Amanda Knox Quotes

I like authors who experiment with narrative and delve into very specific conditions within their characters in order to expose universal truths about humanity. After reading, I like to feel that I’ve experienced, learned, identified, been challenged and been provided with insight.

Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?

I was young enough to think that insecurity disappeared with maturity.

At twenty, I still had a childlike view of people. I looked for the saving graces in everyone. I thought people were naturally empathetic, that they felt ashamed and guilty when they mistreated someone else. That faith in humanity was being picked away, but I held to the belief that people were basically good. And that good people would believe me and set me free.

This was an intentional frame.

The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do?

I spent the next 1,427 nights in prison for a crime I did not commit.

The only place she found mention of experiences like hers was inside a couple of psychiatry books. What she was going through was a fetish, these books explained. It was sexual, deviant and a sign of mental illness. There was something terribly wrong with her. Mortified, she pushed these books aside. Was this who she was? Was she sick? Shame wormed its way into every part of her. She could see no way out, no way to right this wrong. Research had failed her, and she found herself feeling more alone than ever.

It isn’t often that girls are kicked off the team for misconduct, but somehow, I convinced Amanda to consider her breakup with Knox as such.

day’s newspaper into a flower, which the guards brought to me. But I was focused on Guede, who was

Italians are compassionate people who love children and care for their poor and infirm. They watched the televised drowning of New Orleans in the fall of 2005 with horror and disgust. Most Europeans already have strong notions of American racism, implanted by years of televised imagery of police brutality, dogs set on civil rights marchers, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the ugly fact of slavery at the nation’s core. As they watched the waters rise around the Louisiana Superdome, Italians’ native compassion was offended by the United States’ disregard for its poorest.

When you ask Web sophisticates why people are so vicious on the Internet, you get a set of stock responses. The very question is naïve. What do you expect? The world is full of angry people who don’t have a life. The Web offers a perfect outlet where they can be anonymous, important, and powerful, and attack others without fear of retribution. The Web has given them a voice when before they had none. These are people who find meaning in their lives by connecting with similar people on the net, who seek a sense of purpose and fulfillment online that they can’t achieve in the real world. Finally, the nature of the Internet, we are told, is also to blame — it’s a place where the human id runs amok, it’s a playground for disturbed people, it’s an echo chamber for the uninformed. We are advised that Internet nastiness is white noise, best ignored. It has little effect in the real world. While many these explanations are undoubtedly true, none go deep enough. None explain why the Web is a place where some human beings devote enormous effort to attacking strangers who have done nothing to them personally.

Meanwhile back in the cinema, a staggering number of films still fail to meet the incredibly low standards of the Bechdel Test, which merely requires them to include two named female characters who talk to each other about any subject other than a man. According to the Bechdel website, recent failures to meet their ludicrously simple criteria include mainstream Hollywood blockbusters like The Internship, The Lone Ranger, The Avengers, Jack Reacher, Killer Joe, Men in Black III and Star Trek: Into Darkness (which should get a bonus point for an underwear scene so blatantly gratuitous even the writer subsequently saw fit to make a public apology for it). There is a feverish desperation to portray any young woman as a sexual object among a large swathe of the media that is so powerful as to transcend both relevance and respect. In the past year alone this rabid tunnel vision led to the portrayal of Amanda Thatcher (in mourning and speaking at her grandmother’s funeral), Amanda Knox (on trial for murder) and Reeta Steenkamp (a victim of domestic violence and murder) as sexual objects for mass consumption. All – regardless of their very different reasons for being in the spotlight – were paraded in countless photographs for the delectation of the tabloid readers.

On October 3, 2011, Amanda Knox walked out of Capanne Prison a free woman, escorted by her family, on her way to a flight back home to Seattle, while Raffaele Sollecito headed to his father’s house and liberty, soon to enroll at the University of Verona to continue his college studies.

In the five days after the murder of Meredith Kercher, detectives interrogated Amanda Knox for 43 hours.

When Meredith Kercher arrived home, Guede was still there. He sexually assaulted her and slit her throat. Two days later, he fled the country. He was identified through fingerprints left at the scene. Two weeks after that, he was tracked down by police and apprehended near Mainz, Germany, and brought back to Italy to face justice. By then, however, an overzealous prosecutor named Giuliano Mignini, a lifelong resident of Perugia, had detained, interrogated, and arrested Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of Meredith Kercher. Rather than admitting his mistake in light of the capture of Rudy Guede and freeing the young couple, he kept them imprisoned for an entire year, routinely allowing prejudicial gossip, damaging innuendo, and questionable “evidence” to reach a media pool hungry for salacious details. In this way, irreparable harm was done to the reputations of the accused, who were isolated and denied any avenue of response. When Mignini finally charged them as co-conspirators with Guede in the murder of Meredith Kercher, any chance of a fair trial had been purposefully destroyed.

For reasons steeped in flawed intuition, differing cultural norms, and superstition, detectives in Perugia almost immediately focused on Amanda Knox as the target of their investigation. It was this “junk profiling” that caused them to believe that because she didn’t weep for the victim in public, she didn’t weep in private. This lack of public display of grief caused them to falsely believe she killed her friend.

Mignini claimed that the crime scene had been cleaned. But I saw the unedited videotape of the crime scene. I knew that there was no way it had been cleaned, nor had any cleaning been attempted. Mignini’s statement made no sense. It could not be a mistake. It was a lie. The prosecutor also claimed that he had a receipt for bleach purchase by Amanda Knox the morning after the murder. Sure sounds convincing. Except that he didn’t have a bleach receipt, and none was ever produced in court. He was lying. Had he not been, the receipt would have been entered into evidence. But then, he would have had to explain away the fact that bleach wasn’t used at the crime scene.

The reason they interrogated Amanda all night was to break her. Not get the truth, not get answers, not make Perugia safer, but to break her so that she would say what they wanted her to say. Amanda Knox was interrogated for eight hours. Overnight. She was denied food and water. She was denied the use of a bathroom. In a police station. In a foreign country. In a foreign language. By a dozen different officers. Without being allowed a lawyer.

However, reality teaches us that democracy—like free markets—can be messy, especially when intense passions and partisanship are involved. Hence the episode we recounted at the start of this chapter, in which the Wikipedia article about the death of Meredith Kercher was hijacked by “haters” of Amanda Knox who were determined to make sure the page should assert her guilt and were prepared to eradicate any signs of dissension. The Kercher killing is not the only instance in which Wikipedia is embroiled in controversy—far from it. An article on the platform headed “Wikipedia: List of controversial issues” lists over 800 topics that “are constantly being re-edited in a circular manner, or are otherwise the focus of edit warring or article sanctions.” Organized under headings that include “Politics and economics,” “History,” “Science, biology, and health,” “Philosophy,” and “Media and culture,” they include everything from “Anarchism,” “Genocide denial,” “Occupy Wall Street,” and “Apollo moon landing hoax accusations” to “Hare Krishna,” “Chiropractic,” “SeaWorld,” and “Disco music.

I knew there would be a talk coming, but obviously we couldn't let the food get cold. Or warm, in the case of the tuna tartare with benne seeds I finally got to compare to Jada Knox's review. It really did taste a little bit like coffee, which, contrasted with the cold, clean chunks of tuna and hits of acid, was the perfect mellowing factor. The red stew, with a tender chicken thigh nearly falling apart in the spicy, sharp broth, was both hearty and exciting, the bland, fluffy fufu it was served over the perfect contrast. And the curried goat with roti and crispy potatoes? The whole fried red snapper with jerk seasoning? All the contrasts of flavor and texture made me want to eat and eat and eat until I burst.

The Internet is indeed a non-state form of social control — but one that is severely dysfunctional. The ugliness on the Internet is not white noise. It lasts forever. It cannot be ignored. It causes terrible things happen in the real world. The Internet is a place where our darkest evolutionary biology runs riot.

People sometimes note the transient, ever-changing nature of the Web, but in fact the opposite is true. The Web is a gigantic tar pit that traps and fossilizes every electron that ventures within.

On “matched” senders, the seasoned interrogators were perfect. You or I would probably come in at 70 or 75 percent on that set of tapes. But everyone in Levine’s group of highly experienced experts got every matched sender right. On mismatched senders, however, their performance was abysmal: they got 20 percent right. And on the subcategory of sincere-acting liars, they came in at 14 percent—a score so low that it ought to give chills to anyone who ever gets hauled into an interrogation room with an FBI agent. When they are confronted with Blushing Sally—the easy case—they are flawless. But when it comes to the Amanda Knoxes and Bernie Madoffs of the world, they are hapless.