who declared they trust the government “a lot” or “enough”  were 14.7%, and those who trust the parliament were only 15%.

In 2012, the percentage of Italians who trust the parliament is now only 9.5%, and those who trust the Mario Monti administration are only 21.1%.

Over the eight years from 2004 to 2012 the percentage of Italians who trust the justice system was always bigger than those who trust parliament or government by at least ten points, and in some years we can see a spread of 20, 30, even 39 percentage points achieved by the judiciary over the parliament and government.

However, some cases of corruption (such as our Hellmann-Zanetti case, but also several others indicated by the Rapporto Italia 2012) do hamper trust.

The most trusted institutions in Italy above all are the Carabinieri (74% of Italians trust them) and the Polizia di Stato (71%).

Which means the most trusted institutions are precisely those law enforcement instruments which are deployed to enforce the orders of prosecutors.

(My source is “Rapporto Italia 2012” by EURISPES).


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