Amanda Knox shares why she feels ‘lucky’ as she opens up about life after jail | EUROtoday

Amanda Knox now considers herself fortunate. But she didn’t greater than a decade in the past when she sat in a claustrophobic Italian jail cell after being convicted of murdering her roommate whereas learning overseas, depicted as a sex-crazed killer.

But time has modified her view of being one of many fortunate ones. In her new memoir, Free: My Search for MeaningKnox, now 37, reveals what ways she used to outlive jail, the unlikely friendship she fashioned with the person who had her locked up, and the struggles she confronted afterwards as she navigated the skin world.

“Even though I have gone through a very extreme experience, a lot of the things that I’ve learned from it are actually really universal,” she instructed The Independentin an interview for the e book’s launch. “And I’m kind of addicted to that good vibes feeling that I get after being ostracized for so long.”

Knox was simply 20 years previous and learning overseas within the Italian metropolis of Perugia when her British roommate Meredith Kercher was discovered stabbed to dying on November 2, 2007, of their shared condo.

The case made international headlines. Suspicion rapidly fell on Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, a person she had solely lately been seeing. Knox was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in jail earlier than in the end being cleared of the homicide in 2011 with an appeals court docket citing errors within the forensic investigation.

Knox famous that folks typically assume that wrongful conviction instances, together with her personal, finish as soon as they’re out of jail.

“But really, that’s where the person’s story really begins,” she added. “Because that is when they are faced with the dilemma of not just surviving but processing this crazy thing that happened with them, and figuring out how does that play a role in your life, and are you defined by it?”

What got here subsequent was her actual problem. “How do you possibly do anything in your life that could be as meaningful to you as, for example, fighting to prove your innocence and get out of jail?” she requested.

But regardless of Knox being definitively acquitted by Italy’s highest court docket in 2015, her each transfer has remained topic to public scrutiny for almost 20 years. Some noticed her as monster. Others noticed her as a flashy headline.

“Either I am this crazy, woman-hating psychopath that I’m being portrayed to be, which doesn’t exist, or I’m just a regular person like you, and I think that that’s really both scary and intriguing to people,” Knox instructed The Independent.

But she has labored to rebuild her life within the US, advocating for felony justice reform and wrongful conviction consciousness.

An enormous a part of rebuilding herself was the connection she cast with Dr. Giuliano Mignini, the person chargeable for sending her to jail.

Dr. Mignini, a robust native Justice of the Peace with a fixation throughout her trial on conspiracy theories involving satanic rituals, painted Knox as a “dirty, woman-hating slut” who killed Kercher.

“Meredith was astonished that Amanda had started a relationship with a boy after just arriving in Perugia … that Amanda owned condoms and a vibrator,” Mignini claimed at Knox’s trial, she wrote in her e book. “It is possible that Meredith argued with Amanda … because of her habit of bringing strange men into the house … [So,] under the influence of drugs and probably also alcohol, Amanda decided to involve Meredith in a violent sex game … For Amanda, the time had come to take revenge on that ‘simpering goody two-shoes.’”

With these phrases, which made headlines the world over, Mignini inducted Knox right into a society of ladies she now calls the “Sisterhood.”

“The women who’ve been the subject of TMZ headlines, SNL skits, and David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists,” Knox writes, referencing Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Bobbitt.

“It all boils down to this titillating lie that women are sexually jealous and and hateful towards other women, and it’s just this perverse male fantasy that’s being projected on young women,” she instructed The Independent.

Knox identified that she wasn’t the one one painted a caricature by the trial and media.

“They turned Meredith into something that she wasn’t,” she mentioned, explaining that this cliche of an “uptight, judgmental kind of bitch” who hated that Knox had informal flings was not true in any respect. Instead, her roommate was “very nice, introverted, but [a] silly and joyous person.”

Despite how the prosector portrayed them, Knox determined to achieve out to him.

“I wanted to understand why he did what he did. I was not content to think of him as an evil psychopath who didn’t care whether or not he was throwing an innocent girl in prison,” she mentioned.

Another a part of Knox puzzled, “can I convince this man who thought I was a monster that I’m not, and will he do the right thing?”

But Knox’s household, her family members, and different exonerees believed she was losing her time and had been anxious for her emotional properly being.

She was too. Every time an e-mail from him would are available in, Knox needed to muster up the braveness to learn it and determine easy methods to reply. They wrote forwards and backwards to one another about music, The Lord of the Rings and her trial, with him telling her “I’m happy for you.” But Knox puzzled, “could he really be happy that I was free?”

“I tried to do my duty,” he wrote to her, together with the phrases: “I may have made a mistake.”

While Knox yearned for an apology and for him to imagine her innocence, she was grateful for his response.

“I think a huge takeaway for me was how much of a good idea it is to set yourself up to be pleasantly surprised by someone,” she mentioned. “You don’t approach them with an expectation. You approach them with curiosity and, it’s going to sound cheesy, but with an open heart, because if you are fixated on the thing that you want from somebody, you are potentially missing the things that they really have to offer.”

Knox determined she needed to journey to Italy and meet with him in individual, to share with him what he had initially denied her: humanity.

“I was going there to give something to him, something that I had inside of myself, that I was capable of, which was compassion, which was understanding, which was kindness, and as soon as I figured that out, I felt unstoppable,” she mentioned.

“I felt like a fucking superhero. I felt like I was finally doing something in relation to this, this whole drama that actually defined me, and I was so fucking proud of myself, not gonna lie, and I came away from it being like, Wow, what a crazy thing that I just did.”

Today, Knox hosts the podcast Labyrinths along with her husband Christopher Robinson, and so they have two younger youngsters who she could not wait to get house to.

“I wake up surrounded by all of the things that I thought I had lost and that I was forced to grieve in prison, and I actually got to have it back,” Knox mentioned. “I get to live, and I get to do meaningful work, and I get to be a mom, and I am very, very aware every morning of how fucking lucky I am.”