“Inappropriate.” “Inexplicable.” “A little bit anarchist.” “This is not what grief looks like.”
These are observations about a young woman’s behavior — or how it was perceived by Italian prosecutors and the media, anyway — that resulted in her spending nearly four years in an Italian prison for a murder she didn’t commit.
The new Netflix documentary “Amanda Knox,” out today, tells the story of the American exchange student, who was tried for, and convicted of, and then absolved of, and then found guilty of again, and then absolved of again, helping kill her British roommate in Perugia, Italy in 2007.
It is a fascinating, infuriating foray into the destruction of a young woman’s life by the interdependent forces of sexism and sensationalism.
Knox was tried both in court and in the media, the latter contributing hugely to the mythology that sprang up around her suggesting she was a demonic sex addict who’d lured her boyfriend of one week into ritualistically slaughtering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in a “sex game gone wrong,” as tabloid headlines around the world screamed. (As opposed to what was the ultimate legal conclusion: that sketchy acquaintance Rudy Guede, who had previously committed burglaries, broke into the house alone and sexually assaulted and killed her.)
Of the four main interviews that comprise this documentary, directed by Rob Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, it is the ones with Knox and lead prosecutor Guiliano Mignini that are the most striking in their juxtaposition. Knox describes how she’d always been a good-natured misfit, one who looked forward to “reinventing” herself in Italy, where she fell for a young Italian man named Raffaele Sollecito. Home video of Knox shortly before leaving for Italy shows a glowing young woman bursting with excitement about her upcoming adventure.
The murder happened after she’d been with Sollecito for only about a week, and early media footage shows the couple huddled outside Knox’s apartment, kissing and holding onto each other, while cops swarm around the building. This would become one of many pieces of evidence for prosecutor Mignini that Knox wasn’t doing and saying what he thought a young woman in her situation should be doing and saying. Later, he’d throw in that she was seen stretching and doing cartwheels during long hours of boredom in the criminal investigation. This lack of decorum was one of the details that would eventually be spun into a narrative about Knox being a wanton “she-devil” who’d committed the crime in a haze of demonic bloodlust.
Knox’s case was a tragic trial balloon for the early years of 24/7 news coverage, where reporters looked for any way to get ahead of the competition with the most catchy headline possible. Nick Pisa of The Daily Mail, one of the key interviews here, likens the career payoff of the Knox mythology — which he largely helped invent — as “better than sex” and says it’s not his fault for trying to outgun his journalistic competitors. He admits to publishing Knox’s prison journal, which was leaked and widely photocopied, and co-opting her own MySpace nickname for herself, “Foxy Knoxy,” as a damning jailbird epithet.
But compared to the “Sweet Smell of Success” small-time menace of Pisa, Mignini comes off as a straight-up villain. It is not a stretch to say he seems like an old-time witch hunter, a medieval inquisitor obsessed with Satanic rituals (ironically, his jowly countenance put me in mind of Satan-worshipping Upper West Sider Roman Castevet from “Rosemary’s Baby”). The language he uses — and used, in the trial — to describe Knox is both fanciful and condescending, sleazy and sexualized. He is an embodiment of the worst of institutionalized misogyny, no small thing in the pantheon of Italian sexists (unsurprisingly, we learn in a chilling coda, he has since been given a promotion).
Some of the things he says about Knox include:
-Since Kercher’s body had been covered up with a duvet, the murderer had to have been a woman, because “only a woman would cover a body.”
-When Knox was questioned about the number of knives in the house as police tried, terrifyingly, to ascertain whether one of them had been used to stab her roommate in the neck, she became hysterical and began hitting her own ears, “as if there was the memory of a scream, the scream of Meredith.”
-Knox “has an attitude. Hostility, and rebellion toward authority.”
-“She is a very proud girl.”
-“Pleasure at any cost” is “at the heart of most crimes.”
-“There is no doubt about the guilt of the pair.”
The Italian Supreme Court begged to differ on that last one, and after years of isolation the pair were finally freed. But Knox describes a life trying to be a normal person in Seattle after being the media’s favorite slut-shaming target for years, and it isn’t pretty. She’s still recognized everywhere she goes as THAT girl: “Some heinous whore,” she says. “Bestial. Sex-obsessed. Unnatural.”
And even if she could live down the enduring slurs, she still has endless trauma to deal with: in her early interrogation by police, she was repeatedly slapped on the head until she began to change her story; later, she was falsely informed that she had HIV, a disclosure that led her to create the prison journal, recounting her sexual history, that was then stolen from her and published in the media.
In one particularly bleak media moment, upon the news of Knox and Sollecito being ruled innocent, a huge throng of Italians outside the courtroom chants, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” It’s both hard and depressingly easy to believe this happened so recently. As Knox says, “People love monsters. The want the reassurance that they know who the bad people are, and it’s not them.”
