How Amanda Knox Forgave A Prosecutor Who Wrongly Sent Her To Prison
(ANALYSIS) One thing I consider part of my job as a columnist is pointing you to opinions that are better-expressed and more revelatory that what I’d normally produce on my own.
That’s the case here.
A few weeks ago I listened to an interview by former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss with Amanda Knox on Weiss’ podcast “Honestly.” It’s one of the more profound discussions of forgiveness I’ve ever heard.
I’ve heard countless preachers and theologians try to unpack the justifications for, and complications of, forgiving. Knox, interestingly, isn’t a religious adherent at all.
I pushed the podcast on my wife, Liz.
“You’ve got to check this out,” I said.
She did — and her mind was equally blown.
Now I’m alerting you, friends. Do yourself a favor: Listen to this episode, especially the last half-hour or so.
Knox, you recall, was once a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle who was studying in Italy. On Nov. 1, 2007, a man named Rudy Guede broke into the apartment in Perugia that Knox shared with Meredith Kercher, an exchange student from England. Kercher was sexually assaulted and murdered.
Weiss describes what happened afterward:
“The media and the prosecution concocted a narrative that Amanda, her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Guede had played a violent sex game leading to Kercher’s murder. Amanda was portrayed as a deviant sex fiend, a slut, a killer, and a psychopath.”
The problem was, that whole narrative was false:
“Amanda had only been dating Sollecito a week. She had never met Guede. And most importantly, she was not playing a sex game that led to Kercher’s death.”
Soon, Knox was taken into custody:
“She wasn’t given a lawyer or a translator. She wasn’t told that she was a suspect. She was questioned for 53 hours. She was … gaslit and pressured into signing a confession.”
She spent four years in prison, and eight years on trial and in appeals. An appeals court at last declared there was no credible evidence linking her or Sollecito to the crime.
Remarkably, Knox eventually managed to forgive the single-minded prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, she believes most responsible for her nightmare.
Weiss’ interview with her is lengthy and full of powerful insights. But here are a few highlights:
— Knox’ journey toward forgiveness began as an attempt to meet Mignini outside of a courtroom — or at least to correspond with him — to make him see she wasn’t the person he’d thought he was prosecuting. She wanted him, in effect, to admit he’d erred, to validate her.
— After several years of overtures, Knox managed to set up a face-to-face meeting with the prosecutor in 2022, mediated by the Catholic priest who’d been her prison chaplain. As the meeting approached, though, her motives shifted.
“I realized that if I am setting out in order to get him to admit something to me, that’s me focusing on a door that I can’t open,” she says. “That’s the door that is locked to me.”
And so she approached the meeting differently:
“Is there something, not that I can receive from this man, but that I can give him?”
That turned into her seeing him as a three-dimensional human being rather than as an ogre.
“It was accepting … how he thought he was the hero of his own story,” Knox tells Weiss. “And he still believes he is the hero of his own story. And he still believes in the actions he took because he believed in them.”
— Here’s part of what she said to Mignini when they finally sat down in Italy:
“I want you to know that I am innocent. I had nothing to do with Meredith’s murder. You were wrong about me. …
“I’m here to let you know that whether you’ve realized your mistake or not, I do not think you are an evil person. Your mistake, which caused great harm to me and my loved ones and to Raffaele (Sollecito) and his loved ones, is not the only thing that defines you. I want you to know that despite the fact that I am still hurt today, I am grateful for my experience in which you played an important and influential role.
“I am grateful because I learned things about myself that I never would have known, both how weak and vulnerable I am, but also how strong. I am a very strong person. I know that in large part because of you.”
— But forgiving hasn’t neatly cured her anger. And nothing has, or probably ever will, stop the pain of having been wrongly accused and imprisoned, of having been reviled the world over. She’s married now, approaching 40, with two children.
Still, she says, “the abyss never really goes away.” She knows how precarious life is.
“Now, when I experience joy, I don't just experience joy,” she explains. “I experience grief alongside joy, because I am very aware of how fragile and impermanent everything is. … Everything you love will ultimately be taken away from you … Everything that you are will ultimately crumble. And that's okay.”
Well. There’s plenty more. Check it out.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.