La Repubblica’s Riccardo Stagliano Reports From Seattle On Knoxes & Marriott PR #1



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La Repubblica’s cool and objective reporter Riccardo Staglione visited Seattle recently to meet all the parties, and he filed this balanced and unequivocating report.

Seattle, In The World Of Amanda

By Riccardo Stagliano

Seattle. The fabulous world of Amanda Knox is a catalog of goodwill skits. Amanda, whose worst fault is to trust everyone. Amanda, so sincere as to become self-damaging. More about Amanda, comforting a lonely child and pampering her old zen master. All she wants to do is work and study more and more. She finds love at a classical music concert, not at a Black Sabbath rave.

Such a mirrored biography tends to become dazzling, to the point that it seems to have been rinsed in Photoshop. Only the end doesn’t add up. A retroactive, corny and sanctifying portrait to the point that one finds it natural to look for the scriptwriter’s signature. But the end doesn’t add up.

She has been convicted of murdering someone of her same age, stabbed in the house that they shared . A devilish tail springing out of her angelic body. As if the first part of the movie had been directed by Federico Moccia [an Italian writer and movie maker specialized in corny, sentimental plots] and the second part by Dario Argento [Italian horror movies director].

At the beginning of March, the first degree judges [judges for 2009 trial] will explain in the motivations of their sentence why they believe that this 20 year old from Seattle who went to Perugia for a student exchange is guilty. The Court of Appeal judgment will confirm or deny.

Here we ‘ll talk about the environment where the girl was born and grew up, and why in her city and starting from the same premises, some people have reached opposite conclusions about her, and how this event has put the US and Italy up against each other.

This low intensity war started in newspapers. With a scandalized Timothy Egan asking on the New York Times “In which century are we? Haven’t Jeanne d’Arc, the Inquisition and witch hunts taught a couple of things to civilized nations relatively to sexual hysteria with devilish nuances?”. Needless to say [according to Egan] we are the uncivilized hysterics.

Next it was the VIP’s turn, such as tycoon Donald Trump, who has recently proposed a boycott of Italy until the girl will be freed. And politicians such as Senator Marie Cantwell, who has expressed “serious doubts on the Italian judiciary system and the circumstance of anti-americanism that may have contaminated the process” and who has tried to involved Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, luckily too busy with Afghanistan and Iran to look into it.

This is the climate and it is the second thing to be noted upon arrival in this city after the scenographic skyscraper Space Needle: the direction of the reconstruction of this nasty story, very professional and entrusted to a proven spin doctor, whose fees according to local sources are about $ 100,000 a year. David Marriott is the journalists tamer that has been managing the family’s relations with the press for two years.

His first question is if one has spoken with anyone else and if so who they are. His black list has grown long with time. In order to finish up on this list, it’s enough not to go with the official tales, or to raise doubts or point out inconsistencies.

In his posh PR offices even the paintings speak eloquently. On a poster from the 40’s a soldier warns against the risks of espionage : “Someone has talked”. There, it’s important that only authorized people speak, and that they have been instructed about what to say.

The first to arrive in the meeting room is Kurt Knox, relaxed in his black leather jacket. After about 10 minutes Edda Mellas rushes in, breathless.

Mom and Dad, separated for 20 years, seem to only have in common the white plastic bracelets claiming “free Amanda”. And some key words that we’ll hear from the mouths of the other witnesses carefully selected by the PR people. “Amanda? Her main characteristic is to always say the truth, even when it is not convenient” they say, first the father and then the mother, his eyes dry, her eyes shedding tears. It’s the woman giving more details about how Amanda cannot simply restrain from commenting if she didn’t like a dress or a hair cut , how she is not capable to say those white lies that make life easier. A problem for a shrewd manipulator such as she has been described.

In the same way, how could she be a knife wielding murderer, she who is “incapable of violence?”. She didn’t even enroll in the kickboxing course that all her friends were attending, her mother recalls. ” If she found a spider in the house what would she do?” her father asks, with the expression of one who is holding a royal flush. “Well, Amanda would never squash one”.

The third quality of Amanda that is once again discussed is her being booksmart, more comfortable with books that with real life. Is such a girl capable of killing someone? Absolutely not.


Parents are clearly doing their job, a tough job nowdays, and that deserve respect. They meet only on Saturday mornings, just for the 10 minutes weekly call from the prison. Then, they stick to the defense line agreed upon with the communication strategist, and they are very careful and ready to bite their tongue when there’s something to say about Giuliano Mignini who has already sued them for some declarations believed to be slanderous

They are emotionally and financially devastated, says Kris Johnson, who taught Amanda English at Seattle Prep, the exclusive Jesuit high school which costs about $ 20,000 a year. She is number one on Marriot’s approved list. In the tiny cafe near the school where they serve cappuccino in cups as big as soup bowls she pulls out an envelope sent from the Capanne prison and sealed with a drawing of a laughing heart.

“Do you see the handwriting? How could do someone with such a handwriting harm anybody?” . In the two pages the ex student reasons with melancholy about the grey colors of winter she sees during her daily two hours outside her cell, with many more spelling errors than what one would expect from an honor student, as she has been depicted.

But the teacher tells me instead about the boldness of some Italian males when in 1972 in Florence they were proposing her to become their umpteenth lover. It’s not a casual memory and she explains: “Italian men have strange ideas about American females”. She is thinking about the jurors, the prosecutor, the public opinion that are all seeing a witch instead of the sensitive youngster that she knows. “She reads a lot of books, she thinks a lot. She could only attend one course but she was following two. She was writing me emails to comment on the classes. It was a pleasure to teach her”

The fourth word that she introduces is the adjective that Amanda university mates will use: “trusting”, even too much. Madison Paxton is the kosher friend, the one that the careful Marriot casting has approved. I met her at the Cafe on Ave, a couple of blocks from campus, very close to the dorms where she met Amanda in 2005.

“The main difference between us, what was really fascinating is I was very wary, she was the opposite.” An attitude that during the year and a half they were socializing was never a problem. This petite photography student, with honey colored hair and wearing dark shades, seem not to possess an ounce of malice. She would seem the ideal character witness, one everybody could believe. She tells of when Amanda was waiting outside the darkroom because she was afraid to return home alone at night. She is laughing thinking about Amanda as a man eater, she only dated a couple of boys when she was in college “actually a number below the average “.

And if the Italian public have remarked how she didn’t seem contrite during the trial, it’s only because they don’t know “the girls from the North West, they are raised not to cry in public and to behave like guys”. In a letter from jail, Amanda wrote to her not to despair: “even if I’ll be locked in here until I am 46, I’ll still have a big chunk of life ahead” .

If she’ll be freed earlier, one who is ready to hire her right away is Rick Kirsten. She worked for this art gallery owner for two months. but he’s betting on her qualities, as if he has known her forever. “I put an ad, I had 31 applications and I chose her. She used to finish her work in half the time and she would ask for more. And she knew how to deal with people”. His favorite episode-that Amanda’s parents recommended he tell me is about a 8-10 years old girl that seemed to be lost in the crowd at the gallery.

“I was getting ready to go to take care of her, but a client stopped me, and Amanda was there already and the child was happily laughing.” Not to speak of Amanda’s kindness to his father, a 90 years old painter and zen meditative that was often at the gallery

The beatification front is coherent and uniform. If the tabloids, especially the British ones. depicted during the first months after the murder the image of a heartless, shrewd and bad girl, the Foxy Knoxy from MySpace, then the American counteroffensive is aiming at an immaculate picture. Amanda Santa Subito (Amanda Saint Now).

One who definitely doesn’t tolerate it, breaking the city chain of solidarity is Peggy Ganong, a doctoral student in French at the university, a translator who has lived for 20 years in Paris, she is the spoiler who has taken up the task to dismantle the “consensus machine” on her internet forum perugiamurderfile.org.  “I don’t know if the girl is guilty I only know that this rabid activity of image management to bleach her reputation is not convincing, actually, it is suspicious”

[Amanda’s] family - that between airplanes, lawyers, press offices appears to have spent more than $ 1,000 000, and claims it is deep in debts - is only partially responsible for the operation, as several local potentates whose path have crossed Amanda’s in the classrooms of the Jesuit high school have taken action to defend the future possible convict. It seems that Amanda was very fond of the daughter of judge Michael Heavy. He was the first one to write an outraged letter to the Italian magistrates and to inspire the group Friends of Amanda, together with Tom Wright, a tycoon with interests in the movies industry whose children were at Seattle Prep.

“In order to defend the reputation of an institution that prepares the local ruling class” Ganong explains, “they have organized fund raisers to pay some of the costs necessary to sell the image of the typical naive American girl which, regardless of how things went, it’s totally false”.

“We are not in Wisconsin, Kansas, Georgia nor in any other puritan area of the US. The middle class here is liberal, open, cosmopolitan…. Amanda was practicing yoga, she played soccer and was studying abroad. Not really typically American, but rather a Seattle behavior”, Charles Mudede from the weekly magazine the Stranger explains: “But it was more convenient to present her like a standard girl because this would have triggered national solidarity and the suspicion derived from the ignorance that America nurtures towards everything situated outside its border”.

Thus also subduing diffidence toward that other foreign land, adolescence, that for the average American is the dungeon of evil. Mudede is not ideologically a colpevolista, he has been to Perugia, followed the case and objects to the patriotic critics against the Italian judiciary system: “They had Lumumba, a black from Congo and Amanda, a white American. If they wanted a murderer at any cost, which of the two was the easiest target?


The FOA don’t see it this way. Their spokeperson Anne Bremner, a sort of super-blond and sharpened Crudelia Demon that was a prosecutor and TV commentator, cites Martin Luther King: “An injustice in any place is a threat to justice everywhere else”. She claims that with such scarce evidence nobody would have been found guilty anywhere else in the world. She promises that they won’t stop, they will get to the White House.

Meanwhile, they keep recruiting witnesses that describe us [Italians] as the savages of jurisprudence. But have these people who are pointing their sharp little fingers ever heard of the Cermis deaths [details here], and of the US marine Lozano who killed Nicola Calipari [details here] just to name a couple of cases of “lack of judiciary collaboration between Washington and Rome”?

If there is something besides our national health service about which we do not feel inferiority complexes towards the USA it is our justice, slow, at times fallible, but at least without the death penalty. Amanda knows it and in fact she writes to her friend Madison that in the worst case she will be out by the time she is 40. Her lawyers know it too, and so do the spin doctors who hope to shake the fragile probatory evidence on appeal. For her the outcome is still to be determined.

The one for whom is definitely closed is Meredith Kercher, in this grim drama the least quoted protagonist by the Seattle guarantists.

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Comments

So no actual hard facts can be tolerated. No opposing point of view, no objective reality. This almost sounds like a sect.

Way to go to lose the goodwill of most of the American public, which seems to be happening right now. Hillary Clinton and Maria Cantwell cautiously and sensibly backing off are sure signs that US officialdom knows a dishonest snow job when it sees one.

Note here Riccardo Stagliano’s polite if ironic tone. This is very typical of the Italian media. You can read another example of the same tone here. 

The idea that Amanda Knox got railroaded by a hostile Italian press is really an absurd myth.There simply is no hostile press. And literally nobody has a CLUE what Foxy means.

Other than material that did not make her look good that Amanda herself handed to them on a plate, we have never ever come across any inflammatory commentary. Even the family’s appallingly insensitive deportment in court drew few comments.

Compare that with the American tabloids and tabloid-type TV crime shows ranting on every night about the “guilty” perp of the day. Compare that with the sliming of Italy and the legal players by the FOA for that matter. All of the hate has been one-way.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/03/10 at 05:19 AM | #

WOW Nicki—what a great article. Thanks for posting!

Posted by mojo on 03/03/10 at 10:19 AM | #

Peter,

It doesn’t matter how many blogs you read you will ALWAYS find the same ridiculous arguments put forward by proAmanda stooges who are driven by the PR machine that was hired to to discredit and distort the truth.

If you carefully analyse the MO of a typical one-eyed proKnox supporter it follows the same pattern:

1. all their comments are never referenced; usually, their source is in the US media of their choosing, like Donald Trump and Oprah;

2. they will make ‘blanket’ statements like ‘it’s anti-american sentiment and the hostile media’ which can never be fully debated let alone rebutted to fools and idiots;

3. at best, they will state half-truths like ‘italian juries are not sequestered’ but will ALWAYS neglect to admit the other half, that it’s the same in the US;

4. when they do say the entire truth it leaves you speechless : ‘… the italian judiciary is different to ours.” Riveting stuff.

5. you will never, ever, ever get a positive view of the italians, like maybe, ‘every defendant gets an automatic appeal; even in the US we don’t have that’;

6. they make off-the cuff, throw-away lines like: ‘it’s a travesty of justice’; but NEVER articulate the injustice. It just is because Knox is in jail;

7. they will manipulate the truth to their ends, e.g., Ciolino on 48Hours has 3 people running on the asphalt road and then with a straight face says: ‘listen, listen, no noise’. But no-one has the courage to say that the 3 suspects ran up an IRON stairway that which apparently is deafening. What does that say about the integrity of the US media?;

8. like kids in a kindergarten, their immaturity has no bounds; ‘don’t travel to Italy in protest, boycott italian products.’ That’s why the French have so much respect for them;

9. the double-standards, hypocrisy and sheer myopia displayed by proK supporters is nothing less than sad; I actually get embarrassed reading some of their comments. Eg, you will always get negative association linking an isolated incident that was then meant to prove the whole; but when one attempt to rebut this with say the Cermis incident or Guantenamo Bay injustices proK, supporters get indignant: ‘ …. it doesn’t equate’, they say;

10. Rationality, common sense and logic does not exist within the proK mindset mainly because it cannot be allowed to exist; Eg: Timothy Egan writing in TNYT: ‘ … there is no DNA evidence supporting Knox’s involvement and whatever there is has been contaminated or tainted, BUT, there is for Guede’! But Tim, Guede points the finger at K/S. Yes, but G is a liar! But Tim, K & S changed their story 4 times! Yes, but that’s because she was beaten by the police. But Tim, she confessed on the stand that the written confession was freely given by her as a ‘gift’. Yes, but she didn’t have a lawyer present; she was upset; she was confused; she was under influence; she was on her periods, etc ……;

11. ProK supporters always, invariably, argue their case ‘piece-meal’, that is, they will pick on just ONE piece of evidence, attack it whilst totally dis-regarding the rest; this is a tried and tested political PR strategy based on the premise that the ordinary person cannot handle/digest/process more than one piece of information, a variant of the ‘divide and conquer rule’ dictum;

12. it’s impossible to challenge, correct or debate their point of view without being accused of ‘hating’ amanda;

13. which reminds me of another proven political strategy: ‘ … debate the issue; if you cannot, attack the person; if this fails, invent distractions’. Eg: Magnini;

14. to find K/S innocent, YOU have to do ALL the work,i.e., you would have to disregard the testimony of 80 witnesses, scientific evidence ( but not for Guede), all circumstantial evidence and all post behavioural displays by K/S. In fact, one would have to resist with every fibre in his body everything that tells him ’something just doesn’t add up here”. In other words, you will NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER see or hear an element of doubt, suspicion or questioning about K’s testimony from ProK spouters;

15, Because Amanda Knox was an innocent, young, attractive (??), studious, fun-loving Jesuit all America gal, she could NOT have committed murder. ProK supporters will never accept that EVERY murder, at some point in their life, were also young, innocent and fun-loving – google: Matthew Hardman in Wales for a comparison;

16. Circumstantial evidence has been the prime mover in convictions prior to the reliance on recent advancement in DNA forensic science for centuries. But in Knox’s case circumstantial evidence is totally dismissed because, well, it just doesn’t suite proKnox and no other reason;

17.  There was no motive; why would she have killed Meredith? What was the motive for the Columbine massacre?;

18. lastly, NEVER, will you get a balanced comment; e.g., something like: ” from what ‘I’ know, based on the limited information provided by the ‘media’ ‘I’ say that it would ‘appear’ that the italian judiciary did its best to be ‘fair’ BUT ‘I’ ‘feel’ that the jury ‘may’ have got the verdict wrong. NO, it’s always unfair, corrupt and incompetent and usually from dipsticks who freely preface it with: ‘ … I haven’t followed the case AND I haven’t read the Micheli judgement, but ….. “.

I can understand the family and close friends going all out and defending Knox. I guess I would have done the same. But would I have been so fortunate to have almost the entire media lie for me ? I wish ?

What is at stake here is more than posting an ‘opinion’ we think makes a difference.

What does make a difference is to note how we get manipulated by the media/PR agencies and sheer idiots acting on their behalf.

Posted by Chan on 03/03/10 at 12:49 PM | #

Hi Chan. Yes that seems to capture most of it. An interesting read. The TV network people in NYC who encounter a lot of PR campaigns dont rate this one highly - two at least have said they think Marriott is very much out of his depth. He may be breaking the PR code of ethics (such as it is) and the sheer nastiness at national, personal and internet levels is highly counter-productive.

It has hurt Knox for sure. Knox has shown weakness in her position and resignment at times, in the court and the prison, especially in the early interrogations, and may even have wanted to admit early on “Yes I was a party to Meredith’s death and I am really sorry but but there were these mitigating circumstances…” She sure came close. Her written narratives certainly do.

A smarter PR campaign would have not tried to dictate from the US a hard-line position for her, or to demonize everything and every one. A smarter campaign could have had Knox serving not much more than half the sentence she was finally awarded. Now she looks mostly hard and evasive and possibly dangerous, and real sympathy for her and belief in her innocence are scant.

Looks to some like Knox’s parents might have had a case for asking for all their money back for the failing PR campaign - only that they themselves have lept into it so enthusiastically and they don’t seem to give a damn who they hurt.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/03/10 at 06:19 PM | #

What a mess. What a total mess on their side. All the money spent and effort put in - and they really are sitting in the smoking ruins.

Anything positive that they have achieved? Ah yes… the creation of this truth-telling website. Much looked-to by the media as with PMF the place of accurate record - though dont go telling the PR campaign that. We’d sure hate to be blacklisted.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/03/10 at 08:00 PM | #

We must also add that the Knox have spent all those money for nothing. It seems like they have been ripped off by the Marriot team.

The American public was not influenced at all except for maybe one or two thousand people in the entire country.

Italian public opinion was not targeted by the media campaign.

The American Embassy has been following the case therefore they don’t buy all this misinformation (and consequently neither does the U.S. government).

The TV viewers of Oprah are used to seeing pathetic representations and I’m sure they forgot everything about this case one hour after the program ended.

Their only hope remains that of attracting some television celebrity, willing to “spread the verb”, and I’m sure they have tried really hard without any minimal success. If all they were able to attract were individuals like Donald Trump, with his ridiculous statements, well, poor Amanda !!! Thank God she’s got lawyers.

Trial belong in Courts of Law. Not on television.

Posted by Cesare Beccaria on 03/04/10 at 12:22 AM | #

3/3/10

Riccardo Stagliano, good work.

Many people flip out despite years of exemplary behavior. I knew a man who let spiders out of the house, but sprayed cats with water hoses. Madison Paxton is a female equivalent of Curt Knox, wary. However, her photo of Amanda sitting on a toilet in a bathtub spoke louder than words. The Seattle crowd have no clue what the Italian Fox was all about.

The Catholic priest who spoke with Amanda early in her incarceration said she was interested in the resurrection story in Luke 20. AK was 20 when MK died. The Sadducees, which deny a resurrection, gave Christ a hairsplitting argument that he soon dismantled.

Amanda may have needed comfort for her conscience, reassurance that Meredith was not “really dead”.

Luke 20:27 “Seven brothers had the same wife in succession. When each man died, his brother married her in keeping with Mosaic law. Last of all, the woman died (no children). The question: in the resurrection, whose wife is she?”

These verses repeat the theme of marriage which implies intercourse.  Foxy had recent sexcapades and there was sexual assault on Meredith at her death. So the subject isn’t far from AK’s mind. Foxy was terrified by the police report that she had contracted HIV, later proven false. The fear sent her into a torment of anxiety that she might not have children, or marry.

The main point is the wrangling of legal experts. Knox would soon endure that in court.

Jesus assures the scribes and Sadducees that any person counted worthy to obtain “that world” and the resurrection from the dead, would neither marry nor be given in marriage (v.36) nor can they die any more for they are equal to the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection… God is not the God of the dead, but of the living”. This must have been a huge relief to Amanda regarding Meredith.

By verse 41, the subject turns to David, King of Israel. It’s clear David Johnsrud was on AK’s mind. She had written RS a letter to his prison withdrawing her affections from him, saying her heart had returned to David in Seattle.

King David was promised by God that he would make his enemies his footstool. Amanda had enemies suddenly: Italian prosecutors and even the police as she saw it.

The chapter ends with a warning against hypocrisy.

Luke, who wrote the book, was a physician. Raffaelle’s father is a physician. Luca Altieri came over to the cottage when the door was kicked down and MK’s body was discovered.

The first verses in Luke 20 deal with John the Baptist. This is specious reasoning used to trip up Christ. I believe Amanda was intensely drawn to this because she was in a cauldron of legal questions. She faced minefields with every word she spoke. John also might suggest John Kercher. John the Baptist had his head cut off, sliced at the neck. I believe John Baptist was the church in England that held MK’s funeral.

By verse 9 the topic is the murder of a beloved son for his money. MK’s money was stolen during the murder.

The stone through Filomena’s window? Verse 17 mentions “the stone which the builders rejected” and says the stone will grind a man to powder if it falls on him.

Verses 22-25 mention Caesar. Caesar was in Rome.

So Luke 20 is like a mirror of Amanda’s thoughts after murder.

In this book there are Luke, John, David, a murder when a man is alone and in a far country, the death of a woman, and experts in law quibbling over confusing cases that are really quite simple, if you start from the right premises.

OT: Amanda’s poor spelling might stem from dyslexia.

As for the Jesuit high school $20,000 year tuition, maybe Amanda felt she hadn’t done justice to that fee. She worked 3 jobs to save money to escape to Italy, then flipped out at the Bundestag job and didn’t do well at Lumumba’s job.

She may have been suffering from mental exhaustion having worked too hard the previous year. She was ready for a break and refused to submit to work for awhile, as in cleaning the apartment. She was in a period of deep reaction. She had come to party.

Posted by Hopeful on 03/04/10 at 02:16 AM | #

All the while that this Knox/Mellas PR campaign has been going on, with all the money spent, and with the people who have gone out on a limb to speak of her innocence, it has basically backed Knox so far into a corner that she cannot possibly be expected to ever come forth with the truth, as it would make fools of all of her supporters, thus turning them against her for what they have gone through, and then she’d have no one at all.

The Sollecito camp has been especially quiet, so I’m hoping that we might hear at least some of the truth from that side once the appeal is underway, as I think that when it comes down to the end that Raffaele will try to throw Amanda under the bus to perhaps get his own sentence reduced.

Posted by Mo-in-Mass.,USA on 03/04/10 at 05:52 AM | #

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