Amanda Knox on False Confessions, Conspiracy Theories, and Her “Sisterhood of Ill Repute”

When Amanda Knox was exonerated following a murder conviction and released from an Italian prison 14 years ago, she returned to Seattle with the appeals process still ongoing, full of uncertainty about what the rest of her life might look like. The issue was further complicated by the fact that Italian courts, and one prosecutor in particular, continued to pursue her, refusing to believe her innocence in Meredith Kercher’s murder. Only when she was home did she realize that she had become, without her knowledge, one of America’s most recognizable faces.

In her new book, Free: My Search for Meaning, Knox tells the story of her traumatic four years in prison, and the friendships she struck up with fellow inmates and prison workers to get through it. She also writes about her attempts to make a life on the other side, as she continued to clear her name and became a freelance writer, along with the story of how she met her now husband, novelist Christopher Robinson. Free weaves in insights from Amanda’s interests in Zen Buddhism, comedy, and nerdy pop culture, to give readers a more holistic vision of her personality and continues a project she and Robinson started on their podcast, Labyrinths, where the pair interview artists, journalists, scientists, and comedians.

Knox also writes about the experience of grieving Kercher, her friend and roommate, who was murdered in their shared Perugia apartment in 2007, and her attempts to convince Dr. Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who tried her case in 2009, of her innocence. Knox and Mignini eventually struck up a moving correspondence, which is still ongoing, and Knox eventually met him outside of the courtroom.

Now the parents of two young children, Knox and Robinson run their podcast and production company from their home on Washington’s Vashon Island. But before the couple headed to New York City for Free’s release, they traveled to Budapest to spend some time on the set of the upcoming Hulu scripted show Amanda, which they executive produced.

“I can’t say much, but it’s going to be really cool,” she said of the show. “Everyone is really, really talented. They’re bringing their best work and such care to the project. It’s very moving.”

Vanity Fair: Your second book is so different from your 2013 book, Waiting to Be Heard. You said that was a story about what happened to you, and this new one is about you. One of the funnier parts of the book happens when you realize you missed four years of pop culture when you were incarcerated.

Amanda Knox: Oh my gosh. I missed Obama! I missed Wall-E. I missed Justin Bieber.

But you also learned that your case had been huge news in America while you were gone. You credit Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Gallo—the members of what you call the “Sisterhood of Ill Repute”—with helping you get through it, but how did you deal with essentially being one of the first people to be “canceled” online?

It was being canceled, but I was also turned into a product. It was a product that was being sold, the product of the woman-hating slut. Right? Similar to Monica—how dare she have an affair? With no one considering that she was just a young girl who was stupidly in love. What did they think was going to happen?

I hate how the media pits women against each other, and that’s what was happening in my own case. This idea that here’s this one archetype of woman and here’s this other archetype of woman, and they are at spiritual war with each other, and it ended in sex and death.

Even after your conviction was overturned, people struggled to acknowledge that they were wrong about you.

Clearly it’s not personal, because whatever it is, they have their own weird little worldview and motivations going on. But why did this story trigger them and trigger them to be so motivated and dedicated? It’s a really good question for a psychologist—why do people get obsessed? I do think that there is something to the fact that from the very beginning, I was both unrelatable and relatable, in the way that the Mona Lisa is captivating because people can’t quite tell if she’s smiling or not or what she’s thinking. I think I was the Mona Lisa in that way.

There is also a rom-com in the middle, when you meet your husband. You fall in love by going to Burning Man. It’s cute!

It’s kind of insufferable in a lovely way. I like calling it a rom-com. I’m going to tell him that. He’s with our kids right now. The hardest thing about the press gauntlet this week is saying goodbye to the kids. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and they’re both highly attached. I’m their favorite person in the world. It’s so hard. Every morning my daughter, our three-year-old, holds on to my arm and says, “Don’t leave.”

You guys run your podcast and production company from home, right?

Yeah, she’s not used to me being away for hours at a time. So this has been a tough experience.

Was it easy for you to take on the identity of “mom”? There is a lot of research about how people are having fewer kids and there are disagreements about why, but it can be fraught.

I’ve always been a mom in a not-mom’s body. I realized from a very young age that my mom was a really good mom. In the same way that you read a really good book and think you want to write one, I had a really great experience with my mom. So I thought, I want to be a really good mom, and I know how to do it.

In addition to your own coming-of-age story, the book talks about your experience in prison and how that motivated you to become an advocate for criminal justice reform. Did you have to learn about the mechanics of false confessions and how that was reflected in your case?

I absolutely had to learn that because I had no idea what the fuck happened to me in my interrogation room. [Saul Kassin], a John Jay professor and an expert in false confessions and police interrogations, reached out to me while I was still in prison. His initial letter to me was simply, “Could you please just describe for me in as much detail as possible as you can remember what happened in your interrogation?”

His response was to send me his research. It laid out, step by step, a method that police around the world are instructed to do in order to break down the will of people that they believe are deceiving them. [Police] construct a false reality around them, and then force them to deliver the goods. It is an incredibly effective method at getting both guilty and innocent people to deliver to the police a narrative that they already have in mind. That’s the danger of it. Police believe in this method because they’re like, “Look, it validates what we already thought”—if you confessed, it’s a closed case.

An immense wave of relief came over me [when I read the research] because I had been blaming myself. Now that’s my big crusade in the criminal justice realm. Because it is so frustrating to just stare people in the eye—the people who are endowed with the responsibility of protecting you as a citizen—and tell them, I was a victim of a crime. Someone broke into my home and raped and murdered my roommate, and I called the police for help, and this is what they did to me, the utter betrayal. And it was so unnecessary. It did not need to happen.

In the book, you go into detail about how prosecutors arrested and charged an assailant, Rudy Guede, for Meredith’s murder, but lessened his guilt by alleging that he had accomplices. How did you feel when you heard that he was accused in December 2023 of assaulting an ex-girlfriend? (Guede has denied the accusations.)

This is going to sound really fucked up, because when he got out of prison, I really, really genuinely hoped he might have gotten better. I don’t know this guy from fucking Adam, but a part of me, the headlines were all talking about how he had been rehabilitated and how he’s this good guy and he found religion or whatever. But he wasn’t saying that I was innocent and telling the truth, so I was wary of him.

Then the news broke that he had sexually assaulted a girl who [would have been] eight years old at the time his assault of Meredith happened. She had no idea who he was, and this was her first big relationship!

A part of me felt so validated, and that sounds horrible. My first thought was, Thank God she’s alive. And my second immediate thought was, I feel really fucking validated right now, because look who this person is. He has once again revealed himself. And it shouldn’t have taken another assault for people to start questioning the narrative about him just being a poor little guy who was drawn in by my evil clutches. But it needed that. And I think it actually tipped the scales even a little bit between me and Giuliano [Mignini, who prosecuted her case], because he started being willing to admit certain things to me after that. Did you know that Rudy Guede wrote a book?

I did not! Have you read it?

It was basically self-published, but I think a university professor published it for him. [Guede] tells a lot of lies in the book. But he tells a lot of truths that I thought were really interesting. As somebody who’s constantly plagued by the why question, I kept thinking, Why did this happen? Why, when Rudy Guede had a history of breaking and entering, and he broke and entered into a Milan preschool carrying stolen goods and a knife, did no one think to [detain him]? Why did they [release him]?

It goes even deeper than that, because he had a fucking traumatic childhood, and he had weird mommy and daddy issues because he had been abandoned and neglected. He then sort of developed this perverse sense of entitlement over other people’s things and homes, because he didn’t have one of his own. From a psychology perspective, it’s fucking fascinating.

And also, what are the consequences of people falling through the cracks? Meredith might not have died had Rudy Guede not fallen through the cracks, and that is fucking scary. I don’t know.

Everyone wants to think that things will be okay if we can just protect our own family, but you write about realizing that we’re all interconnected. Do you think that lesson is important to remember while people have been trying to dismantle the government in the US?

It’s so hard for us to conceive of ourselves as a part of an entity with so many people and so many diverse interests and viewpoints and ideologies and resources. It’s really hard, even just imagining myself as a citizen of the United States—what does that mean? There’s so much stuff that I can’t conceive of that goes into being that. So I’m failing on a day-to-day basis to be the self-aware, ethical citizen of the United States that I need to be because I’m so fucking tired and I just need to watch Bluey for the thousand time with my frigging kids, and I just know what I know.

Maybe this is me pontificating, but we need to know that we can rely on each other. I need to rely on somebody else to know what to do with my garbage at the end of the day. No, seriously, do I need to recycle this or do I need to recycle that? I don’t know. I’ll do it if you just tell me, and in the meantime, let me talk to the legislatures about policed populations.

You live in the Pacific Northwest now, and I’ve read so much about people on the West Coast who would’ve previously been on the left going to the right. Sometimes because of COVID-related things, and partially just in reaction to recent politics. Is that real?

Is it real in the Pacific Northwest? Up until COVID, Vashon Island was known for being one of the most anti-vax places in all of the United States because of this hippie, ultra-leftist take that it was giving all kids autism or whatever it was. So we had the highest anti-vax rate of any place, but then COVID hit. A huge part of our population is elderly and retired, and so they’re high risk, and so everyone just buckled the fuck down and got vaxxed, and it was not an issue.

Eventually, the huge scandal was that the head of the fire department on the island refused to be vaxxed, and then the ferry workers also refused. We’re dependent upon the ferry system to leave our island. There is no hospital on the island, so sick people were like, “I can’t get on the ferry if I know that there’s a potential ferry worker who’s carrying COVID.” Then there’s this huge struggle.

So that’s a ramble-y not-answer to your question. In the Pacific Northwest—especially on Vashon, but just in general—everyone’s just drifting more to their extremes. You’re seeing people take more radical stances, and I feel uncomfortable about that. The more radical your stance, the more likely you’re cherry-picking reality.

The internet has something to do with it. Do you ever worry about the spread of conspiracy theories? It can be hard to predict who’s going to believe conspiracy theories versus who won’t now.

It’s also a slippery slope, and I remember having a conversation with my sister. I have a youngest sister who was a flat-earther there for a minute, and it was just so infuriating. Because on the one hand, she’s like, “What’s the harm in believing the earth is flat?” I’m like, What’s the problem with having a false belief just because you like it? Do you know who your sister is? I had to let that one go, and she figured it out for herself.

Now that you’re a content creator, what has it been like for you to figure out your own niche in this world where false beliefs spread so quickly? How do you think about algorithms?

Honestly, I do not think about algorithms at all. I go the path of opportunity, which is also the path of least resistance. So I talk to people who want to talk to me, and I talk about things that I know about or that I’m curious about. So far that has panned out okay.

I have been told that I should stick to a lane and have more of a distinct brand. It’s just not how my brain works. Besides, so much of the product that I create is me. It’s not based upon my expertise. It’s based on the fact that people know me. And so if I then try to brand myself [more specifically] it feels so limiting. I am not just a true-crime person. I am also a comedy person. I’m also a musical person, and I’m also a person who’s just curious about mushrooms. All of these things are parts of me. That’s that constant tug of war—where do I begin and where does the product “me” begin? That’s a whole further challenge that maybe I need to wrap my mind around now that I have this book out of my system.

Between podcasting, writing, and activism, it seems like you have found a career that works for you. I get the sense that you might be doing something similar even if you weren’t an exoneree. What do you think?

I definitely feel like I am doing what comes natural to me, and so I don’t think that what comes natural to me has really changed. But I doubt that I would’ve been given the opportunity to do a podcast randomly. I’m not an audio engineer, and my husband’s a novelist, so I don’t know if we would’ve gotten into podcasting were it not for the fact that some random person asked me to host a true-crime podcast.

The message of the book is that you survived something really awful with the help of people who supported you. The experience gave you insight into the human condition and helped you find something that you like doing. Now you’re surrounded by people who you enjoy doing it with. Is that a good summary of how things are going?

It’s a pretty good gig. It’s a great gig. I like that people rely on me. Recently, I’ve been working with Innocence Project of Texas just because I’m really good friends with an exoneree in Texas who’s on the board, named Anna Vasquez, who has accomplished a lot of stuff and she’s really cool. I just love that we’re good people to hang out with and go thrift shopping with. Then also we get really important work done together. That’s a cool feeling.