RedHanded - Listen Now: Amanda Knox on How Do You Cope?

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

How do you cope when you’re sentenced to life in prison for a crime you didn’t commit?On How Do You Cope?, John Robins speaks to writer and activist Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully incarcerated for the murder of Meredith Kercher at the age of just 22. Amanda spent a total of 4 years in an Italian jail before she was exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.In a wide-ranging and candid conversation, Amanda talks about the methods she used, and the hope she leaned on, in order to get through her time behind bars. She discusses the unacknowledged misogyny at the heart of her case, and reflects on the ways Meredith’s death haunts her to this day.If you need support, you can find help and advice from the following organisations:Rape Crisis England & Wales - https://rapecrisis.org.uk/Samaritans - https://www.samaritans.org/Miscarriage Association - https://www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk/Listen to How Do You Cope? on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/how-do-you-cope.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello dear listener, do we have a podcast recommendation for you? Can you ever fully recover from a trauma that's been played out in front of the world's media? This week on How Do You Cope, John Robbins sits down with Amanda Knox, who at just 22 was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Meredith Kurcho. She spent four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted in 2011, and then fully exonerated in 2015. In this raw and powerful conversation, Amanda opens up about the toll of her wrongful conviction,

the misogyny at the heart of her case, and how she's worked to rebuild her life. It's an incredible listener, because we are so nice, we're about to play you an extract from this very special episode. But if you would like to listen to the full conversation, search and follow How Do You Cope with John Robbins right now, wherever you get your podcasts. You're welcome.

It's a very warm welcome to How Do You Cope to Amanda Knox. Amanda, thank you so much for making the time to speak to us today. Oh, thank you. I love the concept of your podcast. Well, I wanted to start by asking, for someone who has spent so long battling against other people's preconceptions of them, whether it be their character or your guilt through lawyers, the media and members of the public. How do you feel coming into an interview like this with someone you don't know, you don't know what my questions are going to be? What's your sort of headspace? a very philosophical question because you're right, I have no idea who you are, I have no idea what

version of me exists in your mind and I've had to grapple with that my entire adult life knowing that very likely anyone that I encounter is going to have an idea of me that exists in their mind, and that my identity isn't just my own, that my identity belongs to everyone and is a part of this entire ecosystem of humanity that we all inform each other and the place that we exist in the world and the role that we are,

and how do you cope with that when the idea of you in people's minds is potentially so, so negative? Well, one way that I cope with it is that I understand deep down that much of what people perceive is me is not really me. It's very, like I have learned to not, to recognize that like people's perceptions of me are not personal to me, that really like the product

that was packaged by the Italian criminal justice system and by the international media was packaged by the Italian criminal justice system and by the international media was a product that was being sold to people's worst impulses and therefore says more about other people than it does say about me potentially. The thing that I have to grapple with is then, okay, so what? Now what? Now that my identity exists as a product in other people's minds that is meant to stoke their most titillated and morbidly interested impulses,

what do I do about that? And for a long time and in my book Free, I talk about grappling with this question, how do I exist in a world where I am perpetually the girl accused of murder? Can I do anything about that? Is there anything that I could possibly do in my entire life that will ever come to define me more than this idea of me and other people's heads? And for a long time, I was very afraid to talk to people because my experience was that I was always viewed in the worst possible light, that anything I said was always construed in the least generous

way possible, and that I was being constantly scrutinized for evidence of guilt. So it was paralyzing, paralyzing. It's been a long journey of realizing that this worst experience of my life that put me at odds with the rest of the world is in fact a bridge and an opportunity for me to connect with people. Sorry for this very long-winded answer to your question, which is I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised. Well, you know, I've spent the last two or three weeks in the world of your story and your life.

And really, I only had a sort of thumbnail sketch of what had happened to you before that, which turned out to be quite a useful place to be when learning about what happened to Meredith, what happened to you. And at the start of the documentary about Meredith's murder on Netflix, you pose a very stark question right at the start. You say, either I'm a psychopath in sheep's clothing or I am you. And I was able to sort of absorb your story with both those possibilities in play. And that gave me an insight into why false narratives about you were so powerful. Because if you're guilty, the story, especially in the way the media framed it, is box office.

It's kind of Hollywood. It's awful, but it's kind of soap opera. Oh yeah. Whereas, if you are innocent, the story is almost unbearably troubling and disturbing. And the reason it's so disturbing, or the reason I found it disturbing, is not because I was thinking this could happen to me, but it made me confront my culpability in what happened to you. That's very generous of you, I think.

I don't know if everyone came away from that. I mean, there are definitely people who came away from the Netflix documentary who reached out to me and said, oh my God, I'm so sorry that I treated you and the worst experience of your life as entertainment for so many years. And I didn't even realize that I was contributing to that. But I think other people came away from it feeling more just angry at the journalists. Oh yeah. I mean, we might get to that. Yeah. And thinking like, you lied to me. Yeah. Oh yeah, I mean, we might get to that. Yeah, and thinking like, you lied to me.

Yeah. But because whether it's believing a headline or wishing you ill or even thinking you're guilty, your innocence costs us something that your guilt doesn't. And it costs us faith in a lot of institutions. And also, it costs us our opinion of our own ability to question what we read and how we read it. When did you become aware that actually there's a lot more riding on me being guilty in terms of people's understanding of this? Yeah. First of all, can I just give you so much credit and compliments for phrasing it

that way? Because I've never heard someone phrase it that way that it costs like my innocence costs people something that that is something that I have acutely felt and as helped me to answer one of those haunting questions that has like niggled at my insides for years, even after I was released from prison. And even after I was definitively found, um my insides for years, even after I was released from prison and even after I was definitively found innocent of the murder, I was really struggling with that why question.

Why did this happen to me? Why did people look at me and see their worst nightmare even though I have like zero history of violence, zero motive to commit a crime, like zero mental illness. Like why did this thing happen to me and why did this story about me that is like for me, so obviously false, why did that captivate people? And I was able to sort of realize that like,

I didn't phrase it to myself this way, but I love the way you phrased that, that it cuss people. Like it means something for an investigator, for instance, whose entire life is dedicated to pursuing justice and getting the bad guys and trusting their gut to confront the fact that not only did they make a mistake, but they harmed a person as a result of them making their mistake.

I think that's where it's really scary, is it's not just they were wrong about their opinion about something, it's that their opinion or their decisions that they made were harmful. And now they have to reimagine themselves as someone who has committed a harm against someone whether that was intentional or not. Like it's not something that we like to acknowledge about ourselves. And I think that there's an unconscious resistance to accepting that when you imagine yourself

to be generally a good person and generally just trying to do your best and do the right thing. I think another thing as consumers of news and media reports, we're very bad in general at stories with multiple victims and multiple perpetrators. You know, we want a story to be black and white. We want a team to pick. And once we've been told what team to pick, we don't like switching sides. We don't like sudden nuances to the story. And obviously, I think it's really important to acknowledge,

as you do in your book, Meredith is the first and major victims of this story, then you and Raffaelle are then victims of different kind. Raffaelle then becomes a perpetrator by changing his story. You, under completely unreasonable questioning, then become a perpetrator for implicating Patrick Lumumba. He then becomes a victim. Yeah. And I think it goes far beyond your story because I'm thinking of something that Yuval Noah Harari said, which is why the situation in the Middle East is so complex is because there's victims and perpetrators on both sides and we can't cope with that. So why do you think we struggle so much with complex cases like this? Um, and what kind of emotional gymnastics do we need to be able to perform to sort of better empathize and understand them? So there's a chapter in my book where I talk specifically about Meredith

and how she continues to have a huge role in my life, not just because her death became intertwined with my identity. Whenever people think of me, they inevitably think of her death. That's just the way that I sort of came into their existence was in the context of her death. But like, I am deeply aware that the way that our institutions are created, our criminal justice system, our media, the stories that we tell ourselves are all in search of what you said, the hero and the

victim, the villain. And we wanna know who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, who to choose. And makes us simplify reality so that we feel like we are on the right side of history. We are on the right side of whatever conflict has arisen. And I think that that was a real challenge for me. First of all, I talk in

the book about this idea called the single victim fallacy, where we have this idea that in any tragic event there must be, for our own brains to comprehend it, there must be one true victim. And if there is one true victim and someone else lays claim to a kind of victimhood, it is at that first true victim's expense necessarily. As if there's not enough victimhood to go around or enough acknowledgement of victimhood to go around. And I think that that is false.

I think that is a false setup that has been established by our institutions, especially our criminal justice systems, which are so adversarial. I think it's a very huge shame that, like now that I'm in the sort of criminal justice advocacy world, very often you see victim rights advocates being pitted against, you know, criminal justice victim, you know, advocates. Like, there's this sense that, like,

you cannot care about the victimhood of both sides and see the both sides of it. And I actually am in a unique position because like you said, Meredith was the first and primary victim who had the most taken from her in this experience. And I actually was an indirect victim of the crime that was committed against her. Like a lot of people forget that like the moment that Rudy Gide broke into my home and raped and murdered Meredith, that impacted me as well in the sense that like if nothing else had

happened, if I had never been accused and never like gone to prison, all of that, never become this like household villain name, I still would have been traumatized by the experience of at 20 years old coming home to discover that this person that I was sharing my life with in this moment had been viciously ripped away and that if I had been home by fluke, like I would have been raped and murdered too. Like I would be in therapy still from having had that experience

because I would have been an indirect victim of this horrendous crime. And then of course, there's all these other layers on top of it. And so I think you're right. I think there is this impulse in the way that we frame reality that we feel like we have to choose a side

in order to be on the side of justice because that's how the criminal justice system or that's how politics like presents us our choices. And I have found that that way of approaching reality has been deeply unsatisfying. And in my own approach to my own victimhood and my own adversaries and the people who have harmed me. I'm assuming you're talking about Giuliano Minnini, who led the prosecution. Yes.

That was a prosecution which Italy's Supreme Court found quote, glaring errors, culpable omissions and sensational failures. S1 Yeah. I have not been interested in pursuing the course that is expected by that perspective, that they are clearly on the wrong side. I am on this side. They are over there, ne'er shall the two meet because they are bad and they are wrong and they hurt me. the two meet because they are bad and they are wrong and they hurt me. I never thought that that could be true, especially because that's what was being said about me. I could not believe that the person who had harmed me was just a villain because it was so clearly, obviously false when people were saying that about me. And so I tried to imagine,

saying that about me. And so I tried to imagine how could the man who hurt me, how could he be the hero in his own story? And what does that make me? And is it possible for us to exist in a world that is not just adversarial, that is not just black and white. And instead of defining him by looking at the decisions he made that had a harmful impact on my life, could I instead see him and understand him in order to understand his decisions? It's like that switch, right? Like you, you can choose how to approach a person. You can say they did this, therefore they are this kind of person. Or you can say, huh, they are this kind of person

and they did this. And so I went that other route. I went that sort of indirect labyrinthine route of trying to understand this victimization hood that happened to me by being first genuinely curious about the person who harmed me and then sort of inevitably as a result of coming into contact and coming into understanding about him as a person, having compassion for him and caring about him and realizing that and caring about him and realizing that, yes, I am a victim of certain choices that he made, but I am not helpless at all. And that our dynamic is not as scary as I had thought it was,

when in fact I have quite a lot of power in our dynamic in surprising ways that I think just establishing a boundary instead of crossing a bridge would not allow me to recognize.