2019 PR on Knox Not A Monster EDIT
Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Talking to Strangers’ is a swing and a miss
Gladwell examines the case of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student who was convicted of the 2007 murder of her roommate and spent four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated. Gladwell calls Knox “the innocent person who acts guilty.” It was not forensic evidence but Knox’s demeanor – reacting inappropriately, appearing indifferent to her roommate’s death – that led to her wrongful conviction.
Mismatch can work the other way, and Gladwell unpacks the story of college student Amanda Knox to show how. An American studying in Italy, Knox was roommates with Meredith Kercher. When Kercher was found dead in their apartment, Knox and two suspected accomplices were arrested. In interviews with the police and in court appearances, “Foxy Knoxy” didn’t conform to notions of how a blameless person should behave. She spoke loudly, laughed with her boyfriend, and swiveled her hips in front of detectives at the crime scene. The investigation was also badly bungled, and she was convicted of murder and sent to prison. Then, after legal appeals and credible evidence implicated the actual perpetrator, Knox was completely exonerated. Her real crime was “her weirdness,” according to Gladwell. “We have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency,” he writes.
Malcolm Gladwell Changed My Opinion about the Value of Presidential Debates
Gladwell analyzes the Amanda Knox case. Knox, an American college student studying in Italy, was accused of helping to murder her roommate. Although insufficient evidence of her guilt was brought forth—including DNA evidence—Knox had one big thing going against her—she looked and acted guilty. Knox fit pre-conceived notions about what and how a guilty person looks and acts. And it cost her dearly.
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1. The Catastrophe Gathers Steam
The reverberations of Knox’s strident act in Modena seem set to continue playing out for years.
Suddenly there is a real demand there for the Knox book and the Sollecito book in Italian so that all the demonization can be looked at and possibly rolled back.
This happened too late for the full blast to bother Sollecito during a goofy appearance on Porta-a-Porta, but he was not let off too lightly by several other guests
At least some new tribulations for Knox are now in the pipeline, exactly the things that she had said terrified her before she ever stepped onto the plane in Seattle.
Expect more Italian talk shows, an Italian conference or two, an Italian-language Wiki with all the documents our Wiki carries (maybe a world record number for one crime), and more court appearances and legal losses.
Remember, unlike Sollecito, Knox did not even try to win a damages award from the State and she may never be paid the small award recommened by a foolish ECHR - who did not even mention the unpaid $100,000 the Supreme Court insisted must be paid to Patrick, having for no reason destroyed his life.
So what was the Knox entourage thinking? In particular Curt Knox, Edda Mellas, and those mafia poodles looking for blood-money via the US Innocence Project?
And what was Knox herself thinking? After all she delivered the shrill speech.
2. The Roles Of Knox 1.0, Knox 2.0 and Knox 3.0
The Knox, Sollecito and Guede public personas have all evolved - a lot.
Consider Rude Guede, who is again out now on work release. In 2007-09 Guede was very rarely seen - once publicly at his own 2008 trial (which was moved behind closed doors) and once at the 2009 Knox-Sollecito trial, where he refused to testify. Otherwise he was defined by the Sollecito and and Knox lawyers, who demonized him for some of 2008 and all of 2009.
In the past couple of weeks Guede was again demonized, this time in several of the UK and US papers. But there was no equivalent of this in Italy. To quote a comment from the previous thread:
But he’s been out before, he’s the only one to show any sorrow to the Kerchers, he’s the only one that did not stalk them, he’s the only one setting himself up for a worthwhile career, he’s the only one with no lust for blood-money. And no Italians think that he or Sollecito wielded the knife that killed Meredith.
And Guede did a rather intelligent, thoughtful national TV interview, after doing a dozen years in a humane, reformative Italian prison leaving him seemingly pretty fit for society.
Italians who paid serious attention to the case from 2007 have indelibly imprinted in their minds two Knox versions which between them led quite remorselessly to a unanimous guilty verdict and prison.
The much revised Knox version wheeled out by Curt Knox and David Marriott from late 2010 was heard-from at the start and end of the 20l1 appeal, but otherwise was never intended for Italian consumption. Only Americans and Brits who might press back politically were ever meant to see that.
Guess who is the most likely of the three to shed their demons and age gracefully?
Neither Sollecito nor Knox were ever what you might consider average kids.
The very reason for Sollecito being in Perugia was that he was troubled and his highschoool there was for troubled children of doctors. We know of the cocaine use and absence of friends there. The records show that Sollecito was a continuing headache to his father, and it’s hard to see him marry or succeed at a career now.
Knox is much more complicated. Even Sollecito said she was not strongly tethered to reality. Few would rule out this brutal parenting as a prime cause of that.
From early days to what Italy just witnessed in Modena three Knox versions stand out strongly. We start with Knox 2.0 deliberately.
Knox 2.0 is the boisterous, naive, tin-eared, trouble-prone Knox who intermittently seeks to be lovable but most times falls short. Her family openly edged her in this daffy direction. “Let Amanda be Amanda”.
Knox 3.0 is a solemn, humorless “I’m the victim” widows-weeds version, ostensibly who opened and closed the 2011 appeal and who comes out strongly in her 2013 book. A talented, diligent, caring, regular-American success-story in the making who somehow ran afoul of archaic
It was this Knox that Italy mostly saw from 2007 through trial to 2010 and beyond the guilty verdict.
Marriott 95% of case hidden. Flaming of media.
Knox 1.0 goes back many years. All or most of this is known, but it is spread around. Italians for the most part developed a cuynical view: yet another case of this.
It has been hard for her family and she herself to hide that she was a troubled child. We posted one very credible cause here. There is some evidence that her stepfather from early teens, Chris Mellas, was a needling prick.
Her tin ear was seemingly offputting both at her school and Washington University and cost her friends. The common excuse “Amanda will be Amanda” was substituted for a close look.
Only a few in Seattle stepped forward to sing her praise after her arrest. A scholarship named for her at her school made some of the parents very annoyed.
Several hazings made her notorious, but it was the initiation of her drug-taking that maybe did most to set up for her Perugia fall.
Contrary to what the fake reporter Nina Burleigh and many others have claimed, Knox was NOT an exchange student, as 99% of all American students in Italy are. She was the very rare freelance entirely on her own.
She deliberately bypassed considerable financial support, possibly because some supervision in Perugia would be required. She took only her meager savings along - far short of what a foreign student is predicted to need in a year. She had no work permit for Italy which all Americans must have - and yet she HAD to work, or go home.
She did not even enroll at the main university at all and so her graduation would be set one year back. All signs are that Knox did not go there to do serious university work, as all around her could with sinking hearts see. Now she totally misrepresents how much she was on drugs but she shacked up with a dealer while on the train, had him in her bed at the house, and directly led to his arrest and a prison term.
So in Post #2 we offered a list of sleeping dogs that Knox would be really stupid to wake up - so of course, she did. Her grating presence in Modena and anti-Italy rant has had precisely that effect.
Modena: Knox I’m the victim here, not a monster, the real me, the real villains Italian justice and media
But
Real justice
Real media; TV mostly in court
Sollecito
In Post #1 we explained how Sollecito was treated identically to Knox in the days 2-6 Nov 2007. And yet Sollecito (1) did not blame the cops for abuse, (2) did not claim to be a persecuted woman, (3) did not claim to be a persecuted American, (4) did not frame an innocent man, (5) did not get a sentence of three years for reckless talk on the stand, (6) did not blame the media for his plight, and (7) did not transmit an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. In fact, he only blamed KNOX! He did that at least twice right before and after his arrest.
Back in Seattle
Not exchange student
Little money
Drugs; drug dealer; cat pee
Probs with Patrick
Probs with flatmates
Weird before arrest
Weird at arrest
Framing Patrick
The PR surfaces
Rejected by Sollecito
Hard line by Matteini
Hard line Ricciarelli
Failed interview with GM
Failed Supreme Court
Micheli hard line
Daffy in court
Good prosecution
Massive evidence
Flailing defense
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Above: Shriek! Outrage! Must be Nick Pisa at work! Oh… before his time. Wrong city too.
Dr Mignini was not talking about morals or about all women.
He was being purely practical and was in fact explaining how Italian girls keep themselves out of trouble and Knox could have done so too, in which case Meredith would still be alive.
People who came to the case from 2010 onward have no idea how mixed up and dangerous Knox was. She didnt only allow rockthrowing at Seattle U, she was a proven serious dopehead as well.
Very very few spoke up for her in Seattle after her arrest.
Netflix never mentioned that.
She headed for Perugia why? Because it had then the reputation for the easiest drugs of any university town in Italy?
Netflix never mentioned that.
Solid surveys by American colleges worried about their exchange students abroad have studied foreign drug scenes and found
(1) drug intake and alcohol intake often jumps 50 percent;
(2) students on psychological medication as psychologists suspect Knox might have been often come off their meds and crazy situations result.
Every year a bunch of overseas students get charged with crimes.
Netflix never mentioned that.
That is why they DEMAND to fund and supervise official exchange students - which is probably why Knox was not. She was the 1 in 100 Amrican students totally freelance.
Walking a highwire without a net. Netflix never mentioned that.
She was bad news to EVERYONE she met in Perugia. Do you know of any not? By arrest she had not one real friend left. Even Sollecito saw he was toast.
Netflix never mentioned that.
Loud, sharp-elbowed, often rude, often smelly, very lazy, all the other girls in the house saw her as a sex fiend and druggy and wished she’d go away. They had 40 hour weeks, she worked barely ten.
Netflix never mentioned that.
Patrick was feeling that way too; he took her on without a work permit and she was the Employee from Hell.
Netflix never mentioned that.
Mignini knew all this and more and yet he was STILL polite and considerate to her. On 17 December he gave her a terrific chance to get off. No other judge or prosecutor was as kind as that.
Netflix never mentioned that.
He wanted to bring up the dangerous drug-dealer she had in tow and her growing addiction, including to cocaine. Why? So she could maybe argue impairment and seek a manslaughter charge.
Netflix never mentioned that.
Her own lawyers wanted to go with that but Knox’s own parents didnt want it out, and and various judges especially Judge Micheli wanted a harder and no breaks for Knox.
And by end of 2007 Curt Knox’s PR was demonizing Dr Mignini!!
Mignini and Meredith were the two most understanding friends: in Perugia Knox ever had. She killed one, and has shafted the other ever since.
Netflix never mentioned that.
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1. The Context Of The Legal Process
Netflix doesnt make clear that the prosecution presented its full case just the once, in 2009.
The only ones to get the full blast were the jury and others in closed court. The prosecution was compelling and remorseless day after day in a meticulous reconstruction of the case.
The unanimous guilty verdict was predictable and understandable. If you havent yet done so you might want to read how powerful it was. In the US and UK there would have been zero grounds for appeal.
At the “automatic” 2011 Hellmann appeal there was a jury - but essentially no prosecution. How weird is that?! ! All the prosecution got to do was rebut several witnesses for the defense. The jury did not even read the case. Hellmann garbled the DNA (no contamination was proved but he acted as if it was) and so Knox and Guede were sprung.
At the 2013 Nencini re-do of appeal the judge and jury were told at length by the Supreme Court’s First Chambers how to get this task right. Although there was a new prosecutor (Crini) he was very good. The whole case was read by the jury, and the Carabinieri labs were brought in to do a test the “independent” DNA experts in 2011 said could not be done.
Sollecito took off like a rabbit before the verdict and Knox was too scared to appear.
Had the verdict gone to the First Chambers for review,as it should have, Knox and Sollecito would now be inside. Why it went to the Fifth Chambers in 2015 (which never handles murder cases normally) is murky and still under legal dispute.
By this stage the defenses had so many occasions to get things right (over seven years) it was like Groundhog Day. Bongiorno was allowed to rant on about “incompetent cops” for several hours over her legal limit. But the prosecution was not even there.
2. The Daffy Amanda Knox
Do you know who hit Knox on the head at her so-called “interrogation” 5-6 Nov 2007? She did herself! Nobody else. Day after day straight reporting - not biased or made up, simply straight reporting - suggested that she was odd. Cops think she was maybe on a long bad trip.
Since her arrival in Perugia she had got the backs up of almost everyone she encountered. Many though she was there solely for the drugs and she never even enrolled at the University - merely a language school. She could easily have been funded by the University of Washington but she herself chose not. Maybe because monitoring would have been a part of the deal and drug use would have been out.
They seem clueless as to the power of the case. They never saw the daffy Knox (above) who was wheeled out in 2009-2008 when EVERYONE including her lawyers and seemingly her parents all presumed she had got in over her head.
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By Hugo
Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about the famous hair test. Follain, p.143:—
‘Mignini suspected that on the night of the murder Amanda and Raffaele had taken drugs stronger than the marijuana they had admitted to: maybe cocaine, he thought. But no such traces were found in either Amanda or Raffaele’s hair.’
Unfortunately, as neither Mignini nor John Follain seems to have known, the result was meaningless in that context. When Dr Lalli, or the woman doctor assisting him, cut the sample strand of Knox’s hair on 6 November, the previous week’s growth was still below the skin of Knox’s scalp.
The hair test is normally only used to establish whether there is or is not a history of use of the specified drugs (generally cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamines, opiates, PCP and a few others) within the last few months. The various labs that perform the tests according to their own methods all like to claim that their results are ‘absolutely accurate’, but, if you think about it for a moment, there is no likely way they could know that, unless they tested control groups of people who (a) definitely had been using the scheduled illegal drugs and (b) definitely hadn’t. Bit tricky to arrange. In addition, each lab likes to claim that its own patent method is more reliable than those of other labs, so a certain margin of error seems to be a given.
And the drug metabolites are thought to attach to the melanin in hair, so a person with light-coloured hair, such as Knox, is more likely to produce a false negative.
But mainly, as we do not know exactly how close to the scalp Dr Lalli, or the female doctor assisting him, cut the sample strand of Knox’s hair, the result is quite useless for the investigation of Meredith’s murder. Not only did the hair test tell us nothing about the week of the murder, because the potential evidence was still below the skin of Knox’s scalp, but, if the scissors left even a 1cm stump—a month’s worth, as is a quite normal minimum—the test can tell us nothing about Knox’s drug use for the whole of the time she was in Perugia.
This may make it more relevant that she hooked up with mature student and cocaine trafficker Federico Martini on that Milan-Florence train in August, and remained in regular phone contact with Lorenzo, a fellow member of Martini’s subsequently convicted coke syndicate, throughout the period of the murder—her phone records forming evidence in the syndicate’s convictions.
So why would she need the services of Rudy Guede, well known to students in Perugia as someone who wasn’t a dealer, but knew the dealers’ spots and could get you drugs?
Because the whole point of Rudy, and the way he kept in with the student crowd, was that he spared you having to do the run yourself. Even if you happened to know a big-time coke dealer, you didn’t necessarily want to speak to his lowlife street pushers, or even show your face to them. Many students are snobby, and Knox certainly is.
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Quick reaction for starters. This looks like Knox 1.0 is back.
That was the 2007-2009 Knox who slipped the leash of her handlers, the one that often ignored both her lawyers and parents, the one who was CONVINCED that given time she could explain everything away and everybody would love her.
Well that did not end well for her at all.
She failed time and again from Mignini (especially on 17 Dec 2007) through Matteini, the Supreme Court, Micheli, and Massei. The one who failed so absolutely on the stand in June 2009 that she was handed a sentence that ended up being three years.
At the Hellman appeal Knox 1.0 was replaced by puppet Knox 2.0 in widow’s weeds.
Seem correct to you? If so this interview is the beginning of the end.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/12/21 at 09:57 PM in
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