In a few days, Amanda Knox will be either set free or ordered to remain in jail, from where she will most certainly file another, final appeal against her murder conviction. Whatever the Italian appellate judge and jury decide to do with her and her onetime boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, one thing will remain unchanged: people living in three different countries already have reached very different verdicts on her, and the reason for that has less to do with what really happened on the night of Nov. 1, 2007, when Meredith Kercher was murdered in Perugia, and everything to do with the media.
In the U.S., Knox is the victim of a judicial system gone awry. That is the way her family has portrayed her in countless interviews with American television outlets over the past four years. The courting of the family by American network producers involved generally favorable coverage. After all, why would Amanda's parents, her stepparents and her friends volunteer to appear on any program that painted her as an "angel-faced she-devil," to borrow a phrase from the prosecution? That long courtship is about to bear fruit. Producers are in a tense bidding war with the family for the biggest get of all, the prize upon which all have fixed their eyes since the earliest days of this tabloid tale: an interview with Knox herself.
(See a who's-who in the Italian murder trial.)
But while Knox's family from suburban Seattle got sympathy from U.S. journalists, they initially failed to understand that they needed to take their message to Italy and the U.K. The Seattle p.r. firm they hired to control coverage gave rise to a myth that a massively funded American publicity campaign was under way to spring a guilty girl from jail.
That did her little good in Britain, the murdered Kercher's homeland. There, Knox is the exchange-student version of Casey Anthony. She is an all-American psychopath with a pretty face masking a liar and a killer. The U.K.'s tabloid reporters, operating in a print-media industry that is more robust than the U.S.'s, with many more tabloid newspapers and thus more competition, stoked the "Foxy Knoxy" story for all it was worth. One of them published a picture of a bathroom Knox showered in before her roommate's body was discovered. All the walls appeared to be smeared with blood. No one ever explained that the redness of the walls was the result of a crime-scene-investigation chemical, which turns pink, that Italian police had sprayed on the walls.
American and British journalists theoretically operate in similar fashion; freedom of the press is, after all, an Anglo-Saxon invention. But a chief difference between the two styles of journalism (besides the illegal hacking of phones) is that British reporters often pay for interviews, while in the U.S., paying for interviews is considered journalistic malpractice. Since the Kercher murder was so sensational and the stakes for newspaper sales in the millions, huge sums were available for interviews. Reporters didn't even broker the biggest deals themselves; high-powered London agents did it for them.
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The U.K. tabs' biggest get was Patrick Lumumba, Knox's former boss at a Perugia bar, the man Knox originally told police was in the house where the crime took place. (The testimony was taken during a night of police interrogation that she now claims was extracted under duress.) Lumumba took a high five-figure sum for a London tabloid interview, parts of which were picked up elsewhere and became part of the narrative of the case. In that account, Knox was described as jealous of Kercher; Lumumba said his own wife had decided that Knox was untrustworthy based on one interaction with her; the accused also was said to flirt with customers at the bar; Lumumba also suggested that he might have been ready to fire Knox and put Kercher in her job. However, when Lumumba talked with me for my book — for free — he retracted nearly every word of it.
Both the American and British print media had a field day cherry-picking through a "prison diary" that the compulsively journalizing Knox filled with her rounded handwriting and blithe musings during her first month in prison and that authorities released to the media. Reporters selected bits of text in which she remarked on fan mail she was receiving from Italian men, ignoring page after page of description about a menacing jail guard repeatedly asking her if she was "good at sex" or "dreamed about sex."
Much of the coverage was driven by the Italian media, which purvey lurid crime stories like this one in a separate section called cronache nere (literally, black chronicles). If or when Knox is released from prison, the Italian response will be the most interesting of all to watch. Italians think of her as a kind of pretty witch, a beguiler of men, whose murderous spree on the night after Halloween was only to be expected as the dark side that all hypersexualized vixens are presumed to possess. That's why the prosecutor inserted witch fear into his first statements about the murder, and that's why the Italian television networks looped and relooped endlessly a piece of video of Knox and Sollecito snuggling and kissing outside the murder house as crime-scene investigators came and went around them; and that's also why a television news program voted her "woman of the year" in 2008, ahead of Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie.
Italy is a sunny place, but free speech there is rather chilled. The nation was ranked 79th in press freedom in 2009. Journalists who criticize Silvio Berlusconi have been fired. Prosecutors have the right to throw journalists in jail on fairly flimsy grounds. Most Italian journalists assume phones are tapped. Courageous, smart journalists are on the front lines of stories about war, the Mafia and social issues, but those who do investigative work generally don't take on the government, a function left to the judiciary, which polices itself. (See more about Amanda Knox.)
Because the Italian judiciary has no public face, all journalists in Italy covering cases like the Kercher murder must rely on tips from individual lawyers. Favored reporters were handed what seemed to be everything — mountains of material that American courts would never hand off to American journalists, from audiotapes of wiretapped conversations to garish videotapes of forensic workers at the crime scene swabbing orifices — before the trial even began. Meanwhile, crucial, other potentially exculpatory information — audio or video of interrogations, for example — never emerged.
Adding to the selective information download, journalists in Italy approached the case with a casual attitude toward facts. If a lawyer said something — anything — it was broadcast or printed, subject to debate, but rarely if ever an official correction. Thus, nonexistent "evidence" — Sollecito's quest for "extreme emotions," a cherry-picked phrase from a long blog post mostly about homework and taking care of family members; his reported googling of bleach in the hours after Meredith's murder; or a parking-lot video supposedly of Amanda Knox arriving at the house around the murder hour — and scientifically incoherent memes such as "mixed blood" DNA in the bathroom Knox and Kercher shared, remained in the public record forever. (Read "Amanda Knox's Appeal: A Case of Too Little DNA?")
Almost two years after the murder, I was only the second journalist out of a pack of dozens on the story to go to Milan to follow an important thread on Rudy Guede, the third person convicted of murder in the case and now serving a 16-year sentence. I spoke to the owner of a nursery school where, the week before the Kercher murder, Guede was found with a knife and a computer stolen from a Perugia law office in his backpack. The police took the knife and computer and let him go — much to their regret, they told me, when they heard he was wanted for murder a few weeks later. No one had ever put much effort into trying to understand his deeply troubled psyche, his sleepwalking and fugue states, let alone understand how the crime scene at the house resembled other incidents involving the same man. Instead, the court heard and the journalists broadcast that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the Kercher murder. Such was the power and hold of the narrative's central figure — Knox — over global media.
With the exception of a Perugia blogger, few Italians ever really questioned the peculiar narrative of the crime. As the appeal ends, holes in the case — especially involving dubious material evidence — that were well known to all spectators during the first trial have finally entered the Italian consciousness. But no appeal verdict, guilty or innocent, will ever convince millions of people in three countries that the Amanda Knox they think they know might not be her at all.
Burleigh is the author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox (Broadway, 2011). More on the book and her work at www.ninaburleigh.com. Get updates on the Knox case on twitter @ninaburleigh.
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