The Megyn Kelly Show - Amanda Knox on Media Bias and Sensationalism, Reclaiming Her Name, and Motherhood and Marriage | Ep. 211

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Amanda Knox, writer and co-host of the "Labyrinths" podcast, to talk about the story that made her a national name, the details of her arrest, what she faced with the Italian police, the way the prosecution botched the case, the media's selective reporting, bias and sensationalistic coverage, reflecting on her interview with Chris Cuomo, her effort to reclaim her life and her name, her thoughts on the Kyle Rittenhouse case, due process on college campuses, the MeToo movement, "cognitive opening" and learning to forgive, motherhood and marriage, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we have a good show for you today. You're going to love this program. Joining me now is Amanda Knox. She's a writer, a new mother, and co-host of the podcast Labyrinths with her husband, Christopher Robinson. Amanda is a household name, not just in our country, but worldwide, but not by choice. She has spent the past six years trying to reclaim her life, her story, and her freedom after she was wrongfully convicted of a murder she did not commit in Italy in 2009. And she joins me now.

Amanda, thank you for being back with me. We interviewed when I was on NBC. And I'm so happy to see you doing so well. And congratulations on the birth of your daughter. Thank you so much, Megan. It's great to reconnect. So I've been like neck deep in Amanda Knox in preparation for this interview. And of course, I was in the media when this happened to you.

So I covered it not in the way the British tabloids did, but I covered it as a new story. And as a young woman myself, I was skeptical of the claims being made about you as a lover of Italy. I was not wanting to believe that they'd be doing this to an innocent American, that there was any sort of anti-Americanism going on there. But it for sure was a dynamic at play. And as I sort of went back to your story through the Netflix documentary and your book and so on, and a bunch of interviews about you and involving you, I felt the trauma on your behalf. It was never ending. It wasn't like, oh my God, one year of my life was so awful.

It went on and on and on. And you're still trying to get out from under it in some ways. So let's just start at the beginning. I think a lot of people know generally, wasn't she that girl, Foxy Noxy, that's the newspapers called her. And what happened? Did she murder somebody?

What happened? Right? I think that's how people think about your name because they're living their own lives. So let's just talk about what happened. Because I think if you go through it stage by stage and talk about the evidence and what the prosecutor was releasing about you, the story tells itself. Your exoneration, you don't have to prove anything. It tells itself when you realize what was done to you. It was deeply wrong. Okay, so let's do that, and then we'll talk about what you're doing today. So take us back to Amanda, age 20,

and you decide, as I did when I was the same age, to study abroad, as I did in Italy. It's like a dream come true. So you go over there. I'm sure excited for a semester of who knows what and what was the year? 2007. So I was 20 years old, 2007, a language student and really for the first time going out into the world on my own without my parents right there next door to be right by me and support me. So look at your vulnerable in a way for the first time. So we're doing this on Sirius XM live triumph 111. But we also do a YouTube version of the show. And we have the picture of you and you're so cute. And you're so young. And you're so you look so sweet with your

little headband. And you know, it's like, like God only knew if that girl only knew it was about to come her way. So you go over there and you hadn't exactly been a world traveler or, you know, all that experienced and living independently. But you managed to find a place to live, to find your own roommate. So it wasn't like where I went. I went to Syracuse, both at home and abroad. And they kind of provided all that for you. You did it on your own. Yeah, yeah. I had a number of jobs to save up money to be able to spend that year abroad. And when I arrived in Perugia, I knew that I was signed up for classes, but I had to get my own visa. I had to find my own place to live. But fortunately, this is a small

town where a lot of young people are moving through it. So there were a lot of like places to rent. And just outside of my university, there was a young Italian woman who was putting up a poster for a room for let. And I met with her and immediately we hit things off. So, you know, it was actually a really ideal situation. I was just a few steps away from my university in this beautiful little cottage that was overlooking the valley and living alongside three other young women who are all students,

two of whom were Italian and one of whom was British. The Brit was a woman named Meredith Kircher, who you met on September 20th, 2007. And within 42 days, she would be dead and your life would have changed forever, bringing you here today. You found that roommate and the other two gals. You found a boyfriend, Rafael Solisito. You'd been dating for just five days, which is a little known fact. Yeah, I think when people like they've called us lovers, they've called us boyfriend and girlfriend. I think that at the time of like, to be perfectly honest, we knew each other for five days. So we were at the very beginning of a like very sweet,

romantic, who knows what it was going to be, but it was only five days old. So it wasn't like, you know, we the way that it was portrayed is that we were like in cahoots in some like deep in like inextricable way. Right. Really, we were just getting to know each other. Right. Later, it will be like part of a sex cult, the two of them together. It's like, well, I barely know the guy's last name. I mean, I'm not the sex cult with him. And we're not, you know, plotting murders and so on in any event um okay so that you you found meredith on september 20th and and november 1st 2007 um take us to that night you you were not at home that night in your apartment no i was not no um so this is the day after halloween

um it was like a day off from school, basically. And we were, you know, I was hanging out with Raffaele that day. And Meredith, I knew had gone, I had saw her in the morning, she had taken a shower to wipe off the Halloween makeup, did a load of laundry, said, I'll see you later. And that was last I saw her. I was around like late in the morning, early afternoon. And then I spent the day with Raffaele and I spent the night with Raffaele. You know, as soon as I met this guy and he was so sweet and charming and we made plans to go to another town nearby called Gubbio in which we would spend the weekend and eat truffles like that. That was the world I was in. And I was technically supposed to work that night.

I was doing some like basically all around work, like handing out flyers or serving drinks at this local bar. And my boss, Patrick Lumumba, called me that night and said that I or sent me a text message and said that I didn't have to come in. So I stayed the night with Raffaele and we made plans to leave the next day to go to Gubbio. So you decided to swing by your apartment before going on your trip and you walk in and as you approach the apartment, you did notice something was off. Take us through that walkthrough. Yeah, absolutely. So coming back to my apartment, my thought process was I'm going to go change.

I'm going to grab some clothes, grab some things that I can take with me to Gubbio. And so I went back to my place and I noticed the first thing that was off was that the front door was wide open. And of course, like this is a huge red flag. If you think about it, this isn't the middle of the summer. It's early November. It's cold. Why is the front door wide open? Well, I thought that too, except there was one little trick to our front door, which is that it didn't actually stay closed unless you locked it with a key. So I thought maybe someone left in a hurry and forgot to close the door and lock it with a key and the wind blew it open. So there was a plausible explanation, but still, it seemed off. I went into the house. I called out, hello, is anyone there? No one answered. So I went about my business to take a shower. Inside the main area where I was and in my own

bedroom, nothing seemed amiss. The first next sign that something was a mess was when I went to my bathroom to take a shower, I brushed my teeth. And as I was brushing my teeth, I noticed a few droplets of blood in the sink. And this is, again, I didn't automatically think at that moment, a few drops in the sink of the door open that someone had been murdered. What I thought was that's odd, but it's not like a bathroom full of blood. It didn't look like a crime scene to me. It looked like a few drops of blood again. So I got dressed. I went to go dry my hair. And while I was in our second bathroom, drying our hair using my Italian roommate's hairdryer, I noticed that there was feces left in the sink, or sorry, not my Italian roommate's hairdryer, I noticed that there was

feces left in the sink or sorry, not in the toilet. And I thought that is odd. That is not something that my roommates would do. My, my, especially my Italian roommates were very, very meticulous about cleanliness. So I could understand maybe, you know, menstrual issues, but leaving feces in the sink or in the, in the toilet, totally off. I got this weird, creepy feeling that someone was in the house with me. And I immediately left and reached, started calling my roommates and reaching out to Raphael or asking Raphael, like, what do you think? Should I, do I need to call like, this is something off. I didn't notice that anything was taken from the house, but I feel like I need to know what's going on. At that point, I started calling my roommates. Meredith was not answering the phone. Neither was Laura. The only

one of my roommates who did answer was Philomena. And Philomena said, definitely come home. We need to check out to see if our house was broken into. So Raffaele and I went back together to see what was going on. I was feeling creeped out. He was there to support me. And we opened up the door to Philomena's room and found it ransacked. Window was broken, the entire room a mess. Meanwhile, Laura's room was totally untouched. We went and checked her room and we went to check Meredith's room and found that her door was locked. And again, we thought this is really strange because the only time I've ever seen Meredith lock her door was when she was like changing or something and didn't want to be disturbed. So I thought, is Meredith in there?

Is she is she's not answering like we knocked on the door, didn't answer. Raffaele even tried kicking down the door, didn't didn't succeed. We called the cops. Raffaele called the cops to be more specific, because arrive. Within minutes, two plainclothes police officers arrived and said that they were there because they had discovered some cell phones in a nearby garden. And we thought, wait, you aren't here for the break-in call? And they said, no, we're here for these cell phones. They belong to Filomena Romanelli. And I thought, that's weird. I was just talking to Filomena on the phone. She's on her way. You can ask her about them when she gets here. Philomena arrives. The police who are investigating or they don't write yet. So Philomena arrives. She says those phones belong to Meredith. I let her borrow an SMS card from me. So they belong to Meredith. Where is Meredith? And I say, well, her door is locked. And Philomena says, well, someone needs to break down the door. There was a conversation between her and the police officers arguing about whether or not they were allowed to break down the door. But ultimately what happened is Philomena, her boyfriend, their friends and the police all sort of charged Meredith's door and broke it down while I was while me and Raffaele were standing in the kitchen.

And that is when they discovered the crime scene. And I think this is a really important point. A lot of people have asked me, when did I think everything started going wrong? And of course, it's hard for me to be in the hearts and minds of the investigators and the prosecution and how they could think that I had something to do with this or not. A lot has been said about my behavior versus my roommate's behaviors. And I think that there is a very important difference between my reaction and Philomena's reaction in the immediacy of discovering the crime scene. That major difference is that Philomena saw inside Meredith's room and I did not. I never saw the crime scene with my own eyes and Philomena did. And so, of course, Philomena,

seeing Meredith's body on the floor, blood everywhere, this horrible nightmare flipped out, started screaming, started crying, was hysterical, was inconsolable. Everyone was yelling in Italian, forcing us outside of the house. And I barely understood what was going on. I barely understood Italian at this time. I never saw into Meredith's room. I never saw the horror of that tragedy. And so I was pushed out of the house, bewildered, but not horrified because I didn't know what was going on. And so when the police and everyone talks about just outside of the crime scene, of course, there's two there's two roommates here to this

girl who just died. One of them is flipping out and hysterical. The other one is just kind of standing there looking confused and getting a kiss from her boyfriend. Well, the big difference is not that one of them is innocent and one of them is guilty. It's that one of them knows exactly what's going on and the other does not. And so I always, that always struck me as a little, uh, cause it's like having lived in Italy as well for, for many months, I went over there a few times as an exchange student. Um, the Italians in general are, are bigger in their personalities and in their emotions. And there's absolutely no social, um, I don't know, caution about showing your emotions or expressing your upset or your tears. None. It's expected. Americans, I don't know, caution about showing your emotions or expressing your upset or your tears. None. It's expected. Americans, I would say, are a little different in that way. I know you've got some German heritage.

Same, you know, for the Germans. So even if you had known, to me, that was never real. I don't know if that wasn't a real selling point in whether you had done anything or not. But I understand why you're sensitive about it, because now you've had a million headlines written about every move, every turn of your head in the weeks and months after. That's a fair point, Megan, because like that's, you know, it's another fair point to say what what constitutes guilty versus innocent behavior in the immediacy of discovering a crime scene.

And I think there's a lot of speculation about like the turn of the head or the look or whether or not you would get a hug or whether or not you would cry. And I think these are all excuses for people to sort of retroactively justify their original opinion about you. But that isn't to say that there aren't actual, you know, behaviors that do indicate guilt. And a really great example of this is the man who actually killed Meredith Kircher, Rudy Gaudet, fled the country. That's I think that's a pretty like, you know, I think one could argue that he wasn't just fleeing the country for so that he could have a vacation in Germany. Like he was fleeing the country specifically because he had committed this horrible crime and's no perfect way of handling it. And I've seen enough criminal cases to know you really can't deduce that much from a person's emotional state when they call 911, when they first talk to investigators. But you're right. Fleeing is so much evidence of guilt. They'll allow it in in a court of law as evidence of guilt many times. So there you are. And that's where we see the video of you and Raffaele comforting each other and you're kissing. Now that I know you'd only been dating five days, that actually makes more sense, too. I mean, you find a new hot Italian boyfriend. You're over there. It's like you do spend a lot of time kissing. You're young. You're like a babe. You're there. You're scared. You're kissing. People would use this against you as evidence of criminality. We now know it is nothing of the sort um then then enter we've got to introduce uh

giuliano i always struggle with his last name but giuliano is it mignani or mignani what is it min mini mini okay so we go with the true italian mini m-i-g-n-i-n-i this is i mean if he wanted you to be the villain of this movie he wind up he winds up being one of the villains of this movie. And this guy had a long history in Italy before he ever met Amanda Knox. He had investigated a serial murderer there who was dubbed the monster of Florence. And he had made some, I don't 10 or 20 arrests, all of which were ultimately thrown out. He was censured by the Italian courts. He had already been disciplined for unethical behaviors before he met you. And he got there. And he was actually on trial for abuse of office while

trying me for Meredith's murder. Oh my gosh. For gosh. Case. Yeah. So it's not like it is here because people hear that and they think, well, no, if that happened to a lawyer or prosecutor here, he would be he'd be benched. You know, he wouldn't be allowed to go back out there. That's not the way it worked there. And in fact, he's still doing well in his job in Italy. But he settled on you very early. They brought you, I guess, back to the crime scene after you had left that morning. They made you search through a knife drawer to see if anything was missing. You started crying and the documentary about you on Netflix shows him reaching all these crazy conclusions, right? Like because you cried when they made you search through the knife drawer in the home in which your friend had just been murdered. He deduced what he deduced that I was remembering the murder somehow. you talk about, you know, what footage is endlessly recycled that is meant to make me look guilty and what is forgotten. And of course, there were moments when I was feeling scared and and crying. And even those were pitched in the through the lens of me being a guilty person of me being involved. And I think that that that is, you know, that moment when they asked me to search through the cutlery drawer to see if there was anything missing. That's when I had like this first like wave of sudden horror at what Meredith had gone through, the full gravity of it, the full like just pain of it. shocked and scared. And it was sort of my equivalent to Philomena's shock at seeing

the crime scene herself. Like that was my moment of like sudden realization and horror. And I lost it. I was hysterical. But of course, by that point, I was not just a witness in the eyes of the prosecution. Another really important point about the difference between the Italian justice system and the American justice system is we think that prosecution, the prosecution and the detectives work really closely here in the United States. Well, they work even more closely in Italy where prosecutors actually are the head of the investigation in a case. And so they don't just take whatever evidence the detectives give them and decide whether or not a case should be brought to court. They are there from the beginning, building their case with the help of the detectives. And so when my prosecutor decided

at the very beginning that I must know something that I'm not telling that he understood that or he he looked at me through this lens of Amanda's not being fully forthcoming. And whatever Amanda is experiencing must have something to do with her involvement with this crime. The whole system that's so messed up. I mean, there's a reason we separated out over here. And that's one of them is the prosecutor's role is to seek justice. It's not to get a conviction. It's to seek justice, no matter what that is. And so if the case, as it goes along, even at trial reveals to the prosecutor, he or she has the wrong defendant, they have an ethical obligation to drop it, to abandon the case because they they're there

to get a just result, not to put somebody in prison. And yet, if you are the investigator, soup to nuts, and then the guy who tries the case, they're setting you up to want to get her from day one. Once you've settled on somebody, the rest of your days are spent building your case against her. And you really don't have much incentive to keep an open mind or think about overall justice. You just want to win. And this guy's history showed it. And unconsciously or consciously. I mean, I think there's a lot of cognitive science research that shows that you could even think that you have the best intentions and yet still be doing what ultimately results to unethical work and an injustice because of confirmation bias and because

of certain prejudices that you have in your own mind. Tunnel vision is a very natural thing that we all get sometimes. But if you are in that position of authority who has the power to take away the freedom of a of a citizen, you should constantly be doing self auditing in order to make sure that you are following the evidence instead of building a case and finding the evidence that you want and ignoring the evidence that you don't want. To the contrary, this guy is on the record talking about the accolades he was receiving in going after you. And that's where I'm going to pick it up right after this quick break. And later we'll get to the media and Hollywood and how Amanda is trying to reclaim her own story and her name. So Amanda, you, the prosecutor is putting you through these paces and this is all within a matter of days before, days after the murder. And I just before I leave the subject of this prosecutor, I want to I want to read the audience. The quote I was going to play you the soundbite from the documentary, but it's in Italian. So that's not much help, much help without subtitles to our listeners. This is what he said, quote, Normally, people say that nobody is a prophet in his own country, but that's not what I experienced.

Complete strangers would come up to me and ask to shake my hand. They would congratulate me. It gives me satisfaction because Perugia is my little homeland. He loved it. He was trading off of gunning for you. Yeah. And I think that, you know, the biggest sign of this, it wasn't just Giuliano Mignini, although he was head of the investigation. It seemed like the entire Italian legal system ultimately in the end was banking on me being guilty in order to not admit fault. And so also, I you know, if I'm

going to empathize with someone like Giuliana Mignini, I have to admit that we all have ego. And it's really hard to admit when we're wrong, especially when we've made a mistake in such a public way. I was arrested before any evidence was made available, any forensic evidence was was there. So they made a gut feeling about whether or not that I was guilty. They arrested me. They imprisoned me. They did a public press conference saying that the case was closed. And then lo and behold, the evidence starts coming back, indicating a totally separate figure who had nothing to do with me, his fingerprints, footprints in her blood. It is his DNA in Meredith's body, a local known burglar named Rudy Gaudet. And they thought crap, like they had imprisoned an innocent person. And this instead of admitting fault

at the very beginning, they decided to pursue a case in which a convoluted case in which they were forcing these separate figures with very different pieces of evidence into the same equation and making excuses for why it didn't add up. Instead of saying crap, they should have said, phew, thank God we found out the truth before we put this innocent girl and her boyfriend in jail. But they didn't. They went a different way. So over the course of the next few days, I guess it was about five days. What I read was they interrogated you for nearly 60 hours. And this is an important piece of it, too. And I'm not going to say this doesn't happen in the United States, but we have a lot more strict rules on what you're at least supposed to be doing in an interrogation. So describe what the police were doing to you over those days. Yeah. So it's interesting because it's almost like my family, especially my aunt in Germany, had a feeling that something was off. It didn't make sense to my family that I was spending hours and hours and hours answering the same questions over and over again in the police office. My mom, of course, thought there's a killer on the loose in Perugia who almost killed my daughter. I want her to come home. My aunt in Germany is saying, I'm going to come down there and get you. You need to go talk to the embassy. You're clearly not safe. But of course, the police were telling me, no, Amanda, you're a very, very important witness in this case. You were the first person to arrive at home and discover the crime scene. You were the roommate who was closest to Meredith. You are too important to us and our investigation to leave. And I believed them. And so I believed them when over the course of those interrogations, they told me that I didn't need a lawyer and that I was not a

suspect and that, and I didn't know. And they, and I, and they lied to me. They didn't, they told me that they knew who the murderer was. They had tapped my phone and I had no idea. They went through my phone and found my text message exchange between myself and Patrick Lumumba, my boss. And they interpreted that message that I sent him, which was a poorly translated Italian phrase, ci vediamo più tardi. I intended to say, see you later, whenever. They interpreted that to mean, I'll see you later tonight, this night, the night that the crime

happened. And they interpreted that to mean that I had met with my boss, Patrick Mumbamba, and that he had murdered Meredith. They lied to me and told me that everything that I thought I remembered about that night was wrong, that Raffaele said that I had not spent the night with him, and that I was so traumatized by what I had witnessed Patrick do that I could no longer remember it. And they pushed me, slapped me, yelled at me, told me to remember the truth, remember what Patrick did to her. And very leading suggestive course of techniques, like even just saying, well, did you hear Meredith scream? And I said, I don't know. And they say, well, of course you would hear Meredith scream. She's being murdered. And I said, OK, I guess I heard Meredith scream like

this was the conversation I was having. And this is what the police wrote up in their report and had me sign. And of course, this was without an interpreter. This was without a lawyer. And this was an Italian. I was doing this in Italian. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I didn't. I'm only now realizing this. I did read that they were sending in two different detectives or police officers pretty much every couple of hours so that they would be fresh and could keep coming at you. You got no breaks. You didn't get water. They kept you up overnight. This is how it's done. This is how false confessions are given. And when you see a false confession, I mean, it's like nine times out of 10, it looks just like this. How does it happen? Just like this. You break down a person's willpower to the point where they'll say anything just to get out of the room, just for you to leave them alone. And they'll believe anything. Like I genuinely believed at a certain point that the only explanation for the police's behavior towards me was that I must have amnesia and I must have witnessed the murder. And it wasn't until they stopped screaming at me and stopped hitting me that I had a moment to take a breath, to regain a sense of composure and realize what had just happened. And I recanted

immediately. But of course, at that point, the police had already gotten what they wanted, signed statements from me. And so they ignored me. They told me, don't worry about it. Your true memories will return. In the meantime, we're going to be taking you to a holding place for your own protection. Then you'll get to see your mom. Why would they I mean, why would they be so focused on getting you to point the finger at your boss from Le Chic? Right. That was the restaurant.

That was the bar. Why? Like, I could understand them trying to get you to say, I did it. But why were they so focused on you getting, you know, getting you to point the finger at him? You know, I don't think that they actually thought at the beginning that I did it. I especially we're looking at, you know, a sexual assault murder. These are almost always committed by men. And I think that's something that is overlooked in this case, the way that it's been made so much of a like girl on girl sexualized fantasy crime. Like when we're talking about the realities of violence against women, we're talking about male against female violence against women. And they I think what they believe at the beginning was that

I genuinely knew something because they misread my behavior. They inaccurately interpreted my behavior to mean that I was not surprised by Meredith's murder and that I was that I knew something that I wasn't telling them. And so they pressured me into implicating someone because they believed that I knew who it was. And it was over the course of my interrogations that I think they settled upon Patrick, who they didn't know from Bob or John. Like they had just seen a text message between me and a person named Patrick on my phone in their mind, setting up an appointment. And they thought, this is it. This is the guy. Amanda let him in. Amanda knows what happened.

We got to get her to admit it. So did they arrest him right away? They arrested him right away without checking his alibi, without doing anything, despite the fact that I recanted. And they kept him in prison for two weeks, even though numerous people came forward saying that they had been with him the entire night. Wow. I mean, it just shows there they had no appetite for the truth. And he, question about him before we move on from him, because I read that he recently said something like, why hasn't she ever apologized to me? Or this is this is not that reason. It was like 2011. There was a quote from him saying

she never reached out to me. Is that still true? And no, and I did apologize to him in court. So I don't know what he means. I'm assuming that he's potentially talking about how his lawyer at a certain point reached out to me asking for money and wanting me to give it to admit to this whole situation, his imprisonment being my fault. And my point was, this was not my fault. I was coerced into signing statements. And this is the police's fault. I was going to say, they should sue someone, but it shouldn't be Amanda Knox. Okay, so that's Patrick. Then he gets out because after a short amount of time, he's able to prove to them he has an alibi. And they're not going to be able to pin this on them.

And so you're sitting, you go to jail. They not only arrest him, they arrest you. And they arrest Raphael But who's my charges? Right. Right. But so but no charges are actually with a crime. And that's another one of those differences between the American system and the Italian system. In this Italian system, they can hold you in custody for up to a year without charging you while you're under investigation. Wow. That is scary. So at what point do you say to them, you might want to consider this guy Rudy Gaudet, because he was not in your immediate friend circle, but he was kind of on the periphery. So it was a name you knew. And when they were asking you, tell us everybody, tell us everybody who could be who's been in the house, who you guys are friends with and so on. You had mentioned that name. And he was a known criminal. I mean, he was somebody who had been known as a robber in the area. He was apparently into drugs. He was on the police radar prior to all of this. So I would think that name would have been like, oh, he likes to rob people. Oh, and he'd also been he'd also threatened people with knives prior to this. So you'd think that they'd be like, oh, red flag. Yes. Let's follow

that one up. When did you first mention his name and how long did it take them to focus on him? his name. I remembered that he was a guy who played basketball with the guys who lived below us. And I didn't know anything about his history. I'd never really hung out with him. I only knew him from having encountered him that one time. And, and, you know, I'd seen him around, like he played in the basketball court near the university, but I, he wasn't like a friend of mine. In fact, in the very beginning, I had mentioned a character named I think his name was shaky. His nickname was shaky because I remember he was a sort of sketchy guy who liked to dance and hang out with Meredith and her friends who once tried to like take sort of forcefully take me home with him. And I raised the police's attention to that person. But of course, he had nothing to do with the crime. And I remember the moment when Rudy Gaudet's name was finally made public. It was after they had already found his fingerprints

and footprints in her or fingerprints, at the very least in her blood in Meredith's blood at the crime scene. They they were able to process those fingerprints, identify him from having his long history of burglaries, and identify this person and track him down. And there's this really interesting sort of moment of timing where the police released Patrick Lumumba almost at the exact same time that they arrested Rudy Gadea so that they had someone sort of a switcheroo that they didn't have to once again admit fault in a big way because here they were, they found the real guy. And I remember sitting there in my prison cell watching the news as this happened, as Rudy Gadea was being arrested in Germany. And I saw his face, I heard his name,

and I thought, that guy, the basketball guy, like that's the guy. Like, sure, I've seen him before, but it never occurred to me that he would do this. Of course, I didn't know about his history of criminality. And I had this like moment of like relief even when they found him because I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to be over soon. They found out who really did it. And that it wasn't over soon, of course. But boy, were you were you wrong on that? Up next, I'm going to ask Amanda about the lies the prosecutor was openly telling about her, the active misleading they did with the press to try to get people to believe that it was Amanda, all of which fell completely apart. We're going to do that right after this quick break, and we'll come back with Amanda Knox.

So, Amanda, the prosecutor put out, among other things, he and his team put out a picture of a bloody sink. And this sink was covered in blood. I mean, it was awash in red. And they basically were like, she's a liar. She came home. She saw that. She didn't think anything was wrong. And it was a complete lie because the actual sink you saw

and there are pictures of that too, just had a couple of drops of blood. The picture they put out had been treated with some sort of a chemical that is supposed to show them if there's blood and the substance itself is red. So it's all over the sink. This is my understanding. It was an active attempt to mislead. I mean, you could get disbarred for doing such a thing as a lawyer here, but this is just one of the examples. And I know that there are others of the ways in which they try to unfairly portray you in the media. perception that even if I'm innocent, I must there must be something wrong with me or there must be this wrongful conviction must be my fault because no reasonable person would act the way that Amanda acted. And, you know, even as recently as Malcolm Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers, where he analyzes the case and he, you know, from the very get go is like, we know who did this crime. It's

Rudy Gaudet. But he then goes on to say, well, the reason why Amanda was wrongly convicted was because she's ultimately an innocent person who acts guilty. And maybe that's why wrongful convictions happen. Innocent people act guilty. And I I just wanted to push back against that because, again, who, first of all, has agency in the equation? Who's the one who's doing the wrongful, like the wrongful convicting? Who's the one who is pursuing a case against an innocent person despite what the evidence is telling them? And who is presenting false pictures to the media in order to misrepresent the evidence against her in court? Right.

Whose decisions are shaping these events? They certainly were not mine. And if anything, I was the one who had the least amount of agency in this equation. So, you know, when I think about the ways that even just the ways that they portrayed Meredith versus me, right? Like they acted like Meredith and I were two extreme opposites of the ideals of femininity. They turned this into a morality play about female sexuality and morality. They portrayed Meredith as this perfectly invisible ideal serious studious non-casual like person who would never ever ever just go out with boys or have fun or do anything like that she was a serious young woman who had a

fidanzato a fiance someone who we can all agree is a perfect victim well of course you don't have to be you know a studious person who never goes out and has fun to be a victim of a horrible crime on on the first place. And Meredith was not someone who didn't just like Meredith did like to go and hang out and have fun with friends and go dancing and have like casual, you know, relationships like this. That was her as well. And on the flip side, there was the portrayal of me as when in reality, I was actually quite similar to Meredith as someone who was uninhibited and and lustful and and at odds, like jealous of Meredith's purity and and everything depraved that you could

accuse a woman of, particularly through her sexuality, and using that as an excuse to say, well, if she's capable of all of this sex, she must also be capable of violence. Very much playing into the Madonna-whore dichotomy. How did they find out the number of sexual partners you had had? You've talked about it, but like, how did they know that? Yeah. After I was arrested, I was in prison. I was very uncomfortably being talked to by an official in the prison who would bring me into a private room every day and interrogate me about my sex life. And one day he accompanied me into the doctor's office where I was informed that I had tested positive for HIV. And me thinking suddenly that I'm dying and my life is over was told by the vice comandante that I should think about and write down all of the people that I had ever had sex with in order to determine who had given me HIV. So I went right back into my cell, started journaling, crying, thinking that I was dying, wrote down every single person I had ever

had sex with in my entire life and what kind of protection we had used. And the very next day, the police raided my cell and took every scrap of paper that I had ever written on. And then a few days later, it was released to the press. Oh, it's disgusting. It's so disgusting. You make such a good point about Gladwell, who I love and who's, you know, he's on your side, but you're right. He's got it a little wrong, you know, and I in his defense, I get it because we didn't get to like the cartwheels. I'll ask you about the cartwheels because that's what people think about. But honestly, it wasn't it wasn't your behavior. People may not really fully understand the extent to which they have been manipulated

by a dishonest prosecutor who is he's like the Mike Nifong of Italy. You know, he Mike Nifong is the guy who tried to put those three Duke University kids in jail for an alleged rape that they did not commit. And he knew it was false, but he didn't care. That's that's what I think Magnini is. And people don't realize at home how he tried to manipulate them from from the sink to he went out and said a man in ox went home and she bought bleach and she bleached that entire bathroom. She scrubbed it. Now, you look at the actual photos of post Amanda Knox's visit to the bathroom. It's covered in blood.

It's still got the feces in the toilet. Clearly, nobody has been there doing any cleaning. And he said, we've got receipts. Well, they never released them. There never were receipts showing you do that. But there's never any follow up. Nobody ever goes back to the prosecutor and says, where's the receipt? It's just did you win or lose and he lost and still whatever, maintain the story. So we've been manipulated. The diary, the HIV positive, which was, thank that played along willingly. And I get it. I get it. Very salacious. So many elements to the story. You're so beautiful. I mean, that was probably your

biggest sin in attracting media coverage to this. You know, just you are. You're just you're beautiful. And that will sell papers. And thanks, Megan. Yeah. And then like you add impossible sex fiend in like some weird, sudden, I don't know what they thought you were doing an orgy where you slip people's throats i mean it was just none of it made any sense and as soon as patrick fell apart as your third partner you raffaele and patrick your boss he fell apart because of his alibi then they just subbed in rudy oh rudy was the third guy they held her down because why because she wouldn't have sex with him like there was nothing he was making it up making it up as he went along but the media media portrayed you. I mean, there's one of the headlines was satanic sex ritual,

satanic. Now they called you a she devil. Certainly the narrative was that you were a whore. The Foxy Noxy thing came from an innocent thing on your own social media about, as I understand it, you as a soccer player and how you were sly as a fox on the on the field. I don't I can't even understand. I've been attacked by the media in vicious ways, but nothing compares to this. police was releasing to the press. And I'm so glad that you brought up like the claim that I must have cleaned up my DNA because I remember interviewing Mark Olshaker on Labyrinths and he said, if Raffaele and I could have somehow selectively cleaned up our DNA from that crime scene and left all of the other evidence there intact, we deserve a Nobel Prize for chemistry. But it's interesting because that was, like, if you imagine the sort of confirmation bias, the mental gymnastics that my prosecutor had to do to account for the fact that here's this crime

scene where there's Meredith's body, Meredith's DNA, and Rudy Gaudet's DNA and fingerprints and footprints all over the space and nothing implicating Mia Raffaele, that has to be explained somehow. Well, in his mind, it was I was somehow able to clean up all evidence, all traces of me and in order to implicate Rudy Gaudet. And I think the thing that like I I mentioned this in the episode of Labyrinth where I talk about Rudy Gade because for me, like and maybe we'll get to this later, but like for me, I cannot get over the fact that because the police and the prosecution did not want to admit from the get go that there was no evidence against me and that and drop the charges and release me and Raffaele from prison. Instead of doing that, they actually pursued a case that let Meredith's actual rapist and murderer off the hook. Yeah, he was tried separately from me.

He was tried before me. The prosecution was not interested in having him be fully responsible for his crimes. So they never charged him to be fully responsible for his crimes. So they never charged him to be fully responsible for his crimes. He was charged with being a part of the murder and but never having actually plunged to the knife himself. And so when Rudy Gaudet points to that today and says, well, no one says I killed her. Someone else killed her. It's like, well, the reason for that is because the police and prosecution were covering their butts. Yeah. And they allowed him. They allowed him the ability to make this argument, this crazy argument, notwithstanding all the proof pointing to him and only him. Now, there was a knife and this is at the heart of the case.

The prosecutor claimed that it had both Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle. It's one of the reasons why the trial went south for Amanda. And it's also one of the reasons why I don't believe this was an inadvertent mistake by this prosecutor who really was out to get her. That's where we pick it up next. And we'll go back into the media when we come back from a quick break. Don't go away. So on the subject of Rudy Gaudet, one thing we missed is that he's recorded on tape and the prosecutors had it talking to what he believed was a friend, but was actually an informant, saying he places himself at the crime scene that night he claims he slept with meredith the night of the murder uh that he was using the bathroom and that's when he heard meredith screaming that he opened the door and saw an assailant fleeing and meredith was then dead and but he says on

that tape quote amanda was not there she had nothing to do with it so this is him talking you know to a friend he's like he had no reason to say to that person that you weren't there that you had nothing to do with it but still this wasn't enough for the prosecutor your absence of dna not enough for him nothing absolutely no proof other than you telling that weird story at the hands of these police that maybe patrick did it and maybe you saw some piece of that. But there's one thing. There's the knife. They find what they believe.

They pronounced it's the murder weapon because they say they tested it for DNA. It's got your DNA in the handle, Meredith's DNA on the blade. This would lead to the stunning moment in the first trial, January 16th, 2009, where you stood up to hear the verdict and you heard what? Guilty. Oh, so this happens in large part because of the DNA at Evans. And what do we now know about that? Well, gosh, there's so much to say about the knife. That's not just the fact that independent experts eventually examined it during my appeals trial and discovered that, first of all, the result or the DNA trace that

was linked to Meredith was so small that it actually couldn't be reliably linked to anyone. And furthermore, it was tested in the context of 50 other samples of Meredith's DNA. And so contamination couldn't be ruled out. But I think that like, for me, it's astonishing that it got that far in the first place, because to believe that this knife was used in the crime, you have to believe a number of very, very strange things. The knife didn't match Meredith's stab wounds. and so you have to believe that whoever if if i killed meredith with that knife i would have half stabbed her with the knife but not all the way i would it was a knife that was not found at the crime scene it was pulled at random from a

kitchen drawer in rafael's apartment which was across, meaning that this crime, the way that this knife could have taken part in this crime is if I was carrying that knife with me between Rafael's apartment and my house. And the prosecution has always maintained that this was not a premeditated crime. This was a crime that just happened spontaneously in this sort of drug fueled orgy atmosphere. But if that's true, then you are logically saying that I'm just carrying around a large kitchen knife in my bag with me. For what reason? I don't know. And then brought it back to Raffaele's apartment, cleaned it up and put it back into the drawer. I remember the moment when the vice comandante, that same guy, brought me into his office and said, how do you explain this knife? And I remember being told it's Meredith's DNA, her blood is on the knife. And I thought, I have no idea how that happened. I felt like I was being framed, honestly, because I couldn't explain that. But of course, it wasn't true. And when eventually independent experts looked at that evidence, they threw out any sort of link to Meredith or blood in the first place. It did not test positive for blood. And actually, it was ruled that it was more

likely potato starch from me having used it to cook things. Wow. Yeah, apparently it was such a trace amount and they had tried to amp it up and amp it up, trying to get more and more and more through the same machine that had just processed 50 other Meredith samples. And that's how they believe it was contaminated, as found by the highest court in Italy eventually, that this evidence had been contaminated and could not be relied upon. But then there was the clasp of Meredith's bra. And that, seven weeks after her murder and the evidence was being processed, finally this prosecutor announces he's got Raphael. He's got his DNA on Meredith's bra clasp, which had been detached somehow, I mean, presumably during the struggle,

from her actual bra. And I don't, I mean, you tell me, Amanda, I look at this and somebody, somebody put that there. How else did Raphael's DNA, we know Raphael did not commit this crime or have anything to do with it. How did his DNA get on Meredith's bra clasp if it wasn't police misconduct? Well, not just Raffaele's DNA, also the DNA of two unknown males were also found on that bra clasp. And I, you know, all I can think of is that Raffaele had been to my house, right? He had been to my room. He had been in the common area. I think they even found the other trace of DNA that they found of Raffaele in my house was from a cigarette stub that was in like an ashtray in the kitchen. And so it's not that Raffaele's DNA wasn't at the house. It just wasn't in the crime scene where

Meredith hadn't been murdered. And it wasn't until the police who were not very highly trained were going in and out of that room, carrying pieces of evidence with them. Like by the time they actually discovered this bra class, it was long after not just the forensic police had gone through that house, but also the regular police had gone through like turning over mattresses, throwing clothes around, like ripping apart all the house looking for not DNA evidence, but other kinds of evidence. And it was over 40 days that they were touching things and moving things around without gloves that they eventually then found the bra clasp under a rug somewhere completely different in

Meredith's room and said, oh, here's our link proving that Raffaele was there in the room that night. But of course, there's no other trace of Raffaele in that room. How could he have participated in sexual assault and murder and only left one trace along with two unknown males? Meanwhile, like there's a huge semen stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body that the prosecution decided not to test and refused to test. Even when my defense and Raffaele's defense asked for it to be tested. We're looking at a sexual assault case. Meredith was raped before she was murdered and they refused to test it. And the only reason I can think of why is because they weren't interested in pursuing a case against a male.

They were interested in pursuing a case against me and I don't produce semen. So it wasn't relevant to them. My gosh, this is so scary. You know, the question I'm asking myself right now is, did you just have a terrible defense lawyer in the first trial But what was happening was, you know, one of the things that I remember my lawyer saying was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero. There was this sense that the prosecution was throwing the kitchen sink at this case. And so if the kitchen, if there's all this stuff that is being thrown out into this case and debated and talked about something, there must be some substance to it. There must be Amanda's guilt

is in there somewhere. Even if we can't really determine which piece of evidence is the thing that does it, there's so much that's being thrown in there that there must be something to it. And indeed, this is what, and that got me convicted the second time, you know, after I was acquitted and the DNA evidence in that case with the bra clasp and the knife was thrown out, I was still tried for that same crime using this same kitchen sink approach where it's like, oh, Amanda confessed to the crime and all these witnesses say maybe they saw her or maybe they didn't, or how do you explain her dna in the bathroom like there's there was this sense of like this overwhelming if if the

prosecution is so convinced there must be something to it and it wasn't like i think it was really really hard for people to first of all put themselves in my shoes and imagine what it's like to be in an interrogation room and coerced into signing statements as a 20 year old surrounded by adults speaking in a foreign language and without, you know, the assistance of a lawyer. But I think also they couldn't really understand how the case could have gone this far if there wasn't something to it. Well, especially back to our original point of the media, every headline telling them how awful you are. You're just a

terrible person. You're a freak. You're a devil worshiper. You're I mean, just stuff completely made up. A massive manipulation was taking place by the media, of the media, by the prosecutor, of the people. And people need to get to get smart you know they have to be their own advocates when it comes to information consumption if you want to willingly jump in and believe the tabloid headlines just know what you're being fed you know it's garbage in garbage out it remains such to this day um so just the quick without getting into the lengthy procedural stuff i mean so you were found guilty on nightmare. Then, miraculously, it was reversed. Yay. That's what we wanted. You got to fly home to Seattle. It was like, thank God this horrible nightmare is over. I'm done, whatever. And then the innocence was reversed. It was overturned. A new trial was, and you were found guilty again. So this is your second time being found guilty. And then thank God, that guilty, that conviction was reversed again,

by Italy's highest court, this time for good. And the court cited errors and omissions by the prosecutor, sensational failures by the investigator and his helpers, and contaminated evidence. I mean, ultimately, they saw what went on here and declared you not just not guilty, but you and Raffaele innocent that you did not commit this crime, which is huge. I mean, in Italy's defense, that is something we don't do here. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of people would like to see it. Absolutely. And it's something that the Supreme Court never does. That's why that clip at the very beginning, when you showed me reacting to them, it was because that wasn't even something that I dreamed was possible. And of course,

it's within their power. But it is such a rare thing for the Supreme Court to not just overturn a wrongful conviction, but to definitively acquit someone. I'm really glad you talked about the media, because I think that, which is to hold authorities and power to account, to hold them to a higher standard to the truth, we instead find media who are selling us stories that we want to hear. And that is the reason why I got into journalism myself, the reason why I'm an independent journalist who only has, the reason I have a podcast is

because I have subscribers who believe in my work, like go to patreon.com slash Knox Robinson, and you can do it. But like, this is like, I'm not, I'm not, you know, like this is a world where you, you should, we all need to be a little more media literate because the media is not doing what it's intended to do. It is selling a story and it's going to sell the story that makes the most money, not the story that is the most truthful. And that's true in mainstream media and not just tabloids. That's what people may not realize. One of the things I liked about the documentary is it pulled clips of so-called respected news anchors saying a lot of this stuff. It wasn't just, you know, the star. It was in the mainstream,

these characterizations of you. And that leads me to the unfortunate moment that you had with Chris Cuomo, who continued the character assassination in a bizarre interview he did with you. We have the tape queued up. It didn't do well at the time. It was from 2013. I was in the primetime at Fox at the time. It hasn't aged well. It looks even worse in retrospect. And now it looks particularly bad knowing that he's been publicly accused of sexually harassing his his former executive producer of being such a bully to his female executive producer, a different woman that she was forced to leave the show. And now we have multiple allegations in the news today about him actively campaigning against the women who accused his brother, Andrew Cuomo. CNN at this moment is reviewing his future at the company. But here he is interviewing you in 2013, fresh off of all of this. This is their theory that you went in there for some kind of freaky sexual activity that went wrong and your roommate wound up dying. Fair? That's what they say. That's what it is. Forget the headlines. That's the truth of the proposition, isn't it? Is there truth to that proposition?

Were you into deviant sex? Insensitive question, but hey, we got to get to what it is. This fuels the doubt. There's no evidence of that. That's the theory. Knox is into some freaky sexual things. Do you have any type of experimental activities there you're embarrassed to talk about? No. Yeah, that doesn't age well, does it? Yeah. At the time, it's interesting because at the time I was putting up with a lot of that kind of thing from media. I've learned a lot since then. And a lot of times people have said to me, you know, I have to ask you these quote, hard questions, because it's what's good for you, you should have the chance to respond. This is, this is what's best for you. And Chris Cuomo, among other people, said this to me as a sort

of justification for pursuing this line of questioning towards me and questioning me in a frankly humiliating way. And I believed him. And the thing that I've realized now as a journalist myself is that he didn't actually have to pursue that line of questioning. He could have instead called out that theory in the first place because one, what my sexuality is ultimately has nothing to do with the crime. There was no evidence that put me, that placed me at the crime scene. So why is my sexuality being the thing that's on trial? And instead, I thought that this was an opportunity to point out that there is a whole lot of smoke that is deeply irresponsible and is the deeply irresponsible storytelling that gets in the way of justice.

So, you know, when I think about the kinds of like the way that I interview people on Labyrinth and just and puts the person who you're looking at, gives them a sense of voice and ownership over their own story. The way that I was questioned in that interview was again, putting me, making me have to respond to other people's stories about me instead of giving me the opportunity to tell my own story. Which he would have known with just a minor bit of homework had absolutely no factual basis. There was nothing to it and there never had been. It would take you about two minutes of a Google search to know that. I believe what he was trying to do was gin up a sexy moment of him pushing this beautiful, smart, famous woman on her sex life and whether it's deviant in a way that he thought would get clicks or eyeballs or generate something good for him.

That's what that was about. That's one of the reasons why I find it so infuriating. It's maddening to watch that. It's not like having somebody who's actively on trial for their life. They're accused of committing a murder. And you say, were you at the crime scene? Did you do that? Yes, of course you have to do that. What he asked you wasn't necessary. It was intentionally salacious. He was, I don't know if he's trying to embarrass you, but he was trying to promote himself at your expense, just like everyone before him had done to you so many times. Yeah. And, and, and take in like presenting it to me as the opportunity to address it head on, I think was when I look back on it now,

disingenuous because it's again, not asking me to talk about the way that I was wrongly portrayed and how my, my sexuality was used to vilify me. It was instead putting me on the spot and asking me to sort of respond to what was presented as a kind of legitimate question and a legitimate reason to suspect me. So, you know, I mean, the tone, right, like an insensitive question, but it's got to be like just the way you approach somebody who's been victimized the way you have. You've been victimized. Whether you want to call yourself a victim or not, you've been victimized. Raffaele has to Meredith, obviously, is not that way. You know, this is I remember when

I interviewed Tara Reid, Joe Biden's accuser. She said she gave the interview to me because she wanted somebody who was, quote, trauma informed. And that I don't know whether Tara Reid was telling the truth about Joe Biden or not, but I understood she was making the allegations and how to treat somebody like that respectfully while asking about their story and sensitively, right? And being careful, being ginger while still being a good reporter. And it's no wonder she had turned down CNN and gee, no wonder why she turned on Chris Wallace. I'm not surprised by that one either. I just feel like reporters, that was about him. And too often they make it about themselves in their pocketbooks, and they have no thought for the pain that they continue to inflict on innocent people like you.

It goes on. You know, I wonder what you saw, what you thought when you saw like the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and all the jumping the gun about him. You know, we had so many press errors. The Kyle Rittenhouse trial. I mean, I think I have a sort of unpopular opinion from, you know, I run in liberal circles and I do a lot of social justice. But I do think that like people really wanted Kyle Rittenhouse to be a villain. And they weren't a lot of people weren't willing to take the evidence of the case seriously. Instead, we're trying to convict him based upon us, like their interpretation of his character. And I think it was radically, radically irresponsible

of the prosecutor to charge him with murder in the first place, because, you know, why like this, this was not a murder case. If you don't like, you know, why like this? This was not a murder case. If you don't like, you know, there there's an interesting discussion to be had about like, OK, if you walk into a really highly charged emotional space that's uncontrolled and you walk into that space with a gun, are you provoking an attack? And I can see from the perspective of of his, you know, the people who were shot that like, yeah, if you see someone, you hear shots around and you see a guy with a gun, you might think, oh my gosh, I got to stop the shooter from shooting people. But that doesn't mean that

Kyle Rittenhouse did not have the right to defend himself if he was not shooting people. And if you don't like the way that the laws are written, then you like, if you don't like the self-defense law, then you can, you can go to your legislature and say that you don't believe in self-defense. But like, I think that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, there was so much focus on irrelevant information and character assassination instead of the specific actions that led up to this tragic moment, which isn't to say that like I think that Kyle Rittenhouse should be celebrated as a hero either, because, you know, that's, again, playing him as a political football. He's a kid who made a mistake, but he doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in

prison for it. Yeah. There's some similarities in the cases in that, you know, he didn't have quite as much coverage as you did. And his story didn't go on as long. But he had the president of the United States, now president, then candidate, calling him a white supremacist. I mean, talk about poisoning the jury pool. And there is no evidence for that. You know, I mean, even I, at the beginning, I'm like, oh, well, they said he was with the Proud Boys and he was making racist symbols. And we've actually taken a hard look at it on the show more than once. And there's just it's that's not that's not what happened. He went into a bar where they were. They came over. They asked for a picture with him. He posed. And then they all did the OK sign, which Kyle Rittenhouse, his lawyers presented

to the judge and the prosecution had nothing to debunk it. He didn't even know what that was. He thought it was an OK sign, which it's been since the beginning of time. There was nothing, nothing on his social media. They scoured him. The Anti-Defamation League apparently did an investigation. The prosecutors looked at all of his cell phones all his social nothing didn't follow a white supremacist didn't know a white supremacist it was a lie and so people are still confused about him and want him in jail because they think he hates people of color there's no evidence right at some point you have to say show me the evidence and we and if they cannot we as a responsible society have to move on.

Absolutely. And also, I would say that like whether or not he knows that he was doing an OK sign or a white supremacist sign is ultimately irrelevant. In the same way that like if I were a professional dominatrix at the time that Meredith was murdered, it also would not have made a difference. It's irrelevant to the question of whether or not he's guilty of murder. That's right. So much more to go over with Amanda. Really enjoying this conversation. I hope you are too. So I wanted to ask you on the subject because you as you point out, you travel in social justice circles, and I know you've connected with the Innocence Project, which is brilliant. That's perfect. That plus your job as a journalist.

I love it. I love what you're carving out for yourself. But one of the things I've been I've been hot on basically my whole career is what's happening to college men on college campuses. And obviously, neither you nor I want to see young women get sexually assaulted on college campuses but i also don't want to see due process taken away from the young men who get accused and that's what's happened right obama did it where and now joe biden's trying to bring it back trump sort of righted the ship and and biden's trying to bring it back it's deeply problematic democrats and republicans need to pay attention because the way it was and the way Biden wants it to be, Mr. Biden wants it to be, is no right to counsel, no right to

cross-examination, no right to discovery. You get tried in front of a kangaroo court stacked with, quote, victims' rights advocates, and not like an independent body who might be open-minded to the fact that you might not be accused. And if you lose as a young man, you're expelled, you're labeled a sex offender. Good luck getting into another college. And it's near impossible to appeal. Your thoughts on it? Yeah, great. So I'm not actually familiar with what Biden is doing currently. But what I can say about this is I remember at the very beginning of the Me Too movement, which I do think was an incredibly important moment of like reckoning with the fact that this happens over and over and over again to young or to women in general, not

even just young women, but a lot on college campuses is I remember my friend Brian Banks, who tweeted like, yes, you know, we need to be taking these accusations really seriously and doing what we can to prevent sexual assault from happening. But also here I am, a young man who was wrongly accused of sexual assault based solely on a young woman's accusation. And I went to prison and for that crime. And that is unfair. Like due process still is incredibly important. And while we need to take sexual assault accusations extremely seriously, that does not mean that we don't take sexual assault accusations for the person who's being accused not seriously. There is a difficult balancing act of not just fairness,

but also safety that needs to be brought into consideration. And we can't pretend that if someone who is accused, that means they're necessarily guilty. You are living proof that when due process starts getting eroded in the name of something, right, prosecutorial zeal, a desire by the prosecution to be loved by the community for having made an arrest. Or now, you know, it could be different things from pushing of other cultural agendas. It's it can be devastating, unfairly devastating on the person targeted. And we just can't start throwing away lives in the name of causes. You know, there's a reason we want the justice system

to to follow the procedures we put in place long, long ago. That's the only way we can count on it to work. Well, that's why I think that sexual education is so important, because like one of the reasons why these things happen, especially on college campuses, is because these are highly charged sexual environments with young people who don't have a ton of experience sexually, who are, you know, pushing boundaries for the first time, exploring themselves and others. And of course, there are going to be slip ups and mistakes on both sides in terms of communication, both physical and verbal. So I think that these are complex situations that require us to have sophisticated conversations about them instead of treating them as black and white narratives.

Absolutely. OK, a couple of random questions for you. Just following up on the information. I read that you wrote to the prosecutor. You wrote to him. So I can't speak a ton on this because I promised him I wouldn't. But yes, I am in communication with Giuliano Mignini. Wow. I tip my hat to you, Amanda. I don't know if I could do it. I mean, I see you because I see you being very generous toward everybody involved in the case, even Rudy. Even Rudy, who's now out of prison and stirring up trouble again. He's trying to bring you back into it, pointing the finger at you, which we all know is nonsense. But you've been very generous. I don't know if I could find it

in me to be generous toward Mignogna. Yeah. The biggest thing for me has always been wanting to understand why, why this happened to me and why these things happen. And I don't find like the more I, I sort of understand the way human minds work, the less impulse I have to, um, to like to hate people or anything. And it's more, I get a sense of like, okay, I understand why you think you did the right thing in that moment. But I, the next step beyond that is can we then arrive at a place of reconciling the truth that may be something that makes someone have to reevaluate themselves as a human being? And that's tricky. I mean, that is the ultimate labyrinth is you believe that you are one thing and you turn out to be another. And someone tries to point that out to you. And as someone who has been

a victim of the criminal justice system and also an indirect victim of crime, I understand that these things are complicated. And the most important thing that we can do when someone is hurt, when someone is harmed, is to acknowledge that harm. But of course, that means that we have to reevaluate ourselves and our actions in light of new evidence. Let me know how that works out. Yeah, I will. Let's talk about Rudy. Let's talk about Rudy. Rudy finally got out of jail. He served 16 years. That was a reduction of sentence for him. He comes out and and apparently spoke to the son. His message to Meredith's family was that he's so sorry for their loss. He says he's written a letter to her family that explains how sorry he is, quote, for not doing enough to save her that night, to save her. He says, the court convicted me of being

an accessory to murder purely because my DNA was there. But the legal documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds. He's pointing the finger at you, saying Amanda Knox, quote, knows the truth. So your response to him is what? Well, it's a complicated one. I have a whole episode of Labyrinths called The Forgotten Killer, where I discuss him being released from prison and never having been found fully accountable

for his crimes, and also for my name to be the name that is most associated with his crime. Yes, yes. So true. So first of all, I have to to point my gaze, my critical gaze on the tabloid media who has decided to give a platform to a rapist and murderer in order for him to continue to harm others by lying and allowing other peoples to take responsibility for his crime. So shame on the son, shame on Nick Pisa for the platforming and amplifying his lies, damaging my reputation and honestly, just putting

the Kircher family through yet more, you know, loops of pain like this, that shame on them. But for Rudy Gaudet, I honestly have to say that, like, I was almost rooting for him a little bit. Like, here's someone who spent 13 years in prison. I had hoped that he had rehabilitated in some kind of capacity. And while I could, you know, he has over the years, ever since he was arrested, taken the opportunity of the prosecution's unfair gaze on me and used that, exploited that opportunity in order to not be fully held accountable for his actions. I thought that if he had more time and distance from his crimes, that he would have had a more mature response. And instead, I believe that he's just continuing to do what he's done since the day he was arrested, which is to exploit the way that this case has been misrepresented represented and and to try to continue to have me be taken, have me take the burden of his crimes onto my life so that he can continue on with his as if nothing's wrong. So glad you are out there speaking about it because you have a much bigger microphone

than he does and people need to hear your message um thank you the the the kircher family i i understand you have reached out to them um in various ways and various times over the years it's a it's a delicate issue right because i as far as i know they do still associate me with meredith's death in some way or another. And that's not their fault in the sense that like, they were misled too. And it's a very, very difficult thing to look at objectively when it's someone that you lost that you care about so much. And so I have let them know through various channels that I am, I understand, I that I understand that there's this great potential for healing if we can connect and grieve about this incredible injustice and tragedy that links

us forever. That said, I also don't want to put them on the spot. And I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me because I don't want to put them on the spot. And I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me, because I don't want to put them on the spot and make them feel like they have to respond to me. That is not the way that you achieve healing. So I want them to know that I'm there and ready whenever they are ready. I wonder if it's even harder for someone to get past their beliefs in a situation like this when the imprint that was made onasis where you can take in truth and see, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff when, when it, you know, the damage that was done to you was done in those circumstances. You know, it's actually a really fascinating theory because they call that like cognitive opening. And, you know, that's, that something they talk about with like the radicalization of people to terrorism, where something bad happens to them. Some tragedy happens to a person like a sister or a daughter dies. feeling of security and place and your foundations in the world are shook. And you then latch on to

a new ideology because it sort of gives you a new sense of purpose and stability. And I think you're maybe right that in that moment of intense vulnerability, they latched on to the ideology that the prosecution put forth to them, which is that I am an evil whore who was jealous of their daughter and murdered her for it. And it's like, the truth is right there. And I think once they come to terms with it, they'll somehow feel better. I bet it would be a nice moment for the two of you like to come together because you were her friend. I'm sure she cared for you and you cared for her and that all that gets lost entirely. Right. I mean, you've, have you ever had the chance to grieve the loss of your friend? That's a really great question. Um, and I, I always appreciate it when

someone tells me like, I'm sorry, um, your friend was lost, because that's something that not a lot of people say to me. Like, I'm sorry that your friend was murdered that way. And I do look forward to the day that I get to visit her grave. I just don't want to do that without the permission of her family. And so that's something that remains a deep desire and goal for me. Yeah. Oh my goodness. It's so complicated. You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and I, and I thinking about everything you've been through. It's like, in a way you were given a huge hefty gift of wisdom wisdom early in your life you know like you

learn so much about police and law enforcement and you know the justice system media about human nature yeah yes yes right human nature and the importance of family right and the support and all that it makes me want to ask you whether, like, if you could undo, of course, you would undo what happened to Meredith, but if you could undo what happened to you, would you? You know, that is a question that I never ask myself because none of us ever, ever, ever get to choose that. And instead, I think my goal with my life and also my work now with Labyrinth is to look at how, when we are at our most lost, how do we find our way out and what do we gain in the process? Because of course, there is the opportunity to lose so much, but

there's also so much to gain in whatever struggle that you are going through. Post-traumatic growth is a real thing, just as much as post-traumatic stress is. And we all have the ability with a sort of mindfulness to examine whatever it is that life throws at us and try to make the best out of it. And I'm always, always, always fascinated by the stories of people who similarly find themselves in different situations of feeling lost or the existential crisis of their life isn't what they thought it was going to be. And they found their way somehow. It's great to hear you say that. I completely agree with you. But it's great too, to see people, you get upset,

you lose a job, or you don't get that house you really wanted, or whatever it is. Have you been convicted of murder when you didn't do it and sat in a foreign country thinking, I will never get out of here. I will never get married. I will never have children. I will never be able to hug my family again. Like that is next level stress. When you look back on it, you know, what do you what would you say was the lowest moment? Was it when you heard guilty in Italian or was it a different time, like sitting back in the prison cell? No, the scariest, scariest moment was in that interrogation room when I was made to I was I started to doubt my own sanity. That was the scariest moment for coercive interrogation techniques. I had no idea. I think the thing that makes innocent people so vulnerable to wrongful conviction is the idea of being wrongly convicted is not on our radar. Our minds will come up with any other explanation for why this bad thing is

happening to us, including self-blame. And especially when the world is blaming you, it's very easy to believe the rest of the world that there's something wrong with you. And I'm really grateful to those who are dedicating their careers to studying this and revealing the truth about these these processes and in the meantime like you know i'm not one to compare tragedies because i can't tell you like i interviewed in a ton of women for labyrinths about infertility and how they had lived their whole lives knowing that they were going to be parents, they were going to be mothers. And suddenly they were faced with the realization that, oh my gosh, I'm struggling with this. And oh my gosh, am I ever, is it ever going to happen? And how you have to retell yourself who you are in light of these kinds of struggles is real. And, um, and is like some of

those interviews that I had with those women are some of the most emotionally impactful interviews that I've ever had with people. Wow. I know you lived some of that yourself. You did just have a baby girl. I mean, you just had her, right? Is she? Oh, yeah. Like I still have like throw up on me a little bit. Oh my gosh. First of all, you look amazing. So she's healthy. Eureka, right? Her name is Eureka. I love that you're now Mrs. Robinson. And your husband does the podcast with you. Absolutely. Yes. So we are co-hosts, co-producers. We do everything ourselves. We do not have like a team of people behind us. We are independent. We are ad free. So if anyone wants to become a patron to support our work, that's how we do what we do.

Wow. All right. So I've got to ask, like, what it was it awkward or difficult to find, you know, love after all of this? I mean, all this stuff that's been said about you. And I like I would imagine there was enormous pressure on him like, oh, God, I don't know how to act or how to be. Well, you know what? Chris is an incredibly there was the perfect person for me to meet because he's not a true crime guy. He didn't follow the case when he started, when he became friends with me, we were friends at first, like other people would come up to him and ask him, like, do you think she did it or didn't she do it? And he was like, look, I'm not interested in that lens through which to view her. I'm interested in this person that I met, like a regular person and how we interact. And of course, eventually when we started dating officially and people noticed and started photoshopping knives into pictures of him and making claims about what kind of person

he was to even associate with me he did eventually do the google search and read um read all the case you know the case files and read my book and do all the research so he could be informed but that wasn't the lens through which he first viewed me and it's been you, that's the ongoing struggle. Like I am for better or for worse, for worse defined by a crime that I had nothing to do with. I am defined by someone else's horrific actions. And as much as I try to put good work out into the world to this day, that is not what people know me for. And so that's sort of my ongoing struggle is trying to acknowledge my experience and put my perspective to good work and not allow others to use my experience and exploit my story for their own ends and at my expense. Yeah, I know.

Raffaele has spoken publicly about the same failings for him and difficulties he's faced because of the media storm and the unfair conviction. And I loved with the New York Times, I will give a shout out to the New York Times, what they said about you in doing the story. I think it was about the birth of your daughter, but they were saying Amanda Knox's legal purgatory has ended. Her cultural purgatory has not, and it needs to. I mean, you're not the only one who should be fighting for truth here. The people who put you in this position, which includes the media, need to do their part and certainly not pile on and continue the abuse. But to say what we know

is true, which is you had nothing to do with this crime. We know who committed this crime. His name is Rudy Gaudet. He's served a sentence that was rather close to a slap on the wrist. And what I pray for now is for people to realize that, for you to have health and wellness and many more children, if that's what you want. Keep telling your story and keep helping others. I feel like there's a reason you've been through this. And I feel like we're all starting to see what it is. Oh, thank you so much, Megan. It's been such a such pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Oh, thank you. I really admire you, Amanda. I hope we talk again. Wow. Listen, I want to tell

you before we go to coming up tomorrow. Don't miss it. Senator Rand Paul is here to talk Fauci and COVID. See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.