Making Sense with Sam Harris - #345 — Resilience

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Amanda Knox about her experience of having been falsely convicted and imprisoned for murder in Italy. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.  

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with Amanda Knox. Amanda is a journalist and public speaker and author of the New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting to be Heard. She has since become an advocate for criminal justice reform and media ethics, and she sits on the board of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice. Anyway, it was great to speak to Amanda. As you'll hear, she's created a series for us on resilience over at Waking Up, and I just find her story both harrowing and fascinating by turns.

It's very instructive of a larger sociological phenomenon which seems to rule our world at present. When she was at the epicenter of it, social media was just taking off, but now in the open waters of misinformation and reputational destruction in which we all now swim, Amanda really strikes me as one of the canaries in the coal mine that we didn't recognize at the time. And now I bring you Amanda Knox. I am here with Amanda Knox. Amanda, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me.

So you've created a wonderful series for us over at Waking Up on resilience, and your qualifications to produce such a series will soon become apparent. We're not going to duplicate what you did there. I'm sure we'll talk about resilience, but I just am pointing people over to Waking Up wherever they're hearing this, because you've done something really wonderful for us there. Thank you. I think we, I can only imagine the boredom and fatigue that must attend your rehearsing all of the details of this really grotesque injustice in your past. But I fear that most people, certainly many people, will recall just enough of your story to think that where there's smoke, there's probably fire. And they'll know enough to know that you were in prison in Italy,

and they won't recall if they ever even knew it, that you were wrongfully accused and that the wrongness of your conviction has been now fully established. So I really do think we should just take it from the top and I will ask you, what happened in Italy? Sure. Yeah. So what happened in Italy? Well, this was back in 2007. I was 20 years old. I had recently arrived in this beautiful hilltop town called Perugia in the center of Italy to study abroad. And I was there for about five weeks. I had just moved in with these three other young women, two of whom were Italian law interns about, you know, six or seven years older than me. And then there was another exchange student from Britain who was one year older than me named Meredith. And we all lived together in this little cottage, kind of on the very near the middle of town. It was just a few steps away

from my university. And we were doing the exchange girl's life. And then on November 1st, girl's life. And then on November 1st, 2007, so the day after Halloween, I went and stayed over at my boyfriend's house and my other two roommates, Laura and Filomena. They also, I think, Laura went to Rome and Filomena was staying with her boyfriend. Anyway, long story short, most of the people in our house were gone at the time. It was a holiday in Italy. And so a lot of people were going home to visit their families. And a local burglar took advantage of this fact and broke into our cottage, broke into our home. to our cottage, broke into our home. And it's not fully certain if Meredith was already home at that time or not. My guess is that she wasn't. My guess is that this local burglar named Rudy Gaudet had already broken into our apartment by the time she came home. And he, as soon as she got into her room and got settled, he snuck in on her and attacked her and he sexually assaulted her and brutally, brutally murdered her, stabbing her many times. And then he fled the country, adopted a false identity and wasn't arrested until a few weeks later. And, you know, this is a really horrific thing that happened. It definitely shocked the entire town. That said,

it's, of all the violences that are out there in the world, it's not the most uncommon. Unfortunately, young women get attacked by young men when they're vulnerable. I think something that was very unusual was that she was home. This happened in her own bedroom. So it was a shocking crime, and it certainly shocked every one of us. I was the one roommate who first came home to discover that there was a crime scene. And I think one of the things that is a little bit unclear to people is that when I came home, I did not find Meredith's body, right? Like I came home and I found that my house had been broken into, but I didn't know that Meredith had been murdered. As soon as I realized that my house had been broken into. But I didn't know that Meredith had been murdered. As soon as I

realized that my house had been broken into, I went back to my boyfriend's apartment. I grabbed him, had him come and check it out with me. He helped me call the police because I didn't even know how to call the police at that time. And the police arrived. And when they had arrived, when my other roommates had arrived, they all broke down Meredith's bedroom door, which was locked, and discovered her body. And I actually didn't even see into the room. I never saw out of the blue, like seemingly utterly out of the blue violence that we couldn't understand. We didn't know who possibly could have done this. We didn't know why. Immediately, a lot of us started wondering if there was a serial killer on the loose. And my first instinct was, well, first, I guess my first, first thought when I was putting together through overhearing people yelling in Italian that Meredith had been murdered was, oh my God, thank God I'm alive. Because if I had been home that night, I very well could have been

murdered too. And I want to like emphasize at this time, I was absolutely not fluent in Italian. I had taken two or three semesters of introductory Italian in college. So I had very minimal vocabulary. Like I remember I had learned how to tell a story about Little Red Riding Hood, like I could recite a story about Little Red Riding Hood, but I certainly could not talk about legal things or police things or I didn't have the vocabulary to describe a crime scene. And so when I was brought into the police station, I did my very, very best to try to describe to them what I had seen when I came home and why I had called the police and everything. And I spent five days with the police pretty much nonstop. I think the hours that they were able to confirm that I was in the police station or in police custody undergoing questioning was 53 hours over five days. answering their questions, answering a lot of the same questions over and over again with different police officers. I was brought back to my house to sort of go through a knife drawer in my house. They were asking me if I saw any knives missing. And it was an emotional roller coaster for me. I sort of went back and forth between feeling like this was utterly surreal and I couldn't believe this was happening.

And then suddenly getting really hit by just how horrible and real everything was. Meanwhile, my mom is calling me and telling me to come home or to go to Germany and stay with my aunt. It was really unclear how safe I was. And I really put myself in the hands of the police at this time. They reassured me that I was not only safe with them, but that I was important to them. They emphasized this multiple times that I was their most important witness because I was very close to Meredith. I lived with her. I was closer to her age. I was also an exchange student. And I was the one who came home and found the crime scene before anyone else was able to touch it. And so they really wanted me to relive coming into my house and noticing what seemed off, what didn't seem off, where were things placed. And I spent a lot of time just like racking my brain for just the most tiniest details

because they kept telling me any small detail, any little thing that may seem insignificant to you could make or break this case. insignificant to you could make or break this case. And when I asked them, for example, if I should go home, like my mom was asking me to go home, they told me that I absolutely should not because they really needed me to be a part of this investigation. And... Actually, one question, Amanda. So on the point of the language barrier, was there a competent interpreter with you when you were talking to the cops? Or were you just trying to make the best of your bad Italian at this point for 50 hours? So there were two interpreters who were assigned to this entire case.

And they were required to be there to interpret half a dozen people who spoke only English. That included me and included all of Meredith's British friends. Anyone who was close to Meredith was interviewed at this time. And so there were two interpreters on staff. I don't know if they were both there always at the same time. on staff. I don't know if they were both there always at the same time. But what that ended up looking like was that sometimes there was an interpreter and sometimes there wasn't. And most of the time, I did not have the benefit of having an interpreter there with me. And particularly in my final interrogation, really crucially in my final interrogation, I did not have an interpreter

there with me until the very end. And that interpreter wasn't even actually an official interpreter. They were just a police officer who happened to speak English. Do you think this would have played out totally differently had you not spoken a word of Italian? differently had you not spoken a word of Italian? If you couldn't even begin to have a conversation on your own without a competent interpreter? Gosh, you know, that's a really interesting point. I think absolutely, because it would have required there being an interpreter there, and so much would have changed. of all they wouldn't have been able to interview me for 53 hours over five days like it would have been impossible to so this the just the pace and the amount of intense conversation with me would have been limited

so and then furthermore the the thing that really that spurred the police to really, I mean, again, what what spurred the police to really suspect me on top of anybody else? There was this text message that I sent to my boss during my final interrogation or not during my final interrogation. Sorry, it came up during my final interrogation. But during the night of the murder, I was supposed to go and work at this local pub. And it was a slow night, again, because it was the day after Halloween. Most people were not going out. So my boss texted me in the evening and said, hey, you don't have to come in. And I responded to him in my broken Italian, certo, ci vediamo più tardi, buona serata, which means certainly,

I'll see you later then, have a good night. And the problem with my translation was that, again, it was broken Italian. It was my attempt to say what I just said, but the police interpreted what I said to mean, okay, certainly, I'll see you later tonight then. Have a good night or have a good evening. And so they interpreted it radically differently. And had there been an interpreter there, that would have been able to be clarified. But I think your point is really, really important because I thought that because I could speak a tiny bit of Italian, that it was my duty to just tough it out, even when I wasn't sure if I was being understood. And various times I was given the impression that I was not understood. And I also felt like I needed to try my hardest to understand them. And I am absolutely positive that there were

misinterpretations on both sides of what was being said. I remember at a certain point in my interrogation when things were getting really, really heated, I said aloud in English, I don't know what the fuck is going on right now. And one of the police officers who was there just yelling at me said, fuck, I know, fuck, fuck you. And he just started yelling at me and swearing at me. And because he didn't understand why I had said the word fuck, he just thought I was swearing at them. So, yeah, I think it was made astronomically worse because the police sort of assumed that they were allowed to interrogate me without an interpreter because I could speak the barest traces of Italian. And I thought that because

they were doing that, I should be able to hold my own and be there for the sake of the investigation. Wow. It really is a tragic case of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I don't want to derail you from your timeline here, but one more question at this point. At what point, if you recall, did it dawn on you that you were a suspect? You weren't just being encouraged to be their best possible witness, but you were now under suspicion. So this is going to sound really dumb, but I didn't know that I was a suspect until I was brought before a judge days later. Because in the midst of this interrogation, again,

I was constantly being referred to as this witness. And they made it clear to me that they thought that I was withholding information from them. And that, like, I think I need to go take a step back and just say, I was brought in not because they wanted to question me, but actually because they wanted to question my boyfriend, Rafael, with whom I was staying because my house had been turned into a crime scene. And so they called him in at like 1030 at night. And because I was afraid to be alone anywhere, I accompanied him to the police station. And my plan was just to wait in the waiting room and do some homework while he answered a few questions for them. Well, while his interrogation was taking place, it was going

longer than I thought it would. I didn't understand why it was taking so long. And little did I know, I did not know at this time they were full blown interrogating him, telling him that he was an idiot for covering for me, that they knew that I was lying and that I was involved somehow and that he was my alibi. And so they were basically just trying to break him and get him to turn on me. am sitting in the waiting room and a cop approaches me, asks me what I'm doing here. I tell him I'm waiting for Raffaele to finish questioning. And he said, well, as long as you're here, you might as well answer some questions for me. And they set me up in an office that I'd been in and been questioned in for multiple times. And a woman takes a woman police officer sort of takes control of the situation and asks me to recount everything all over again. Where was I the night of the murder? What do I remember?

What was I doing? What was I doing in the morning afterwards? Just basically, again, asking me the same questions over and over again. And it started out as if she seemed to think that I just didn't remember everything correctly. Like maybe I had mistaken the days. It had been days since I, you know, this had happened. So she wanted to make sure that I really remembered if it was this day or that day. And then she wanted me to be very specific about time. What exact time did you have dinner and what exact time did you watch a movie? And she was very meticulous about this timeline. And I couldn't perfectly give her a timeline. I wasn't looking at the clock every second of that night. So I was lying and that she knew that I knew more than I was saying. Do you recall, is there an interpreter with you at this moment or is this still in your very basic Italian? This is just me and her talking. And I feel like this is a misunderstanding.

This is a misunderstanding. In fact, I remember, you know, even years after this, I remember blaming myself for how this whole interrogation went off the rails because I was thinking, oh, my God, my Italian's not good enough. And that's why she's so mad at me. What I didn't know is that, you know, already going into this interrogation, they had decided that I was guilty somehow. They had already tapped my phone, for instance. They had not tapped anyone else's phone. They had brought in my boyfriend to try to get him to turn on me. So this was not, you know, just them questioning me offhand. Like they had their ideas about me being involved or having knowledge about this crime that I hadn't shared that I wasn't forthcoming with.

And so she was trying to pressure me to be forthcoming with this information. And what I understand now, years later, is that she thought I knew who the murderer was and that I wasn't telling them. telling them. And so they kept pressuring me to talk about who, even to imagine who could have possibly committed this crime. Meanwhile, they take my phone, they ask me to fork over my phone, I do, and they go through my phone and find this text message that I sent my boss, Patrick Lumumba, the night of the murder. And at first, I didn't even remember having sent that text message. It was just not at the top of my mind. But they said, yes, you sent this text message. You made an appointment to meet with this person named Patrick. Who's Patrick? Why are you covering for him? What did he do? Really insinuating, like, here is this person that we know

you met with on the night of the murder and you're covering from him. Why are you covering from him? What horrible thing did he do to you? You know, we know you met with him. Tell us what Patrick did. This went on and on and on, me insisting that I did not meet with Patrick, but they didn't believe me. And at a certain point, they finally bring in this interpreter who's actually a police officer and she gets the rundown of what's going on. I try to explain to her desperately that they have misunderstood me. And she looks at me and says, actually, I think I know what's going on. I once was in this terrible car accident and all I can remember from it is that I was driving along and then all of a sudden I woke up in the hospital.

And I think that's what happened to you. I think you were subjected to something very, very traumatic and you don't actually remember what happened. And so now, you know, the conversation sort of shifts and they go, Amanda, try to imagine what the truth is. Like you don't clearly remember what the truth is. We know that you met with Patrick that night. We know that you know something about this crime, but you don't seem to remember because you're so traumatized. And here I am. I've been answering the same questions for five days. My answers are never sufficient to them. I'm 6,000 miles from home. I'm exhausted. It's the middle of the night. And at a certain point, I start to trust the police more than I trust myself. I start to feel crazy. And I've never felt more insane than I did in this moment because I was trying to remember something that I couldn't remember. And she slapped me in the back of the head and just said, remember, and slapped me again and said, remember. And in this sort of state of desperation, I pieced together broken fragments of memory to try to remember what they were asking me to remember. And it wasn't a memory. It wasn't, I didn't, you know, in my mind see Patrick the Moomba murdering Meredith. It was an, it was kind of like an incoherent montage. I had like the vision of the outside court that was between my house and the university. And I had a vision, not even of Patrick, but of his coat. And it's so illogical. But it was me attempting to make

sense of what they were telling me. And from this garbled, incoherent montage, the police then went to their computer, typed up a sort of a version of it that was more coherent and told me to sign it. And I did. the prosecutor, who I didn't even know was the prosecutor at the time. They said that it was the público ministerio. The público ministerio was there to speak with me. And I didn't know who this was. I thought it was the mayor, maybe, like public minister. So here he comes in and he just wants to talk to me, I'm told. So I say, okay. And he wants to know if I heard Meredith scream. And I remember telling him, I don't know. I don't think I remember hearing Meredith scream. And then he says, well, how could you not have heard Meredith scream? And I said, well, I guess I heard Meredith scream then.

Like it was so much of me at this point being utterly suggestible and just trying to connect the dots of what they were telling me as if it were true. Meanwhile, like my mom, they had taken my phone, they had placed it on the table in front of me. My mom was on her way to Italy to be there. And again, they had tapped my phone so they knew this to be true. They had listened into my phone calls, and they knew my mom was arriving the next day. So the morning rolls around, my mom is calling me from Rome, and they won't let me answer the phone. And from there, your question was, when did I know that I was a suspect? And I bring all of this, I say all of this to say that what's potentially this is really hard to understand. But even at this point, I didn't know that I was a suspect.

trouble or like, I guess what they said was I was in trouble for not telling them the whole truth. And they told me that if I didn't tell them the whole truth, I would never see my family again. And they wanted to know why I was covering for somebody. So it very much felt like they, again, thought I was this most important witness and they just needed to help me remember the truth for them. So even when they stripped me naked and took photographs of me and poked and prodded my genitals, and even when they put handcuffs on me and put me into a police car, they told me that I was this witness. And they told me that they were stripping me to make sure that there weren't signs that i had been sexually assaulted like it was still in this sort of space where they were trying to figure out if i was also a victim of the crime as well and maybe i was so traumatized that i didn't remember

being assaulted and and then they brought me into this police car and drove me out of the city into the countryside to this prison, which I didn't know was a prison. They said that they were taking me to a holding place for my own protection. And they photographed me, they took my fingerprints, and they brought me to a cell. And I wasn't sure how long this was going to be. They told me it was only going to be a few days that I would get to see my mom soon. I kept asking about my mom and they left me there. And then a day or two later, I was brought before a judge

who finally said to me, you are accused of murdering Meredith Kircher. How do you plea? And that was the first that I learned what was actually going on. And that was the first time I even was introduced to my lawyers. I walked into a room where there was a judge, there were my lawyers, there was the prosecutor, the police officers, everyone was there. I have two seconds where my attorneys say, where are your attorneys? Your mother, we're in contact with your mother.

Don't say anything. Because I hadn't even had a chance to talk to them yet. And then I look to the judge. The judge tells me that I'm accused. How do I plea? And my jaw just drops. And I wanted to say that I'm innocent and this is all a big misunderstanding, but here are these attorneys that are in touch with my mom. They told me to not say anything. So I say,

I don't say anything. And then the hearing's over and I'm taken back to my prison cell. And it's only after that, that I get a chance to speak to my attorneys or speak to my mom. And it was just this from the get-go, this thing that was so much bigger than me. And it was not a few days. It was 1,428 days that I stayed in that prison because of a huge misunderstanding at the very beginning. a huge misunderstanding at the very beginning. Wow. That is such a Kafkaesque experience. It's interesting. I've just watched the documentary on you on Netflix, which obviously covers all of this ground, but much of what you just said is new to me, and it gives a much clearer picture of the proximate causes of what amounts into a false confession.

So false confessions are a thing, and they really are a disconcerting and hard-to-understand phenomenon. I'm sure there are many paths into producing a false confession. But the one you just described is one I've never really thought of, which was, I mean, you're basically, it has been framed for you that you are a witness and may yourself be a victim who is suffering some kind of a catastrophic failure of memory. And now that you're, you know, just the pressure is being put on you to free associate and think of anything that you can piece together to put you back in the scene of the crime. And add to that the language barrier and whatever was on that paper you signed. Anyway, I just watched a documentary on you

last night. I didn't know any of that. So, well, yeah, now that I know better about false confessions and the psychology that is a part of false confessions, you know, I didn't for a long time. And I spent years in prison just feeling utterly baffled myself because I didn't understand what had just happened to me. And I thought that there was something uniquely broken about me, that I had just something was wrong with me or I was a coward or like, it's not like I was sitting there knowingly and willingly making stuff up just to appease the cops, right? Like I had internalized what they were telling me and I was

trying to genuinely make sense of what they were telling me. And I was scared, like I was scared at the idea that something horrible had happened to me and that I had witnessed something horrible and couldn't remember it. And I was desperate at that point to know what was genuinely true. And I doubted my own sanity at that point. And, you know, there were years that I felt completely alone and like no one would understand what I had been through. I didn't even. And then, interestingly, and here's a person that you should, if you're curious about the psychology of all of this, you should interview this incredible guy named Saul Kasson. He's a professor who studies false confessions. And he also has talked about the various kinds of false confessions. And he reached out to me because, you know, it's a big, clamorous case and

one that involves a false confession. So he reached out. And the first thing he did was ask me if I could just recount every detail I could remember about my interrogation. He didn't say, he didn't like prompt me with anything. He just said, just tell me what you can remember. And I wrote it all down. I sent him a letter. And it was only after I sent him a letter,

like explaining everything that I could remember, that he sent me a copy, like explaining everything that I could remember, that he sent me a copy of a paper that he had written called The Psychology of False Confessions, Does Innocence Put Innocence at Risk? And in it, he details exactly how certain police interrogation techniques break down a innocent person's sort of will and sense of agency and even sense of sanity in the interrogation room. And that includes things like isolating them and, you know, putting in, it's in the middle of the night, not giving them food, not giving them water, you know, all of these various factors. And then it breaks down how different people are broken. Some people are broken because the police suggests a mitigating factor and says, hey, if you

just go along with this, we'll have your back and you'll only have like a year in jail, whatever. So they do it to sort of, they feel like the cops don't believe them. And so they think, I'm just going to say that I did it and then the cops will be on my side and they'll show me some mercy. I'll say whatever they need me to say to get out of this situation. A lot of people sort of lose their sense of long-term consequences when they're being berated. And so they'll do and say anything just to get out of the immediate situation of stress. But then there's this other situation called an internalized false confession where the person is made to genuinely believe that they must be that what the police are telling them is true. And so very often this looks like you blacked out.

You don't remember. We know you're a good person. So we're just going to we just need to unravel the truth for you and you will confess to it and it'll all be OK. And so it's that was the kind that I was subjected to. and yeah so it's a fascinating thing and of all of the like criminal justice stuff that i get involved in now the one that i'm most passionate about is false confessions and the things that we can do to like in the interrogation room to make it not as possible. Like there, there are some really just common sense things that you can do, like record interrogations, like videotape them, record them, have some kind of a record so that people can later go back and say, oh, look at that. That person didn't have actual knowledge that only the killer would know. The police told him on hour three that the murder was committed with a rope. And so like it's stuff like that that ends up in a lot of cases being just a he said, she said situation in the courtroom where the police say, well, only the

killer would know that the person was murdered with a rope. And so he must have done it. And it's like, no, you actually just slipped that information to him without you even realizing that. Because it's not like these things happen because police forthcoming with the truth. And so they do everything they possibly can to gaslight and convince this person to give them what they want to hear. And it just so happens that in a lot of cases, it's not the truth. And so that, you know, my interrogation was not recorded. It was, which is astonishing to me because there are recordings of my phone calls. There are other recordings of me from just in the police station. Like it's not, I wasn't even being questioned. They were just listening in the room to me and my boyfriend talking. So they were obviously surveilling me. But then when that final interrogation was happening, none of it was recorded. And so it was just my word against the police about what happened. Well, one of the most unnerving things about your experience as portrayed in this documentary. Again, the documentary is just called Amanda Knox, right, on Netflix? Yeah. And first, how did you feel about that?

For what it was, was that an appropriate window onto, at least up until the moment it was shot, the experience? Or do you recommend that people watch that or not? Yeah, I do. I think that it's a really interesting window for a couple of reasons. It's not like it's a perfect window into my experience, but it's not my documentary, right? It was these documentary filmmakers who were interested in how a story goes so off the rails. And so a lot of the documentary is really interested in how the media played a role in how my case proceeded. And it played a huge role because I want to talk about that. Yeah, we'll get into that. We can get into that. But I

do recommend it because I think the one thing that they did really well was they didn't speak for anyone. Like they made a point of only making the documentary if the key players were all available and willing to be interviewed. And so that was me. That was my boyfriend. That was the prosecutor. That was, you know, the independent genetic experts. So they were able to get everyone to agree to be interviewed. And before they released this documentary into the world, they showed it to all of us. Everyone who had been interviewed for the documentary had a chance to see it

and, you know, comment on it. And I think what's really noteworthy and interesting is that every single one of us, or so I'm told, you know, approved of the way that we were portrayed. Which is absolutely astounding when you watch the footage of the lead prosecutor. I mean, it's some of the most damning footage I have ever seen of just the misfiring of a human brain and a person who had really complete control over your fate. I mean, it was terrifying to watch a buffoon of this magnitude have control over somebody's life, I mean, I just, I couldn't I was I was arrested. And then there was eight months of ongoing investigation. And then there were a few months before I had my first ever trial hearing. And so and then my trial lasted for a whole year. had any what I thought was going to be closure over this whole train wreck of a situation. And that entire time, even when things were going horribly in the courtroom and horribly in the media, horrible things were being said about me. I knew it was all false. And so a part of me

genuinely, well, no, not a part of me, all of me believed that I was going home. Like, it was just a matter of time before the adults in the room figured out what was going on. And it didn't matter what crazy things were being said about me in the media. And it didn't matter that, you know, my prosecutor was in the courtroom, like, making up what I was saying to Meredith while murdering her. Like, he had this, this like vision of what I would have been saying to her while stabbing her to death. And he was like, Amanda was probably telling her,

this is what you get for being such a stuck up prude. Like that kind of like, it was that level of just made up stuff. And I was sitting there thinking, this is so obviously absurd. And the right thing is going to happen. I'm going to go home. And that's also what my parents told me. I think I want to emphasize again that I was 20 years old when all of this was happening. And so I didn't really know how the world worked. I didn't know what to expect from the situation. And I really relied on my

parents in a big way to tell me like, what is going to happen to me? And they always told me there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Like we're going to get through this. I know this is a really dark time, but there is a light at the end of this tunnel. And we all believed that the light was the verdict. We were just waiting for the verdict. And so when the verdict came back, guilty. I had the biggest existential crisis of my life. And everything I thought that I could rely on in the world just shattered. could rely on in the world just shattered. And I was brought back to the prison so utterly bewildered that I wasn't even crying. I just was, I was in shock. And it took me a long time to, to sort of process and unravel what this meant for my life but in that sort of

immediate moment I realized that what I was not just waiting to go home I was you know I was I was not living someone else's life by mistake like this was was my life. And, and I, that, that was it just like, oh my God, this is my life. And there's not a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm just in this tunnel indefinitely. I was sentenced to 26 years and that was longer than I had been alive at that point. So I then over the next days and weeks and months had to re-evaluate what I thought my life was in ways that I didn't really have to before the verdict, because I thought that this was just like some weird limbo that I was in. And yeah. Well, I want to get to how you coped with the verdict and the prospect of just spending 26 years in prison for a crime you hadn't committed. But I still want to understand the various causal pieces here because there's just a sociological phenomenon. It's just astounding what you found yourself in the center

of. I mean, just take the case of the lead prosecutor for a moment. So people should watch this documentary just to see this guy talk. I mean, he's palpably deranged by his Catholicism as sort of the backdrop to his thinking about the lurid sexuality that must have been the cause of this murder, right? So he's, I don't need to do a full Freudian case study on him, but it's palpable just what this guy's imagination is running amok. And one of the more interesting and insidious things that happens very early on is that you are faulted in the prosecutor's mind and perhaps in the minds of others for having an inappropriate emotional response to the murder, right? So that people are watching you and, you know, their camera is trained on you,

you know, more or less, it seems, immediately watching your demeanor and your moment-to-moment expressions of emotion and all that you're not expressing as the police go in and out of the house, which is now a crime scene. And it's almost like you're the protagonist in Camus' novel, The Stranger, right, who gets convicted for not crying at his mother's funeral, right? Like you just didn't have this big expression of bereavement, but everyone's ignoring the context. You had known Meredith for, what, three weeks at this point? Yeah, I had known her for about three weeks, yeah. Right, so this is not your best friend on earth who has been murdered. And also, as you pointed out, you're being studied while you're... You never saw her body, right? You haven't witnessed the things people are assuming you've witnessed as they're

studying your demeanor to see your reaction to the horrors that occurred in that house. Again, and to have this all being driven by the intuitions of this, you know, fabulous, repressed Catholic, really just proper clown. You know, obviously you have much more experience of him than I do, but just to watch this documentary and the fact that he could have been pleased with how he came off in it is just a testament to pure delusion on his part. Yeah, I think he believes what he says. And so he has a lot of bias that colored the way that he viewed me and that he viewed the facts. I mean, I think one of the things that really astonishes me about this case in particular is, you know, you're right. I'd love to talk to you about how much emphasis was put on my behavior and when I did cry or when I

didn't cry, like there was so much selection bias in that also. But like one of the things that's really astonishing for me about this case is it's like a lot of wrongful convictions in a lot of ways. There's a lot of things that are just like by the book, wrongful convictions stuff. Like you have crazy witnesses that come forth months later who are completely unreliable. You have jailhouse snitches that come up. Like there's a little bit of all of the things that lead to wrongful convictions, including like bad forensic evidence, you know, all of that. But like one thing that's really unusual about my case is that we know who did it. Like, it's not like it's there's now that I am acquitted and my boyfriend is acquitted. The people are like, well, who who did it then? Like,

we know who did it. Like there was copious evidence of this known local burglar named Rudy Gade. He had left his DNA in the like in Meredith's body, like his his handprint and footprints were found in her blood. And he fled the country immediately after the murder and adopted a false identity. Like there there is so much that is it's just obvious what happened. But the problem was that they didn't know this at the time that they arrested me. They didn't have, you know, the fingerprints back from the forensic, you know, people. They didn't have the DNA results back yet. So they were really just going, like, by the time they arrested me and my boyfriend, they they were just going off of gut instinct. And their gut instinct in large part had to do with a lot of pressure. Like there was already TV cameras that were parked across the street from our house, like just zooming in on our driveway just hours after Meredith's body had been discovered. on our driveway just hours after Meredith's body had been discovered. And so the police felt an incredible amount of pressure to come up with answers as quickly as humanly possible. And

there is a lot of discussion about my behavior. When did I cry? When did I not cry? There are assumptions about what I understood or what I knew at various times. Like there's this famous scene of maybe the most viewed two seconds of my life are of me outside of my house in the, you know, a few hours, like an hour or two after this crime scene was discovered. A few hours, like an hour or two after this crime scene was discovered, my boyfriend, Rafael, is standing next to me, just sort of like holding me. It's cold. So he's sort of comforting me. He put his jacket around me and he looks me in the eyes and we we kiss making out. We just give each other some sort of kisses to comfort each other. And those two seconds of my life were then taken and put in the media on loop in slow motion, just like as if people could read into that moment and say, this is the moment we knew that she was guilty because here she is kissing her boyfriend and not crying. And what people don't know is that that moment, I had not seen the crime scene, unlike my other roommate who was there and who was crying hysterically, nor was I fully aware of what was even in the room that they found. I knew that something bad

was in there because people were screaming, people were crying, but I was hearing people yell and speak in very rapid Italian. And so I wasn't sure that Meredith was even killed. sure that Meredith was even killed. I knew that there was something in Meredith's room. I heard a foot. I heard the word for armoire. I heard the word blood. And so I was trying to piece together, is there like a severed foot in Meredith's room? Like I have no idea what's going on. And I slowly pieced together with Raffaele's help that there is a body found in Meredith's room. It was covered by a blanket. It was near the armoire and there was a foot sticking out from underneath the blanket. Oh, my God.

The blanket. The prosecutor's belief that only a woman murderer would have thought to cover a woman with a blanket. Right. Like that proves the gender of the murderer. I mean, it's just- Well, and this is confirmation bias in action, right? Like you've already, by the time that he's making this claim, they've already arrested a woman, right?

Me for a crime. Those sentences could have come out of his mouth in any context, confirming or disconfirming anything. It's just patently insane. And it's just. Yeah, it's like I'd love to know where the statistics of that are. to protect from the obvious waywardness of this guy's mind. I mean, it's just, you know, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a clinician. But Jesus Christ, that was a thing to behold watching that documentary. Well, what's like really disconcerting for me is it's not like, you know,

the prosecutor is absolutely king in the world. Like he doesn't just get to arrest any old person. I mean, he does get to arrest any old person he wants. But the fact that it like it continued for so long, like, for instance, when I was arrested, my boyfriend was arrested. My boss, Patrick Lumumba, was arrested. Patrick Lumumba was arrested. And, you know, the very next day, people are showing up at the police office saying, we know that Patrick is innocent. We were with him the night of the crime. We there was a whole big group of us at his pub together like this is impossible. And instead of releasing Patrick on that evidence, on the numerous, numerous eyewitnesses who, you know, who came forward. And, you know, it was the only thing that was even implicating him was this nonsense confession that was totally incoherent. They held him for two full weeks, I believe, like he was in prison for two weeks and they only released him once they had arrested Rudy Gade. Once they had some like the limited forensics that they were able to bring back

that showed Rudy Gade's fingerprints. That was that was only when they finally let him go. And what for me is really troubling is, you know, a judge signed off on this. And later along down the line, another judge agreed that we deserve instead of just throwing the case out, they sent us on to trial. And then I went through a year's worth of trial and was convicted. And so for me, it's not just the prosecutor. It's like how many people along the way bought into exactly that same sentiment. Only a woman would cover a body with a blanket. stopped to think that there was bias and no one, you know, no one really gave much thought to the fact that I had no motive to commit this crime, that I had no history of mental illness or violence, that I didn't have a relationship with the person who actually killed her, that they had physical evidence of him at the crime scene. And so it really came down to this power of storytelling and this and the impact of first impression. And and even I mean, I hate to say it, but it's like I felt like people were having a sort of macabre pornographic fantasy about me. And and on top of that, there was the issue of saving face because I was arrested very quickly. And then the forensic evidence came forward pointing not to me and not to my boyfriend and not to Patrick, but to this known burglar named Rudy Gaudet.

this known burglar named Rudy Gaudet. And instead of just halting the process there and saying, oh, we were wrong. We arrested the wrong people. Let's put this whole thing back on track. They just swapped Patrick out and put Rudy Gaudet in and orchestrated this theory about me having used my feminine wiles to convince these two men who had no relationship with each other to, out of the blue, just with no premeditation whatsoever, go to my house and rape my roommate for me and then hold her down so I could stab her to death. Hmm. Well, let's talk about the role that the media played in this. I mean, this is,

it comes through pretty well in this film. I mean, the, you know, this was the media, but it was importantly the tabloid press that just had a feeding frenzy here. And, you know, the threat of embarrassing the Italy was obvious and underwriting this sunk cost fallacy, right? They had committed to you as the guilty party and they didn't want to suffer the public embarrassment of changing their minds, it seemed. But this is entirely pre-social media, is that correct? Or was social media just beginning? So 2007 was the year the iPhone came out. We already had Facebook, but it wasn't your grandma's Facebook. It was still pretty hip at the time. Although we were

past MySpace at that point, I think we had all moved on from MySpace. And there was no Twitter. Twitter was 2009, right? Yes. So that came afterwards. I came home to Twitter and was astonished at the world and how it had changed. But yeah, I feel like in a lot of ways, I'm kind of patient zero of a social media conviction because it really was the first time that it wasn't just the media and the tabloid media that was covering everything. It was also these echo chambers that were arising in the social media sphere where they were capturing people's attention and really like funneling very different kinds of information. And this is actually a really important lens to look at when people analyze my behavior, because, you know, people look backwards and justify why

the accusations against me make sense. And I think one of the issues is that a lot of people's access to me was strictly mediated by the media. They didn't get to see me for until I went to trial like over a year after I was arrested. And so they only had like those glimpses that the media were able to get of me in those five days leading up to my arrest. And that's where the selection bias comes into play because so much of my behavior or my alleged behavior is what is going to capture people's attention. And so they zoom in on that kiss between me and Raphael, and they interview people who say, oh, Amanda wasn't crying when I hugged her. And they don't know that when I was alone, I would what my behavior meant. And I actually go in depth about this subject in particular on one episode of my podcast, Labyrinths,

when I interviewed Malcolm Gladwell. I don't know if you were able to listen to that. I heard that, yeah. Because Malcolm Gladwell covered my case in his book, Talking to Strangers. And I appreciated it in a big way because he, you know, from the very beginning says, Rudy Gaudet murdered Meredith Kircher. Like the number of people in the media who just conveniently forget that or like the headline is, man who killed Amanda Knox's roommate released from prison. Like everyone. So Meredith is completely forgotten in that headline.

Then Rudy Gaudet is completely forgotten that headline. Again, this whole tragic thing centers around me, even though I am totally peripheral to it. to it. And Malcolm Gladwell's perspective was that some people are just their behavior is mismatched to their actual reality. So some people act guilty but are innocent or act innocent but are guilty. And in my case, I'm just one of those rare people who act guilty, but I'm really innocent. just one of those rare people who act guilty, but I'm really innocent. And that wigged me out because again, that is him sort of putting the onus of what went wrong in the interpretation of all of the facts of this case on me, which was the whole problem from the beginning. Everyone was looking at me for answers that I did not have. And he missed the point of all the cognitive biases that shaped how my behavior was perceived, because the police were the ones who had the actual agency in this equation. They were the

ones who were arresting people. They were the ones who were coming up with a theory of a crime. And then it was, you know, the the media who was there that was supposed to be this check and balance against this incredible power that the state has to arrest and and imprison people. And instead of, you know, exercising that power to hold people to account, people in power to account, they just piled on and were like, tell us more juicy details about what crazy things Amanda's doing next. And yeah, so it's, I think that when you go back and retroactively justify your already predetermined conclusion, like Amanda Knox guilty, Amanda Knox crazy, you can find whatever you want in in the footage to confirm what you already believe and i think that's one of the that's what was so scary about the case for me was realizing that the truth didn't matter to people

like it it was i i was just this blank slate onto which people were projecting their own fantasies. And, you know, it didn't matter that even the physics of the prosecution's theory was impossible. being a part of this horrific fight to sexually assault and and brutally murder my roommate like she fought back like she has defense wounds on her body i'm supposedly i'm taking part in this brutal crime but i leave no single trace of myself at this crime scene and when that is revealed the prosecution says well she must have gone back to to the crime scene and cleaned up all traces of herself. And this was this is just what they put forward. This is this is their explanation for why there's all this evidence of Rudy Gaudet's DNA, but none of me. And they say, well, Amanda must have gone in and cleaned up all her DNA and left all of Rudy Gaudet's DNA so that she could frame him for the crime. There's no sign of cleaning agents. There's no sign that this crime scene has been cleaned up. But that's just because they are finding a reason to continue to believe what they already believe.

And what's so scary about this is I don't think this was some sort of like conscious thing that anyone was doing. I think that this was happening unconsciously. Or if we want to get into like the free will question, it was just the thought that came to them and they didn't have control over that thought. And they just pursued it and pursued it despite the fact that, you know, And they just pursued it and pursued it despite the fact that, you know, even during my first trial, people were beginning to question that, you know, they were told there was all this damning evidence. And when it all rolled out, some people weren't convinced. Others were. So it was tough. I want to return to what life was like for you after the verdict, if you want to talk about that at all. But I'm actually most interested in what life has been like since leaving prison

and what you've had to confront. I mean, you're sort of, in some ways, you're in a new prison. I mean, it's quite a bit better than the old one, I can imagine, but you're still in the fairly surreal situation of being in a world where many people's primary association with you is that something awful happened. And again, probably where there's smoke, there's fire. It's just safe to assume. And there are many people who just frankly think you're guilty. And I think if nothing has changed since that documentary, Meredith's family are among those people. So I'm just wondering what it's like to confront that kind of reputational lock-in where you're just seeing the evidence of people's unwillingness to change their mind,

no matter what the counter-evidence. Again, in this case, the counter-evidence is, despite the obvious incentives to the contrary, I guess it was the Supreme Court in Italy fully exonerated you and detailed what a masterpiece of incompetence the investigation was. Yeah, that's a great question. That's what I call the now what question. And it's complicated in part because I was released from prison in 2011, but I wasn't fully exonerated yet. I had been acquitted, but in Italy, prosecutors are allowed to appeal verdicts as well. And so my acquittal was appealed. It was overturned. I was tried for the same crime again. I was- And did you, you didn't return to Italy for that trial, did you?

No, I did not. So this all was happening in absentia. And I was convicted again. And I was sentenced to 28 and a half years. So they raised the sentence. And it wasn't until March of 2015, so eight years after I had this whole ordeal began, that the Supreme Court ruled that I was innocent. They said there were stunning flaws in the investigation and that I had been biased from the beginning by all the media pressure. And so I returned to the world.

I mean, I returned to the world in 2011 as the girl who was accused of murder. A lot of people just didn't know I existed until that moment. And so my legacy in the world was association with murder and the anchoring bias that people had towards me was associating me with a horrific crime. And so now I'm alienated from other people in the world because one, I have no idea if anyone in the world has had my experience. I certainly don't know anyone. And two, like everyone I meet from now on is going to meet this doppelganger version of me that exists in their imagination. And I know that every single person that I encounter is going to have an idea of me that is going to be like a veil that is between me and them. And I have no idea what that idea of me looks like in their imagination. I don't know what media they've consumed. I have no idea. All I know is that people associate me with a horrific thing that I didn't do and for the worst experience of my life. And there's no escaping it. Like I had this brief moment of thinking that I was going to

get to go back to being an anonymous college student again. And that was very, very quickly revealed to be a very naive hope because I couldn't, for months, years even, I couldn't go out in public without somebody photographing me, without paparazzi following me. I would bike to school and they would take pictures of me on my route to school. And then once I'm in school, once I'm on campus, they aren't allowed on campus, but other students are and they're taking pictures of me and posting them on social media. And so I was perpetually under a spotlight that was a spotlight where the worst possible light was on me.

It wasn't just a spotlight. It was the worst possible spotlight. Like any interpretation of me and what I did was viewed through the worst possible lens. And this was in part because I was exonerated for murder, but not for slander. So at the same time that I was tried for murder, I was also being tried for a different crime, slander, that was associated with those statements that I signed during my interrogation. extraneous to this crime, and he was suing me for defamation. And in Italy, slander is not a civil crime. It's a criminal case. And so I was being tried in the very same courtroom at the very same time for slander and murder. And I was found guilty of slander. And so around the world, I was perceived as this liar who was acquitted of murder, but probably just for a technicality. And even if I was innocent, I was an unsavory

individual who had put an innocent man behind bars. I was probably racist. The number of people who have accused me of that being the result of racism and not realizing that those interrogations were the scariest experience of my life and that I was 100 percent coerced and forgetting even that I recanted those statements hours after I was out of the pressure cooker of the interrogation. So yeah, there's been trying to feel like I was a part of humanity again after going through all of this was a tremendous challenge. I really thought that, you know, here I am a free person, but I wasn't really free. And in a lot of the ways that counted, I was still living the worst experience of my life. And I was still living a very limited existence defined forever, if not for a horrible thing that I didn't do, then for the worst experience of my life. So what do you do? I know you talk about this. I know you cover this somewhat in your series on resilience, but what has been useful for you in finding some equanimity with all of these forces and events and the thoughts of others that you cannot control? So you can take me back to prison or it can be

to the current moment in your encounters with social media. How have you found a balanced mind given that there's so much you really can't directly influence that's aimed at you? Well, this is the part where I get to thank you, Sam, because you are really the reason why I meditate now. And meditation has been an incredibly huge relief for me for the myriad ways that I discuss in the series, and in particular, the way that you were able to, like my previous encounters with meditation before your app was a little more on the woo-woo end, which did not really resonate with me. And so I wasn't able to really fully grasp grasp the deep insights like, is there a self? And what does it mean to not have a self? And what does it mean to look for the looker? And just the way that you were able to make it so practical and sort of just put it in the hands of the individual meditator to like just experience it for themselves without any dogma attached to it was what allowed me to really find that those truths

through my own meditation practice, which were an incredible relief. That said, there were certain things that I was surprised that I had intuitions about without having had a previous meditation practice. Like even in the prison environment, there were certain intuitions that I had that helped me along the way. One of those big intuitions was that I couldn't believe that the people who were subjecting me to this horrific experience were doing it knowingly. Like, I absolutely could not imagine my prosecutor and the police officers just sitting there in their offices, like, chuckling to themselves about how they had put an innocent person in jail. And so I wasn't living with this delusion that there are just evil people in the world who are out to get you, which would have distorted my understanding of my circumstances and of reality

in a way that I don't think would have been helpful to me as an individual learning to be a person in the world. Instead, I had this intuition that there was something deeper at play and that maybe I could even understand it because how many times have I had wrong intuitions about things in the world. And it made me suffer less to have that sort of limited amount of compassion for the people who were putting me through this experience. And it made me feel a little bit less helpless. It made me feel a little more hopeful that there was a possibility of understanding and connection, even if there wasn't right now. And even if I was in a very antagonistic relationship with what seemed like the entire world. Other intuitions that I had, like, I thought I was going crazy. Like, I would have

conversations with my younger self in prison. Because I didn't really know how to survive this situation that I was in, I instead, like unconsciously or consciously, it's hard to say at this point, would sort of big sister myself through the experience by very vividly imagining a younger version of myself, about 12 years old, who would sit across from me on my bunk in my cell and just ask questions about what was happening and it was it was a way for me to process what was happening to me but it was also like practicing meta like I was wishing well upon this younger version of myself who didn't know that some horrible thing was about to happen to her. Like she just was completely with, it was almost like I was trying to prepare her for this

horrible experience that she was going to go through. And that was the way that I was coaching myself through the experience in the moment. And that feels kind of meditative. backdrop of people who are telling me, you know, this is all happening because Italy is corrupt and your prosecutor's evil. And I just felt like that wasn't true. Or, you know, people who are telling me it's all my fault. Like there's a huge contingent of people who think that even if I am innocent, this whole thing went awry because of me. Like it's my fault that this bad thing happened to me. And for a while, I internalized that because when you're one lone voice against a million voices, you're probably the crazy one. But when I took a step back and I've been fortunate enough to be able to do this as a free person,

and looked back, I can look back and say, no, I was doing the very best I could in a very scary and uncertain situation that I was utterly unprepared for, and no, this was not my fault. And I feel at peace with that. And I feel at peace with that. So what do you make of people's commitment to maintaining their belief in your guilt? Because, I mean, it's a kind of, I guess it might be some version of the sunk cost fallacy, you know, that it's a kind of motivated reasoning. But it's almost, this is obviously not unique to your case.

We see this everywhere. And this is actually one of my favorite points that Nietzsche ever made was that he said in some form, when you force people to change their opinion about you, they hold the effort it takes them very much against you. So it's just a delightful little turn there where it's just, I mean, you can just see this. Whenever you're arguing with somebody and they're really dug in with their cherished opinion on something, whatever it is, and you present counter-evidence, you see this unwillingness. It's this attitude of just begrudging each increment of counter-evidence. There's an attachment. There's an attachment. It's like a very Buddhist mental framing here that seems appropriate, which is that people are attached to the way they think things are, and you push on those attachments at your peril because you're creating cognitive dissonance for them to look back at all the hours they spent dancing on your grave, say, for them to have to realize that they were part of some monstrous misperception and to feel to some degree culpable in that or tarnished by that. How do you think about, I mean, there's obviously all the anonymous trolls out there, but then there's Meredith's family. How do you think about, I mean, there's obviously all the anonymous trolls out there,

but then there's Meredith's family. How do you think about the people who are maintaining an apparent conviction of your guilt, even when so much is now known about what happened and didn't happen? Yeah. You know, I actually feel for people because I think to realize that you were not only so wrong, but so wrong in such a harmful way is a devastating thing to realize. And it's something that it's totally human to want to rebel against at every point. Like the sunk cost isn't just that they were wrong and that's embarrassing. The sunk cost is that they hurt someone in the process of being wrong. And so it's not just the misinformation and it's not just the ego of wanting to be right, I think that people are afraid of what it means about them if they were this wrong. And it's much easier for them to believe that there's something wrong with me

to have deserved the harm that I suffered. And so I think it goes to people identifying with their ideas and when put on the spot and even when having, you know, like plain evidence put in front of them that what they believe is wrong, it feels to them like what you're saying is that they're a bad person. Like what you're saying is that they're a bad person. And that's why they can't grasp the just the just the plain, hard, cold facts of it, because it's charged with emotional resonance and with a sense of it implicating them and their identity and who they imagine themselves to be as people. And this is what I think about when I think about my prosecutor. I would not want to be my prosecutor for my legacy to be what it is. And I completely understand why someone who is not yet fully ready to embrace with full self-awareness the reality of the situation would prefer the delusion and would protect the delusion at all costs. Yeah. What is the status of public opinion in Italy around this case now? Well, you know, it's interesting. I because of the messages that I receive on social media, I was under the impression that I'm basically the O.J. Simpson of Italy. Of Italy. However, however, there have been some really interesting developments. You know, there have been some podcasts and even investigative journalism done that has explored the the side of the events where I'm actually innocent. And it's coming from, you know, like some fringe people,

like there's this really famous rapper who is 100% like has dug deep into the case and done this really long podcast series about it in Italy. Very famous Italian rapper who's like, who takes the very rapper-y stance of like, fuck the um and uses me as an example of that but also there have just been some really interesting legal developments like i appealed my slander conviction to the european court of human rights and they ruled in my favor and you know that it was going to just end there except they just passed a a new law in Italy that made it possible to revisit old cases or like definitive cases based upon international court rulings. And my slander conviction just this just in October was overturned. So and then, you know, just recently, like yesterday or the day before, Rudy Gaudet, so the person who murdered Meredith, he was released from prison a few years ago, having served 13 years of a 16 year sentence.

And he was just rearrested for assaulting his girlfriend. And so it feels like in like tiny little increments, there has been a coming to Jesus in Italy in these small ways. And they're not pronounced. It's not like you're going to see, you're not seeing headlines in Italy being like, oh my gosh, we were so wrong about Amanda. headlines in Italy being like, oh, my gosh, we were so wrong about Amanda. Instead, you're just seeing this sort of quiet realization of, oh, here's the guy who was actually we have evidence who committed this crime. He's now, you know, assaulting other young women. Here's Amanda, you know, living her life and doing the best she can. And everything that she says still is corroborated by the evidence. So I'm hoping that there's this slow change.

And I actually have started seeing some people in just like DMs, comments to me online of Italian people who have reached out and said that they were really sorry because they believed it all when it was going on. They just believed the media's representation of the case at the time. And only recently did they look back with clearer eyes, with the benefit of hindsight, and realize how wrong they were. And they apologized to me on behalf of their entire country. Has Rudy Gaudet ever acknowledged his guilt and your innocence? Oh, no. Oh, no. So the first time that he was ever he ever even mentioned me was while he was still on the run. And he was Skyping with a friend of his who he didn't know was corroborating with the police. So the police had already arrested me, but they then got the fingerprints back. They identified Rudy Gaudet. So they were looking for Rudy Gaudet and they contacted a number of his friends and they and one of his friends agreed to contact Rudy while the police were listening in to their Skype conversation. And when this friend talked

to Rudy Gaudet, he asked about me, like, what about Amanda? What does Amanda have to do with this? And Rudy Gaudet said Amanda doesn't have anything to do with this. And this is while Rudy's like runaway. He's in Germany. He's on the run. And he says that I had not, that Amanda Knox had nothing to do with it. And it's only- And at this point, he wasn't admitting to having committed the crime. He was, he was admitting to what? He was admitting to being there when the crime occurred. And he said that someone else did it. Some man came into the house and murdered Meredith while he was in the bathroom. He said that he was on the toilet listening to a few songs while on the toilet. And while he was in the bathroom, somebody came into the house and murdered Meredith.

And then when he realized what happened, he ran out there, confronted the guy and went into Meredith's room and tried to save her. And that's how he got all the blood all over his hands. So this is his claim. And it was only when he was arrested, he was found in Germany, arrested, extradited back to Italy, that he changed his story and said, no, in fact, Amanda was there too. And it was the man that I confronted was Raffaele, her boyfriend. And they're trying to pin their crime on me because I'm a black guy. And so he, this is his story. He has a history of breaking and entering he has a history of confronting people with knives it's a lie but it's a lie that he continues to hold on to and

when he has been interviewed even recently about the case after he was released from prison he continues to say that i committed this crime with Raffaele and that he had nothing to do with it. What has Raffaele's experience been? Raffaele's experience has been awful, just awful, because he knew me for only a few days before this crime occurred. I think we had known each other for five days. Yeah. So you've been, we've referred to him as your boyfriend all this time, but this is a boyfriend of five days. Yeah. I would say it's more realistic to say we were having our sort of romantic fling that young kids are doing. We were like, he really liked me and I really

liked him, but we were only five days into this like relationship, even though like we clicked very quickly. Laura, one of my roommates called us Piccioncini, which means little lovebirds. And he, so he knew me as of a few days, I think by the time we were arrested, he had known me for eight or nine days. And so here's this girl that he's known for eight or nine days. He's my alibi. And his family, the police, everyone are urging him to just throw me under the bus. Because they're like, you don't know this girl from Adam. You only knew her for a few days. You are now implicated in this crime just because you're her alibi. Like, just give the police what they want and say that she left your house and committed this crime and you had nothing to do with it.

And he refused. He stood up and he stood up for me and he stood up for the truth. And he refused to lie. And so he ended up getting sentenced alongside me. as well, that moment of interrogation that you described where you're also in the police station with him and it becomes a kind of a prisoner's dilemma situation where you're each being interrogated simultaneously and they come to you saying that he's basically sold you out and said that your alibi was a lie. Had he not cracked in any way? So yes, he had cracked, but under the same kind of pressure that I had. And so yes, the police came to me and hours into this interrogation and told me that Raffaele now said that I had asked him to lie for me and all of that.

Meanwhile, they had been telling him things like how do you know that she was there with you all night when you were sleeping she could have left you while you were sleeping and you know so he did he did say in that or at least that's what the statement says that the statement says that he was he was lying for me. But very quickly again, he as soon as he's not in that pressure cooker of the interrogation room, he reverts, you know, back to the truth and defends me and at his own peril, because I don't think the police were really interested in him in the first place. And so here he is going through this entire experience. He also has no history of violence, no motive to commit this crime, has no idea who Rudy Gaudet is.

And in his own book about the case, he talks about how he felt like Mr. Nobody, that the media, the prosecution, nobody actually cared about him as a person. He was just a kind of attachment to me. He was an appendage. Which is actually in some ways diagnostic of the psychological motivations of everyone paying attention to the case, right? I mean, the fact that you were so much more interesting than he was is somehow interesting. more interesting than he was is somehow interesting. Yeah, I think the journalist who was interviewed for the Netflix documentary says it best when he was like, it's girl-on-girl crime. This is, it's sexy, it sells. We don't want to hear about another guy raping and murdering a young woman. We want to hear about a young woman raping and murdering a young woman. And then, of course, because we're at this weird juncture in media, what was being reported in

the tabloids in Italy was then being recycled into legitimate news abroad because people were desperate to just get any information to cover the case. And they weren't doing a lot of their own independent reporting. They were just reporting what they found. And the people on the ground were not necessarily being the most reliable or, you know, and then you have to look at how this is all a part of the defunding of newsrooms that has been happening since the mid-2000s. Like, if they don't have the people to send to Italy to report on this case, well, they're just going to recycle what they see other people reporting on it. And so there was all this reporting, but it was all just echoes of each other, just, you know, veiled copycats of what they were hearing from who knows what station in Italy. And, you know, there were news programs in Italy that were interviewing psychics about me who would, you know, put their hand over a picture of me and talk about how I was guilty. Like it was... Listen, I would take most psychics over that lead prosecutor. I mean, he's like,

he's an amateur psychic. Back to Raffaele for a moment. So what has his experience been in the aftermath up until the present? I mean, he's been in Italy this whole time, right? Yeah. This is his home country, right? And so in a lot of ways, he's been more entrenched in it than I have, because it's not like he doesn't have name recognition. Like people recognize his face and recognize his name there, even if his name is not in the headlines as much as mine is. But is he like the minor O.J. Simpson of Italy? Yes. Yeah. And he's had horrible experiences like he's been catfished by a reporter on Tinder. He's attempted over and over again to just go back to having a quiet, legitimate computer engineer job and has consistently found difficulty finding work because people don't want to be associated with him.

And it's just been this insane uphill battle where door after door after door has been closed in his face and he still feels in a lot of ways like mr nobody because even in the aftermath of all of this happening he doesn't feel like his innocence has been recognized and I, I 100% feel for him and he's, he's still, I think he still, still feels more trapped than I do. You know, when, when I've seen him and I, you know, I've gone back to Italy to see him, I couldn't help but feel just, I mean, here I am with a husband and two children at this point. And in a lot of ways, I've been able to move on and be at peace in ways that he has not. He is not at peace. And I'm just devastated for him.

But I, you know, I can't, I can't be at peace for him. So it's hard. Well, Amanda, your powers of resilience are quite obvious. Is there anything we haven't touched? Do you want to say anything about your thoughts on criminal justice reform or anything else you've been paying attention to? I mean, I really enjoyed your free will series and particularly when you talked about how the lack of free will relates to criminal justice in general. It's a position that I agree with. I 100% am on board with the, we don't have free will, and why do we even think we have free will? That doesn't make any sense. It's not coherent. And how we're so deluded to think that punishment makes sense as if a person could have done differently. For me, the real delusion is that the retributive impulse makes sense. I mean, there are scenarios where, many scenarios where I think punishment in some form makes sense just along pragmatic lines because this is the thing that's going to deter that sort of crime. So everything from giving you a parking ticket, right? That's a punishment. And so, yeah, we want parking tickets because we don't want people just parking their cars for four days in front of a store. But yeah, it's the idea

that people really do deserve to suffer for what they've done, that that's the vengeance component of it. Yeah. And our criminal justice system doesn't make sense if you remove the like the just the severity of punishment that we see doesn't make sense for deterrence. Like, I think there are studies that show that, like, it's more the certainty of being caught that deters people than the severity of the punishment. being caught that deters people than the severity of the punishment. And so we need to look when we think about what works for our criminal justice system, when we think about trying to incentivize good social behavior, which is what we should be thinking when we think about our criminal justice system, we need to look at what works. And unfortunately, just huge sentences and death penalties don't work in a lot of ways. And they don't make sense. And the only reason they're really justified and implemented is because people feel like they want to inflict suffering after suffering has been experienced. And that's their idea of fairness. That's only fair in their mind. And for me, that just, it doesn't make sense. Well, the one thing that does make sense, it's interesting to be having this conversation in the aftermath of what we just talked about, because so you take someone like Rudy Gaudet, right? Like I'm not especially sanguine about,

you know, letting him out of prison after 16 years. I mean, for that sort of crime, unless you can tell yourself a story that he is so fundamentally changed in prison that he's no longer a risk to the public. You know, I think a life sentence for murder in many cases makes sense because many of these people show every aptitude for re-offending, right? And so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely in Rudy Gaudet's sense, I think that that makes sense. And I think that when you, it's the quarantine model. You have to be able to do some kind of competent psychological evaluation to assess what the risk factor of this person is. In other cases, there are people who made mistakes when they were 17 years old who are given life sentences. And when they're 33, they are truly no longer a threat to society. And at that point, we're only holding them in prison again because of that retributive reason. And so that's the unfortunate thing that I see is just suffering

for the sake of suffering. But like when I think about the people who harmed me, and that, you know, includes Rudy Gaudet indirectly, what I care about is not their suffering, but my safety and the safety of other people and their safety and the possibility of incentivizing, you know, their experience of the world where they can be well and not inflict pain on other people. I do not want, you know, Rudy Gaudet to suffer. That's not that's not what I want I want to feel safe and you know I would never want to be Rudy Gaudet because I feel like he's someone who obviously is interacting in the world like trying to get his needs met in the world in an incredibly brutal and ineffective way and I feel bad for him at the same time that I'm scared of him. So yeah, I don't know if I'm making sense. No, no. I mean, well, I can tell you you're not making

sense to anyone who has not absorbed the argument against free will, right? So the people who are convinced that free will is a thing and that people are the true authors of themselves and that the buck really stops there with that conscious intention to do bad things, well, then they might be confused at this point in the conversation. But I've gone around that track so many times and my argument is there for people to find both on my podcast and in waking up that they can go do that. But it's just the simplest way to see it from my point of view is that if you just imagine a person's kind of life line, right, if you just kind of go back in time, even with the worst person, you know, you just, you know, you take Hitler, right? Well, you know, Hitler at 40 years old is exactly the person,

you know, you want to assassinate. And it's a pity no one killed him at that point, or even the year before, or even the year before that, or even five years before that. But at some point, when you go back in his biography, at one point, he's a two-year-old, and he's the two-year-old who's destined to become Adolf Hitler. And at some level, year old who's destined to become Adolf Hitler. And at some level, you have to count that two year old unlucky, right? Unlucky for what reasons? Genes, environment, some combination of those two things. And even if you imagine everyone has an immortal soul, well, he didn't pick his soul, so he got unlucky in the ectoplasm department. So there's just nothing that two-year-old was in control over. And each increment of time moving forward gives only the illusion of control once you actually

get down to the business of honestly tallying all of the influences for every moment of thought and intention and behavior in a human brain and mind and life, right? It's just there's no one invented themselves. No one can pick the next thought that arises all by itself. You don't know what you are going to think next until the thought itself arises. So anyway, that's quite confounding to many people, but it's the crucial thing is that it doesn't leave us with the ethical and the judicial opinion that everyone is not guilty by reason of insanity, right? You just empty all the jails, you know, and just there's nothing to do. No, it's just like, you just have to, you view people much more like forces of nature. And as I've said before, if we could imprison hurricanes, we would, right? Because they create enormous harm. free will, I just feel so lucky. Because even thinking back on the difference between me and

Raffaele and how at peace I am in a lot of ways and how not at peace he is, I just feel like I got lucky to be the kind of person who was able to find some level of peace. I just remembered one other thing I wanted to ask you about, Sam, because I don't get to have this opportunity very often to talk to someone who also has a doppelganger version of themselves out there in the world that is very often misrepresented. How have you handled that situation? my trolls and malefactors than you have just displayed in this conversation. It's certainly helpful for me to view them as sincere, but nonetheless kind of malfunctioning robots when that is in fact the case. In many cases, I'm confronted with evidence of insincerity, which bothers me. I feel like my moral outrage

circuits are probably tuned up too high because I view myself as having some kind of public-facing responsibility to deal with lots of these issues. So when I run into bad faith attacks and bad faith arguments, it drives me a little crazier than it needs to. I don't tend to take things personally in the way that I think some people suspect, right? So if I'm outraged by something, it's not that I've internalized this attack against me. It's more just that I just find it, I mean, it's sort of what drives me crazy about Trump, right? It's like it's a phenomenon in the world that just, I just think is so dysfunctional and creating so much manifest harm to everyone. I mean, it's become almost impossible to talk about

important things. And it's this layer, the contamination of sort of reputational attacks and misinformation. We just have such a polluted information landscape. And it's the problem, at least in my view, is only growing worse. And social media really is the main vehicle of all of this toxicity. So having stepped off of Twitter Twitter produced a sea change in my day-to-day experience. I have not even 1% of the hassle I had in my life around any of these issues now that I've stepped off Twitter. But stepping off Twitter a, in some sense, it's just a, an admission that like, okay, that's this tool, which is in fact a tool in many ways. I mean, it's not that it's useless. It has its obvious uses. This tool is no longer available to me, it's become too annoying. As much as I could correct for the annoyance, it just... I mean, the thing that... I've said this before, so apologies to the audience if I'm boring them, if they've heard this for the 10th time, but it was obvious that it was a source of

stress and toxicity for quite some time for me. But the thing that convinced me to just yank it from my life was that I think it was actually deluding me about other people. It was giving me a sense, even though I was kind of consciously trying to correct for it, it was giving me the sense that people are worse than they really are. They're more psychopaths than there are. And I just felt I was just meditating on an hourly basis on the awfulness of other people. And it was, again, it would be one thing to think that, all right, this is really accurate. I'm seeing into people's minds and people are giving me their otherwise private thoughts and they're exactly this awful. But I really do feel that the incentives of the platform were just making things quite a bit worse than they really

are. I mean, it's kind of a funhouse mirror where you're just getting this grotesque distortion that everyone's collaborating and producing, but nonetheless, it's showing you a digital simulacrum of the public square that is distorted in all kinds of ways toward the worst, toward the worst in us. So no longer looking into that mirror on it really ever. I mean, occasionally I look at Twitter or some other social media platform just as a news feed just to see something happening in real time. But even that, I mean, I go for days and weeks without doing that. I mean, it's just, it's not part of my news diet even anymore. And I'm, needless to say, not putting anything out there.

It's really quite humbling to discover what a big change awaited me after getting off Twitter, which is a testament to just how unaware I was that it had defined my view of the world and my view of myself in the world to some degree for years. had a, I was living with a sense of digital reputation that sometimes is true. I mean, it's still there. I mean, I'm told by people that I'm occasionally trending on Twitter even now, but none of it matters to me. I mean, like it has no contact with my consciousness, even when it does. I mean, even when someone tells me I'm trendy on Twitter, that means nothing to me, right? I mean, it's very weird. I'm returned to the real world in a way that is surprising, and it's quite a relief.

Yeah, I feel that. I try to stay off social media as much as possible, although it is also the same place where it's been a conduit to kind people, like people who have, like I said before, have gone out of their way to reach out and say, oh my God, I was wrong about you and I'm so sorry I treated you like a monster or as like entertainment. So there's that. But like, even if you're not on social media, there's still a version of you that exists in people's minds. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, so whether or not you participate is not necessarily relevant to you just being a thing, an idea of a person in someone's mind.

an idea of a person in someone's mind. And it sounds like it doesn't bother you that there are just weird avatars of you that live in other people's minds. And I think that's interesting because for me, I also tend to feel like a lot of the love and the hate that is projected at the idea of me doesn't really have to do with me. And so I wonder if that's something you relate to. Yeah. Well, it clearly doesn't in most cases for me because it's so mistargeted. I mean, the people who really hate me for my views almost invariably don't understand my views, right? Like they've been misled by a clip or a meme or something. And so, you know, I have people out there who hate me because they think I want to execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world, right? And there's like, there are people, you know, otherwise professional journalists or people who are imagined to be professional journalists who have been going around for 20 years saying that that's what I said in my first

book. And so, you know, I've been dealing, that was, you know, before social media, that came out in 2004, I guess that, but it was before social media was really doing much of anything. It was certainly before I had any knowledge of it. So I was dealing with the misinformation problem, even just in a journalistic context, the moment I published anything. But yeah, it's just at a certain point, you recognize that all you can do is try to ensure that you've clearly represented your views somewhere. And in my case, I've repeated those views up to the limits of boredom, my own and any possible audiences on at least a dozen topics that have been deemed controversial. dozen topics that have been deemed controversial. And then you just have to assume that anyone who really wants to understand whether you're worth hating will do the work to actually encounter your views as you've put them out there. And then you just have to recognize you just don't have control, right? I mean, you just can't control it. The thing that would be more interesting to

confront is, which occasionally happens, is a really cutting criticism, even bordering on hatred, that is valid, right? That you recognize, oh, okay, that person actually sees something about me that I don't like, right? And I get why they have written me off as a moron or as evil or whatever. It's like, this thing is, I wish I wasn't like that. So that would be interesting. I can't say I've had that experience much. I've had glimmers of it where somebody will point out, certainly if anyone points out a mistake I've made. I feel that's useful. And if it's ever embarrassing, I'm still certainly

grateful for it and want to correct all those given a place where that's possible. But so much of it is just a hallucination on the part of the trolls and the critics based on misinformation and a kind of a commitment to maintaining, again, it comes back to Nietzsche's point, you know, like once their view of you has solidified, once they've gone into print with their dunk on this view of yours that you've never even held, then any effort to change their mind is, you know, they hold it against you for all the effort it causes them. And it's just a very weird part of human psychology, the double down condition that everyone has, even when it would seem logically or factually impossible. Yeah.

Have you been tempted to get off of social media and I I set very strong limits but I've I've had to really depersonalize it in a lot of ways and it's to the extent that like even so at this point now my husband is the one who will look at my dms first to sort of protect me and then lets me know if someone has something nice to say. But like, it doesn't mean I'm not exposed to like the headlines that come up. And then one of the things that like continues to sort of haunt me, especially with this sort of idea of me out in the world, is again, people have this anchoring bias about my identity and my identity is, you know, a counterpoint to Meredith's identity. People sort of associate me being alive with Meredith being dead. And so often I have found that people sort of resent me just for like being alive when she is

dead. Well, this is something I think you've spoken about, what you've called the single victim fallacy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's really, I feel like her and I are like two sides of a coin. And whenever sort of I pop up and live my life or exist, it's viewed in many people's eyes as like an affront to Meredith's memory, which is really tough because she's also an idea in so many people's minds. I not by choice I also feel responsible for her image in the world it's merely because my name keeps getting associated with her death and because people horribly don't really seem all that much interested in her I don't know it's it's a weird thing that I'm continuing to grapple with. And again, I don't get the chance very often to talk to somebody who has even a somewhat similar experience to me as being an idea in other people's imaginations. Yeah. That plays into the plot points of their own life story. you know, the number of people who have chosen you to be the cartoon villain that they want to take down because they're on their own journey of righteousness is interesting to me. It might be a professional necessity for you or anyone else to maintain a presence on various social media platforms. I mean, I, you know, obviously I have a sort of the marketing

presence that, you know that my team will send out just posts on various platforms that I never look at. But for me, Twitter was the one that I engaged with and used, and that really was me there. And I think, yeah, I'm sure something's lost by not having it, but I just got to tell you, I tend to view life now like a, it's almost like a vast dinner party, right? Where you get to decide who you want to sit down with and talk to and keep company with and whose advice you're going to seek and whose input you really want and who you're going to take the time to debate and disagree with. And you can pick your battles. And when you look at what the experience is like for someone like me, and I can only imagine someone like you on a platform like X, and you're looking

at just random people who decide to tell you what they pretend to think about you on a moment by moment basis. For me, I just step back and think, why would I want to do this? Like these people, why would I invite this person, this anonymous person to the dinner party? That I get to, this is, it's Friday, right? I'm not going to get this Friday back, right? So how much time am I going to spend contemplating this person's opinion of me before I then go hang out with my kids or my wife or friends? It's just because it has seemed like a professional necessity for so many people. And because, again, you do get these dopaminergic moments of goodness where you just like it's exactly what you would hope it would be you get connected with with a person who you're a fan of say you know so it has its utility

but so much of it is just this insane encounter with people who are deciding to be at their worst again because all the variables are tuned so as to incentivize them to be their worst. They're performing in front of their crowd at you and hoping to win points for it and nothing is really at stake in many cases for them because they're living under a pseudonym or it's just corrupting of so much, both know, both in public and in private that, I don't know, I just, you know, I'm not urging you to delete your ex account, but it's, I got to say, it really is quite amazing to just not have that in one's life. You know, it's somewhat analogous to like if there were a protest in front of your house right now,

if you had a mob of people, if every time you opened your front door, there were 400 people out there ready to tell you that you're the scum of the earth. And then you got a few people out there who say, yay, Amanda, we love you. But still, there's always someone out there who's just going to say, you're scum. If you could wave a magic wand and have all those people forget where you live, right? So that you could just walk out your front door and have a nice empty street, why wouldn't you do that, right? And that's essentially what happened when I got off Twitter. Yeah, no, I mean, it sounds like utter relief and something that I hope one day that I can aspire to. I think the big issue for me is that I still feel very, very deeply stuck

in the reputational hole. Like I sort of emerged into the world as girl accused of murder. And I thought I could like go about my life and not care about that and not have it impact me, but, you know, like live the life of an anonymous person, but I was not really given that opportunity. And so instead, like I looked at social media as an opportunity to be one person who was representing me in a sea of people who were already representing me and having an actual impact on my life and my career and what I was able to do and how I was able to move through the world. And it's been a really interesting journey because I still, you know, walk this line of having of just offending people by existing and and being like what they don't expect me to be. Like, I can't tell you the number of people who just seem kind of mad that I don't live up to their expectations

of who I am and they get frustrated or confused or, or look at anything I say in through the lens of the way they expect me to behave. And I don't know, I think that I feel a lot of pressure to assert who I am because there was this false image of me put out in the world. So like that was just on like on all the billboards. And there was just this one story being told about me for so long. And I live with this interesting dilemma of how much do I want to interact with that? And and not like in a reactionary way, but just understanding that there is a space for me to just exist as I am and hope that that speaks louder than the thing that came before or the story that persists. talking to you. And that means a huge amount to me because I never thought that after everything I went through, I would end up talking to someone like you about issues like this. And I would have this opportunity to share my work and perspective on waking up. Like your app has been tremendously

helpful to me. Like really, it's made a huge difference in my life. And I really, really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to just be who I am and not an idea of a person just right now. So thank you. Nice. Well, the honor is mine. It's really, it's great to have you as a collaborator over at Waking Up and to be talking to you here. And yeah, I am just, I'm happy to be on Team Amanda. No. To be continued. It's great. Thank you for your time and for everything you're doing. And if people want to pay attention to what's going on for you, I know you've got a bunch of other projects in the works that have different timelines associated with them. So if people want to follow you, where's the best? Is X the best place or do you have another spot you want people to be logging for you?

You know, people can send me just direct messages through the contact form on my website, noxrobinson.com. But if you want to follow me on social media, I'm on X at Amanda Knox and on Instagram at a mama Knox. And that's a great way to keep up with what I'm doing. And yeah, I have a lot of stuff that's really exciting that's in the works. And if you haven't listened to the Waking Up Resilience series, I recommend it. It's there. It's in our live section, yes. Thanks again, Amanda. Thank you, Sam.