When Amanda Knox was released from an Italian prison in 2011 after her murder conviction was overturned, her mother insisted she see a trauma specialist. Knox had been jailed along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, in what investigators insisted had been a sex game gone wrong. Four years later, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted.
Back home in Seattle, the trauma specialist began by asking Knox how she was doing, prompting her to break down in tears and run away. What was intended as an icebreaker “felt like the hardest question in the world to answer”. She tried another therapist – though, fearful of having her story sold to the tabloids, she quit after two months. Next, she went on a 10-day silent retreat where she was instructed to do walking meditation in a field, which reminded her of walking in circles in the prison yard. She had a panic attack and fled.
After this, Knox gave up on therapy and found other ways to process what had happened to her. She would go out alone, wandering the streets or riding her bike for hours, which brought relief. “I didn’t talk about my trauma as much as you might imagine. I hadn’t yet learned that it could be useful, not only to me, but that it could help others, that there was something uniquely healing about finding purpose in that pain.”
If her first memoir, 2013’s Waiting to Be Heard, documented the road to release, this one shows what freedom looks like for a woman relentlessly maligned and misrepresented, both by Italian judges and in the court of public opinion. Knox is now a paid-up member of what she calls the “Sisterhood of Ill Repute”, a club of women who have been victims of misogyny on a massive scale, caught up in vicious and dehumanising narratives (others include Monica Lewinsky and Lorena Bobbitt). The title of Free may seem like a victory cry but Knox has put in the hard yards to liberate herself from a public image that was part monster, part hussy.
The first 50 pages of Free are a summary of the murder case, her early egregious treatment by interrogators and her imprisonment. Initially, Knox was met with hostility by other inmates who didn’t welcome a celebrity in their midst (“I would have done anything to blink that media coverage out of existence”). But as she became more fluent in Italian, she began reading documents for prisoners, many of whom were illiterate, becoming their unofficial translator and scribe. By the end of her time in prison, she had found a way to get along with people and show them she wasn’t the figure depicted in tabloid headlines.
She is still disabusing others of those impressions today. In Free, we learn what happened in the aftermath of her acquittal: her attempts to reintegrate, find a job, have romantic relationships and a family. She reveals how she coped with the films and documentaries made about her against her wishes, the bullying and death threats and the continuing legal nightmares (after her release from prison, she was retried and then exonerated again). Acknowledging the pain of the Kercher family, and the handling of the case that meant it was Knox’s name dominating headlines rather than Meredith’s, she notes the misconception that there is only one victim when a crime occurs, and that “acknowledging the suffering of an innocent victim in prison is somehow akin to denying the victimhood of the person who is murdered. It is not.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that Knox, a former language student, is a fluent writer with a flair for vivid and entertaining prose. She describes her former prosecutor Giuliano Mignini as having “a round face that sat like a scoop of ice-cream on his suit collar”. Mignini is Knox’s bete noire, the villain of Free whom she holds most responsible for her conviction. Startlingly, he is also the man with whom she strikes up an intense and intimate correspondence that culminates in a face-to-face meeting in Perugia. This part of the book reads like a thriller, as Knox and her family wonder if the meeting is a trap to put her back behind bars.
Why put herself through it? Knox’s thinking is muddled on this: she wants him to admit his mistakes and state her innocence despite knowing he can’t and won’t. But clear thinking is a lot to ask of someone who has endured all that she has. The Knox we meet in Free is clever, anxious, funny, contradictory, sometimes self-regarding and given to talking about herself in the third person. She is also an unfairly vilified exoneree whose impulse to disappear and live a normal life has been trumped by a desire to rewrite the narrative foisted on her. You long for her to be able to move on, but the path she has chosen, as a public figure and advocate for the wrongfully convicted, makes that impossible. For Knox, being free isn’t just about not being behind bars – it is about being seen and understood.
• Free by Amanda Knox is published by Headline (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
