Waiting to Be Heard

by Amanda Knox

  She was right.

  My Italian was still elementary enough that if I wasn’t paying close attention, I couldn’t grasp much of what was being said. I embraced my new routine—­do as many sit-­ups as I could manage, write, read, repeat—­as if ignoring the reports would make me immune to them, that they couldn’t hurt me. I convinced myself that whatever awful things the media were saying about me were irrelevant to the case. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. But in my heart I knew it did.

  Mentally tuning out the TV helped, but it was impossible to drown out all the coverage—­there was a television set bolted to the wall in every cell, and the set and I were locked in the same room twenty-­three hours a day. The screen was flooded with my image. I felt as though I were looking at someone else. A picture of me talking to detectives outside the villa was a news channel staple. They replayed the footage again and again, often in slow motion, of Raffaele and me kissing in the villa’s front yard after Meredith’s body was found. They’re making it into something it wasn’t. The way they’re manipulating this, ­people will think Amanda just couldn’t keep her lips off Raffaele. They acted as though our affection showed such a flagrant disregard for Meredith that it was obvious Raffaele and I were hiding the truth. The commentators pointed to our consoling kisses as proof that we were capable of murder. Their remarks were so unfair, their expressions so smug. I wanted to scream, “Look into our faces! Do we really look ready to jump on each other and have sex in the driveway?” What I saw then—­and see now—­is a young girl and guy in shock.

  I felt violated, indignant that journalists could say or imply anything they wanted, that they could use my photo as a symbol of evil. I now understood the belief in some tribal cultures that having your picture taken robs you of your soul.

  Reporters also plundered my Myspace page, and this felt just as intrusive.

  When I created my social networking profile in high school, borrowing the soccer moniker my teammates had given me when I was thirteen seemed safer than using my real name. Sure, I knew foxy meant “sexy” or “sassy,” but that was the irony of it—­and the fun. My soccer girlfriends had ironic and sassy nicknames, too. Martinez was Martini; Miller was Miller Light; Trisha was Trash. By college, when I graduated to Facebook, I seldom looked at Myspace. I could never have dreamed that something so harmless could later have such damning results, that the prosecution would focus on my nickname’s other meanings—­“wily” or “tricky.”

  Overnight my old nickname became my new persona. I was now known to the world as Foxy Knoxy or, in Italian, Volpe Cattiva—­literally, “Wicked Fox.”

  “Foxy Knoxy” was necessary to the prosecution’s case. A regular, friendly, quirky schoolgirl couldn’t have committed these crimes. A wicked fox would be easier to convict.

  They were convinced that Meredith had been raped—­they’d found her lying on the floor half undressed, a pillow beneath her hips—­and that the sexual violence had escalated to homicidal violence.

  They theorized that the break-­in was faked.

  To make me someone whom a jury would see as capable of orchestrating the rape and murder of my friend, they had to portray me as a sexually deviant, volatile, hate-­filled, amoral, psychopathic killer. So they called me Foxy Knoxy. That innocent nickname summed up all their ideas about me.

  “Foxy Knoxy” also helped sell newspapers. The tabloids mined my Myspace profile and drew the most salacious conclusions. I resented that they took my posts and pictures out of context, emphasizing only the negative. A photo of me dressed in black and reclining provocatively on a piano bench, a shot my sister Deanna had taken for a high school photography class, circulated. They published parts of a short story I’d written for a UW creative writing class, about an older brother angrily confronting his younger brother for raping a woman. The media read a lot into that. There were pictures of me at parties and in the company of male friends, and a video showing me drunk. These were snippets of my teenage and college years. Not shown were the pictures of me riding my bike, opening Christmas presents, playing soccer, performing onstage in my high school’s production of The Sound of Music. Looked at together, these latter images would have portrayed a typical American girl, not as tame as some, not as experimental as many, but typical among my age group—­a group that had the bad judgment to put our lives online. Now, at twenty, all I could think was, Who’s writing these articles? Is no one being fair?

  “Foxy Knoxy, the Girl Who Had to Compete with Her Own Mother for Men” ran in England’s Daily Mail. The writer speculated that my mom’s marriage to Chris, a man they described as “young enough to be [my] own brother,” intensified my feelings of rejection that “culminated” in Meredith’s death. They conveniently overlooked the part of my Myspace page that read, “Foxy Knoxy’s heroes.” My answer was: “My mom.”

  My supposedly obsessive promiscuity generated countless articles in three countries, much of it based on information the police fed to the press. It seemed that the prosecutor’s office released whatever they could to bolster their theory of a sex game gone wrong. They provided descriptions of Raffaele’s and my public displays of affection at the questura and witness statements that portrayed me as a girl who brought home strange men. Whatever the sources, the details made for a juicy story: attractive college students, sex, violence, mystery.

  I became the embodiment of everyone’s worst fears of, or fantasies about, a sexually aggressive woman. I could’t deny that I’d hooked up with a ­couple of guys in Perugia whom I hadn’t known well. But I hadn’t sought out men because I was obsessed with sex. I was experimenting with my sexuality. My reaction to being characterized as a femme fatale was Me? Really? Of all ­people!

  Along with my exaggerated sexual history, ­people found it tantalizing that I didn’t look like a depraved murderer. The press said that I had “the face of an angel but the eyes of a killer” or “an angel’s face and a demon’s soul.” Suddenly I had a “secret side.”

  Soon after I got to Capanne, I started getting fan mail—­some from ­people who thought I was innocent, and some from strangers who said they were in love with me. I appreciated the encouraging letters and was shocked, and baffled, by the others. It seemed to me that these men—­often prisoners themselves—­had written me by mistake. Their passionate, sometimes pornographic scribbling had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the media’s creepy, hypersexual creation. I’d never imagined that I would be bombarded with such perverted attention. And if I was drop-­dead sexy, it was news to me.

  Vice-­Comandante Argirò always made a production out of opening my mail, winking and chattering about how many admirers I had. But I got at least as much hate mail as I did supportive and provocative letters combined. Some of it terrified me, especially the chicken-­scratch notes with no return address that said they knew where my parents were staying and planned to cut up their faces. What if they followed through? I warned Mom to be careful, to close her windows at night. And after one particularly threatening letter, I told Argirò, hoping he’d alert my mom right away. “Forget about it,” he said, dismissively. “They’re just words.”

  I felt terrible that my mom and dad had abandoned their regular lives to come to Italy, and that their spouses back home were being hounded by journalists and paparazzi, who staked out their houses, waiting for them to come or go, knocking on the door and phoning them incessantly. The ­people who hated me couldn’t get to me in prison, but there was nothing I could do to protect my family.

  Nor could I deflect the overpowering attention being given to “the Wicked Fox.” The real me had been lost. It seemed as though ­people were putting me in a costume that trapped me even more than the iron bars I lived behind.

  The portrait the prosecution and media created of me as sex-­charged led some ­people to make sure that everything Raffaele and I had done in the days following the murder, every errand we ran, appeared se
xual. Soon after the first few Foxy Knoxy stories showed up, the owner of Bubble, the cheap teen shop where Raffaele and I had stopped the night after Meredith’s body was found, told journalists that I’d bought a red G-­string. Stories ran under headlines such as “Pictures of the Moment Foxy Knoxy Went Shopping for Sexy Lingerie the Day After Meredith’s Murder,” quoting Raffaele supposedly saying, “I’m going to take you home so we can have wild sex together.”

  As usual Luciano and Carlo filled me in on this story. “But I didn’t buy sexy underwear!” I protested. “And Raffaele didn’t say that. It was red, but it’s a pair of bikini briefs with a cartoon cow on it. I was locked out of my house and had only the clothes I was wearing.”

  “I’m sorry to even ask you about it, Amanda,” Carlo said gently. “We just needed to know what to make of the claim.”

  Carlo and Luciano urged my family and me to ignore the media. They organized a short press conference at which my parents read a statement saying that I was innocent. After that, the lawyers refused to allow my family to answer any questions from journalists. We’d learned that anything could be turned around and used against us.

  “The media are about as evil as you can get,” Carlo would say. “They’re going to do whatever makes money. Anyone who meets you will see you’re not the girl the prosecution and press are portraying, but journalists aren’t interested in hearing that you’re a good girl. We have to do that in the courtroom. Don’t worry. We’ll have our chance.”

  I didn’t know that my parents were debating this approach with the lawyers. Mom and Dad wanted to stand up to the media. They understood that once damaging words are unleashed, they stick. To protect one another from added pain, there was a lot Mom, Dad, and I didn’t say during our visits.

  Besides all the lies about my out-­of-­control sex life, ­people started pitting Meredith and me against each other. It had never been that way when she was alive. Meredith’s British girlfriend Robyn Butterworth gave a witness statement after my arrest claiming that Meredith had complained about my loud singing and poor toilet hygiene. Police leaked parts of the testimony to the press, and like so many other things, normal moments in the lives of housemates were refashioned into a motive for murder. I do sing loudly and often. And I knew Meredith had been embarrassed to tell me that the toilet needed to be brushed after each use. I’m embarrassed to think that she may have put off bringing it up with me until it happened a few times. Still, I thought she probably hadn’t complained as much as mentioned it to friends or family to ask how to handle it so she wouldn’t hurt my feelings.

  The idea that Meredith and I had been at odds ramped up quickly in the press. A ­couple of weeks after Robyn’s statement came out, investigators announced they’d found my blood on the faucet in the bathroom that Meredith and I had shared. Prosecutor Mignini hypothesized that the two of us had gotten into a fistfight and I’d wound up with a bloody nose. The truth was far less dramatic—­and less interesting. I’d just gotten multiple piercings in both ears, and I took out all eleven earrings so that I could wipe my ears each morning while the shower water heated up. When I noticed the tiny droplets of blood in the sink the day Meredith’s body was discovered, I thought the blood had come from my ears, as it had on another day, until I scratched the porcelain and realized the blood was dry. That must have been what was on the faucet.

  Meredith had been dead for just three weeks. I still could barely process the loss of my friend. It infuriated me that the media were rewriting our relationship to fit their storyline. I was a monster. Meredith was a saint. The truth was that we were very much alike. She was more contained than I was, but we were both young girls who studied seriously and wanted to do well, who wanted to make friends, and who’d had a few casual sexual relationships.

  Raffaele didn’t demonize me, but he did publicly renounce me. Answering questions through his lawyer, he told one journalist, “If I am here it’s her fault above all. I am conscious that contrary to what I thought, our paths have diverged profoundly.”

  When asked what he’d like to say to me, his answer was “Nothing. I have absolutely nothing to say to her.”

  I didn’t know what to think about Raffaele. Hearing that he’d destroyed my alibi was as baffling as it was incensing. Saying I’d put him up to lying was inexcusable and painful. And now this, I thought. Did I misjudge him? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t at all sure what to make of him. One day we were really close, and the next he announced that he’d dropped me. Had this come from him? His lawyers? Journalists? I rationalized that I wasn’t the Italian girl he needed. I tried to be forgiving. If Raffaele doesn’t want to talk to me again, I’ll understand. This has been traumatic for everyone. But sometimes I was just angry.

  I was nursing these hurts when I got news so shattering that it blotted out almost everything else. I was at my nightly infirmary appointment, where I was meeting with a doctor I’d never seen before. Dressed in a white lab coat, my medical file in hand, he said, “We got the results of your blood test.” His bedside manner was as warm as gelato. “You tested positive for HIV.”

  I was so shocked I couldn’t think. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying.

  The doctor saw my panic. “Don’t worry,” he said, offering me a spoonful of compassion. “It could be a mistake. We’ll need to do more tests.”

  His reassurance struck me as hollow, as if he were just trying to postpone my inevitable anguish. I thought my head would explode from anxiety. I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed, and now I might be infected with HIV?

  Argirò was standing a foot behind me when I got the news. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you slept with lots of ­people,” he chided.

  I spun around. “I didn’t have sex with anyone who had AIDS,” I snapped, though it was possible that one of the men I’d hooked up with, or even Raffaele, was HIV-­positive.

  “You should think about who you slept with and who you got it from.”

  Maybe he was trying to comfort me or to make a joke, or maybe he saw an opening he thought he could use to his advantage. Whatever the reason, as we were walking back upstairs to my cell, Argirò said, “Don’t worry. I’d still have sex with you right now. Promise me you’ll have sex with me.”

  I was too undone to react.

  Sitting on my bed, I wondered if I would die in prison. I didn’t know then that ­people live with HIV for a long time due to improved meds. Please, please, let it be a mistake. Please let it be wrong. I don’t want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to be able to grow old. I want my time. I want my life.

  I didn’t know how to tell Mom or Dad. I desperately wanted to talk to them, but their next visit wasn’t for two more days. I miserably reasoned that I’d had such a fortunate life that all my bad luck was catching up to me now.

  I was aware that there were consequences to being careless about sex. I thought I’d been careful enough. But what had I really known about my sexual partners? Why hadn’t I seriously considered the risk? I’d been trapped by prison; now I felt trapped by my own body, trapped by my stupidity, trapped because bad things happened to ­people for no reason, with no way of anticipating them. Thinking about the life I might have had instead of the one I was living made me understand for the first time how ­people in mourning tear their clothes or rip out handfuls of hair. I wanted to undo everything—­to be out of my body, out of this prison, out of this life that had caved in on me. I buried my face in my pillow so no one could hear me and wailed.

  So much had happened that I didn’t know how to handle emotionally or practically: Meredith’s death; my interrogation, arrest, and imprisonment; HIV. Any one of them would have been a hard burden for a twenty-­year-­old. To have them all at once was devastating. Every problem put before me was foreign, and the tools I had—­stubbornness, optimism, the support of my family, and the certainty of my innocence—­weren�
�t nearly enough for the situation.

  Part of me couldn’t believe I really had HIV. Even though the media were portraying me as a whore, I knew I wasn’t one. It seemed too ironic, too overwhelming that all this was happening at once. Just breathe. Write down that you’re freaking out and then stop. You’re not going to make anything better by going crazy over it. Relax. The doctor said they don’t know that you have it for sure.

  I got out my diary to think this over rationally, imagining who could have infected me, replaying my sexual experiences in my mind to see where I could have slipped up. I wondered if a condom had broken, and if so, whose. If it had, did he know?

  I’d had sex with seven guys—­four in Seattle and three in Italy. I tried to be logical, writing down the name of each person I’d slept with and the protection we’d used.

  Writing made me feel a little better. I knew I needed to get out of prison and get checked by someone I trusted before I started thinking and acting as if my life were over. I forced myself not to anticipate the worst.

  That Saturday, I told my parents what the doctor had said. My mom started crying immediately. “But I haven’t had unprotected sex,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I’m sure it’s going to be fine.”

  My dad was skeptical. He asked, “Do you even think they’re telling you the truth?”

  That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. But when I told them, Luciano and Carlo seconded that idea. “It could be a ploy by the prosecution to scare you into an even more vulnerable emotional state so they can take advantage of you,” Carlo said. “You need to stay alert, Amanda, and don’t let anyone bully you.”

  In the end, I don’t know if they made up the HIV diagnosis. It wasn’t the doctor who said I should think about whom I’d had sex with, but Argirò. It might have been that the test was faulty, or Argirò could have put the medical staff up to it so he could ask me questions and pass the answers along to the police.