In 2007, a British student studying abroad was raped and murdered by a Black man from the Ivory Coast. Her name was Meredith Kercher, and his name was Rudy Guede. That’s a story we keep telling — white woman raped and killed by a Black man — but nobody is hearing it anymore.
Instead, the ‘Amanda Knox Saga‘ keeps playing out. Google Knox versus Kercher or Guede, and the difference in hits is hundreds of millions. Knox complains of ‘loss of agency’ by which she means exclusive commercial rights to tell her own story; but that’s as much her own fault as that of the banal world in which we live.
Three reasons for that.
Amanda Knox is American, female and attractive.
Had the wrongly-accused been an indigent Guatemalan (for example) with a harelip and bad hair, the murder would have disappeared into obscurity. Just another black-on-white statistic to be wilfully buried and conveniently forgotten by the BLM horde.
But Knox is all the above.
On trial for eight years, her every expression immortalized by the hungry lens, we love seeing beautiful young Americans go bad. Lurid fantasies about her guilt or innocence, her motives, sexuality, her fucking hairstyle even. The wwweb made Knox familiar to a jury of billions long before she faced her own.
Knox describes herself as “exoneree, journalist, public speaker, and author” and now dedicates her life to “upholding the ethical principles I so often found lacking in the media that covered and consumed me” through a podcast called Labyrinths she shares with Christopher Robinson.
Asking “serious questions in silly ways” and being “controversial” is not much of a business plan. But the podcast is good! Their guest speakers are stellar: including Malcolm Gladwell, who once decribed Knox as ‘mismatched’ — “an innocent person who acts guilty“.
They are about to release Stillwater — “loosely inspired” by the Amanda Knox Saga. Which maybe won’t present the Knox-equivalent as a ‘man-eating psycho sex-slut‘ but we’ll have to wait and see.
Let’s be real for a sec.
The media did report it. It was a popular story. But it also happened fifteen years ago. Rudy Guede was released from prison on December 7th 2020. Maybe time to move on.
The Amanda Knox saga won’t stop until Amanda Knox stops talking about it. Her podcast won’t undo her undeserved infamy. But it does tell me she won’t stop, not so long as there’s a living to be made from the worst thing she’s never done.
But that’s how we roll now.
Depsite the eventual acquital and several detailed books on the case, many people in Italy admit they still believe she was guilty, and it’s not because Amanda keeps talking about wrongful convictions (her own and other people’s). If I were her I would never stop talking about what happened. She deserves compensation for what she suffered.
She is being compensated. She’s making coin from her ‘ordeal’ every single day. Without the wrongful conviction she’d be selling tinned peaches in Wisconsin, just a regular nobody like the rest. That’s my entire point. So enough of the boo-hoo already, and how about a bit more hooray!