by Amanda Knox
Could Mignini, Comodi, and the whole questura keep going after me again and again? Would I be persecuted forever?
The indictment was a dark reminder of how completely vulnerable I was. Not only had the prosecution successfully had me convicted for something I hadn’t done, but also legally, my word meant nothing. I was trapped.
And so angry. I’d never felt so consumed by raw, negative emotion as I did then. I had to turn my thoughts away from it. For the first time, I was afraid of the spiteful, miserable bitterness I felt.
Incredibly, a month later, Prosecutor Mignini was convicted for abuse of office and sentenced to a sixteen-month suspended sentence for his part in the Monster of Florence case. He was accused of having used his authority to intimidate and manipulate people. By the time I was convicted, there was no question that he’d also manipulated me. That case is currently on appeal.
My sense of doom was growing. With the prosecutor’s verdict coming so close to my own, it seemed that they’d waited to convict Mignini until he’d convicted me. Sitting in my barely heated prison cell on that frozen January day, I believed that the Italians had made a mockery of the word justice.
As the months went by, I realized that I hadn’t just been convicted of murder—I’d been sentenced to a life apart from the people I loved.
In a practical sense, my innocence didn’t matter anymore. Whether or not I belonged there, prison was suddenly my entire world.
I’d always tried to fill my days there with mental and physical exercise—in the meantime, I told myself, until I go home. I’d taught myself Italian and I was healthy.
After my conviction, my sense of purpose became my life raft. I clung to purposefulness. It was the only thing that allowed me to maintain my relationships, my humanity, my sanity. I was obsessed with making each day count. The one thing I couldn’t tolerate was wasting my life in jail.
Prison officials started calling me to be an interpreter for anyone who didn’t speak Italian—even if that other language was Chinese and I had to point to words in the English-Chinese dictionary I happened to have.
As I did for Mina’s mom, Gregora, I helped prisoners write letters, legal documents, grocery lists, and explain an ailment to the doctor. The Nigerian women treated me as an honored guest, setting me up at a table and offering tea and cake as they dictated to me. This was my way of being part of the prison community on my own terms, of trying to find a good balance between helping others and protecting myself. No matter how much I was hurting, I didn’t think it was right to ignore the fact that I could help other inmates with my ability to read and write in both Italian and English.
At bedtime each night, I made a schedule for the next day, organized task by task, hour by hour. If I didn’t cross off each item, I felt I’d let myself down. I wrote as much as I could—journals, stories, poems. I could spend hours crafting a single letter to my family.
I thought about what I wanted to say to whoever came to visit me that week, and the message I wanted to convey on my weekly phone call home.
I became a purposeful reader. I already preferred Franz Kafka to Jackie Collins, but now I was drawn to books with characters who were isolated, lost, or grieving in a surreal, existential way—Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before.
I read a lot! And I often felt more solidarity with the characters and the writers who created them than I did with the real people I knew.
Since my arrest, the prison psychiatrist had often asked me if I harbored suicidal thoughts. Her question always struck me as strange—as did the suicide watch I was put on the night of my verdict. How could people kill themselves? There’s always hope. There’s always something to be gained in life. No matter what, my life meant something to me and to my friends and family. I could never consider such a thing.
But I struggled with a way to come to terms with the fact that my life was encapsulated within these gray walls. And I started to understand how you could feel so locked inside your own life that you could be desperate to escape, even if it meant that you’d no longer exist.
The ways other prisoners had tried to kill themselves were well known—and I imagined myself trying them all.
There was poisoning, usually with bleach. Swallowing enough and holding it in long enough was painfully difficult. Usually the vomiting would attract the attention of the guards too soon, and then they’d pump your stomach. It seemed an agonizing way to go if success wasn’t guaranteed.
There was swallowing shards of glass from a compact mirror or a broken plastic pen, hitting your head against the wall until you beat yourself to death, and hanging yourself.
But the most common and fail-safe method of suicide in prison was suffocation by a garbage bag—two prisoners on the men’s side did this successfully while I was there. You could even buy the bags off the grocery list. You’d pull the bag over your head, stick an open gas canister meant for the camping stove inside, and tie the bag off around your neck. The gas would make you pass out almost instantaneously, and if someone didn’t untie the bag immediately, that was it.
Less effective but, I thought, more dignified was bleeding yourself to death. I imagined it would be possible to get away with enough time in the shower. The running water would deter cellmates from invading your privacy, and the steam would fog up the guard’s viewing window. I imagined cutting both my wrists and sinking into oblivion in a calm, quiet, hot mist.
I wondered which straw would need to break for me actually to do any of these. What would my family and friends think? How would the guards find my body?
I imagined myself as a corpse. It made me feel sick, not relieved, but it was a fantasy I had many times—terrible, desperate recurring thoughts that I never shared with a soul.
I also imagined what it would be like to live a life not inside prison. If all this hadn’t happened, where would I be? I pictured myself being a regular person—going to the grocery store, getting coffee at Starbucks, having lunch with my mom, rock climbing. I’d get lost in memories of when I was younger—walks with Oma and July Fourth fireworks with Dad; playing football with my friends or helping Madison develop photos; bicycling with DJ and taking long walks with my friend James.
I thought about how much I wanted to get married and have kids. If I get released on good behavior when I’m forty-three, I can still adopt.
Other prisoners would say, “You’re lucky you’re in prison while you’re young, because you’re going to get out and stand on your own two feet.”
I thought, What the fuck are you talking about? How will I know how to live my life? I won’t have been given a chance to be an adult.
I started having conversations with myself as if I were talking to a younger sister. I told her, Don’t rush, keep your eyes open, observe things, don’t be so insecure. You’re just fine.
She’d tell me, Stop being so hard on yourself.
It calmed me, but I started worrying that I was going crazy. Is this one of the steps people take on the way toward losing their mind?
Optimism had been my way of life, and it still was for my mother, who continued to insist that I’d be freed. But optimism had not saved me. I could picture myself growing old in prison, losing everything I’d ever hoped for in life, and one day returning to the world a ghost of a person, without anyone capable of understanding me. I thought I’d look like a smaller version of Laura with brown hair—maybe because she was close to the age I would be by then.
My feelings of loss only made it worse for me the day Mina was taken away from Gregora and put in an orphanage. Although Gregora didn’t know when Mina was born, prison officials had decided that she must be three. From then on, a social worker would bring Mina to visit her mother for an hour a month. I couldn’t decide whe
ther I identified more with the child I’d come to love or with her inconsolable mother. But I was sure of one thing: prison tore families apart, and they could never be stitched back together.
My mom couldn’t accept my sadness. She wrote, and talked to me, many times about how scared she was for me. “You’re changing, Amanda,” she said. “You’re not sunny anymore. I hope when you get out you can go back to being the happy person you were.”
“Mom,” I wrote back, “good things don’t always work out for good people. Sometimes shit happens for no reason, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I had to consider the worst- and best-case scenarios to be able to maintain my emotional stability. I was no longer a tourist, waiting to be allowed to go home. I was a prisoner. I was trying to figure out how to be happy even if I weren’t freed. I was preparing for life in prison. The thing that scared my mom was that I wasn’t completely focused on getting out, which she saw as giving up.
I wasn’t. I hadn’t lost hope, but I wasn’t banking on it, either.
Mom couldn’t understand what I was trying to say: that it was important not to be optimistic all the time but to come to terms with reality, the good and the bad, and to create something positive from it. She took this to mean that I’d become a pessimist. It was hard for us to communicate with each other about this.
My conviction and the ways I tried to deal with it created a divergent path that made me afraid I could lose my family. Not literally, but in my soul. Was I becoming someone different, someone they couldn’t reach?
I never thought they’d abandon me. Remarkably for a stepfather, Chris had kept his word and essentially moved to Perugia, living there for months at a time, and there was always someone to visit me during the twice-weekly visitation schedule. At home, Oma had started lighting a candle to represent me at each family gathering, and Deanna told me in a good-humored way, “Look how crazy we all are! We light a candle and pretend it’s you!”
But I was consumed by the question of how long they could, or should, keep up the back-and-forth between Seattle and Perugia. What is my family going to do? What about work? What about life?
It was the same for my friends who were graduating that spring. How do I tell them that I live here in prison now, and that they need to move on with their lives—without me? Can I tell them just to forget about me for 26 years?
I desperately didn’t want to be forgotten. But more than worrying about the logistics of such a life, I was terrified that we were coming to a point where we wouldn’t understand one another. They still had the right to choose what to do with their lives; they had freedom. I didn’t. I was at the mercy of my wardens. I worried that my new prison identity wouldn’t make sense to them, and my mom was evidence of that. If enough time passed, we’d be speaking two different languages—and it would have nothing and everything to do with their English and my Italian.
Chapter 31
November–December 2010
Sitting beside me in the visitors’ room at Capanne, my friend Madison reached over and brushed my cheek. I flinched.
“Baby, don’t worry. It’s just an eyelash,” she said.
My skittishness horrified me. “I guess I’m just not used to people touching me anymore.”
In one of the few happy surprises of my then-three years in prison, Madison had moved from Seattle to Perugia to be near me—arriving in November 2010, a few days after Laura handed me her bedsheets, hugged me tearfully, and left for a halfway house in Naples.
One friend couldn’t replace the other. Laura had nurtured me on the inside. Seeing Madison twice a week for an hour gave me heart—and, often, valuable information. Distraught after a bad breakup, Madison embraced the Mormon philosophy she’d grown up with: “forget yourself and go to work.” Keeping me grounded and hopeful was her work. But she also needed a paying job. A photographer who didn’t speak Italian, she turned to Rocco and Corrado. With their recommendation and her portfolio, she landed a gig taking pictures for a local newspaper. In her spare time, she and an interpreter friend talked to journalists, lawyers, and people on the street about my case. Maybe one of those interviews would give Carlo, Luciano, and me an extra fingerhold to help pull me out of this hell.
After I was convicted, my family, my lawyers, my friends, other prisoners—even, bizarrely, prison officials—tried to console me by telling me that I’d surely have my sentence reduced, if not overturned, on appeal. Rocco and Corrado assured me that in Italy about half the cases win on appeal.
The old Amanda would have appreciated the possibility.
But I’d been burned so often I was terrified. Why would the Court of Appeals make a different decision from the previous court? Or from the pretrial judge? Both had accepted the prosecution’s version. With my case, the Italian judicial system was also on trial. My story was well known, and the world was watching. It’d be difficult for the judicial authorities to back down now.
One thing had changed: me. I was different. In the year since my conviction I’d decided that being a victim wouldn’t help me. In prison there were a lot of women who blamed others for their bad circumstances. They lived lethargic, angry lives. I refused to be that person. I pulled myself out of the dark place into which I’d tumbled. I promised myself I’d live in a way that I could respect. I would love myself. And I would live as fully as I could in confinement.
The questions and choices I made during the first trial ate at me. What if I’d spoken up more, clarified more when other witnesses took the stand, pleaded my innocence more forcefully? Would it have made a difference? I’d waited for the jury and the world to realize that there was no evidence against me. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
Though I trusted my lawyers completely, this time I wanted to be involved in every decision. I owed it to myself. I couldn’t survive another guilty verdict if my team and I overlooked a single speck of favorable evidence.
Once I started thinking about what might be possible, nothing seemed out of reach. Should I write to the new judge? The U.S. secretary of state? Why not the president?
Rather than write, I read. The 407-page report from Judge Massei explained why we’d been convicted and how Raffaele, Guede, and I had murdered Meredith.
The supposed motive was as far-fetched as a soap opera plot. “Amanda and Raffaele suddenly found themselves without any commitments; they met Rudy Guede by chance and found themselves together with him at the house on the Via della Pergola where . . . Meredith was alone,” Massei wrote.
The judges and jury hypothesized that Raffaele and I were fooling around, and that Guede started raping Meredith because we turned him on. Instead of helping Meredith, we inexplicably and spontaneously joined Guede, because it was “an exciting stimulant that, although unexpected, had to be tried,” he wrote. “[T]he criminal acts were carried out on the force of pure chance. A motive, therefore, of an erotic, sexually violent nature which, arising from the choice of evil made by Rudy, found active collaboration from Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.”
The report rejected the prosecution’s claim that Meredith and I had had a contentious relationship. The judge wrote “the crime that was carried out . . . without any animosity or feelings of rancor against the victim . . .”
They allowed that there was no evidence of contact between Guede and me—no e-mails, phone calls, or eyewitnesses. They discounted the testimony of Hekuran Kokomani, the witness from the pretrial and the trial who said he threw olives at me and who “identified” me by the nonexistent gap between my teeth. And they conceded that Raffaele and I were not likely killers. Rather we were “two young people, strongly interested in each other, with intellectual and cultural curiosity, he on the eve of his graduation and she full of interests . . .”
Nonetheless, the report claimed, Raffaele and I “resolved to participate in an action aimed at for
cing the will of Meredith, with whom they had, especially Amanda, a relationship of regular meetings and cordiality, to the point of causing her death . . . the choice of extreme evil was put into practice. It can be hypothesized that this choice of evil began with the consumption of drugs which had happened also that evening, as Amanda testified.”
It continued: “Therefore it may be deduced that, accustomed to the consumption of drugs and the effects of the latter, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito participated actively in Rudy’s criminal acts aimed at overcoming Meredith’s resistance, subjugating her will and thus allowing Rudy to act out his lustful impulses . . .”
Another factor, the judge wrote, was that Raffaele and I read comic books and watched movies “in which sexuality is accompanied by violence and by situations of fear . . .”
He brought up the disputed theory that Raffaele’s kitchen knife was the murder weapon, in addition to a new theory that I’d carried the knife in my “very capacious bag.” Why would I? “It’s probable, considering Raffaele’s interest in knives, that Amanda was advised and convinced by her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, to carry a knife with her . . . during the night along streets that could have seemed not very safe to pass through at night by a girl.”
The lining of my bag wasn’t cut. The police found no blood in my bag. How can I prove what I didn’t do?
The prosecution had based their case on misinterpreted and tainted forensic evidence and had relied heavily on speculation. But Judge Massei’s faith was blind. Patrizia Stefanoni would not “offer false interpretations and readings,” he wrote.
The appeal wouldn’t be a redo of the first trial. Italy, like the United States, has three levels of justice—the lower court, the Court of Appeals, and the highest court, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, their version of our Supreme Court. The difference is that, in Italy, someone like me is required to go through all three levels, all the way to the Cassazione, whose verdict is final.
