She-devil of family's nightmares or Amelie of Seattle: the two faces of Amanda Knox
At the trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher it often seemed as if there were three people in the dock. One was Italian, Raffaele Sollecito, the other two were Amanda Knox.Everyone agreed on Sollecito – a whey-faced computer enthusiast with a fondness for cannabis and an arguably troubling interest in knives and violent Japanese comics. But the blue-eyed, blonde Knox stayed a riddle to the end.
Was she the "she-devil" claimed by the Kercher family's lawyer, who endorsed the prosecution case throughout? Or was she, as Sollecito's lawyer said, "the Amelie of Seattle", a reference to the heroine of the eponymous French movie that Knox and her boyfriend said they watched on the night of the murder – a quirky young woman intent on bringing happiness to others? The two images of Knox presented to the court and public were so wholly at odds as to be those of different women. In no small measure, the task facing the judges was to decide which was the real Amanda.The first emerged from the leaked details of the inquiry two years ago: "Foxy Knoxy"; uncaring, sexually rapacious and eager for a taste of life on the wild side; just the sort of young woman who might bewitch the accommodating Sollecito and come to detest her level-headed British flatmate. This was the Knox caught drunk in a video on YouTube; the Knox who sent an email to a friend saying she had sex with a man on a train. This was the woman who posted to MySpace a story about a woman drugged and raped and who had a picture taken of herself aiming a machine gun at the camera and captioned it "the Nazi". Her flatmates only saw her cry once and a detective was horrified to find her turning cartwheels in the police station while Sollecito was being interrogated.
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As for the cartwheels, her mother told the Guardian earlier this year that was "Amanda just being Amanda": it was the early hours of the morning; she was stiff. Her younger sister, Deanna, recounted on another occasion how Knox was prone to gauche behaviour in public.But then she is a daughter of the US west coast, with its laid-back, be-yourself ethos, so very different from that of provincial Italy where the accent is on figura (appearances).Lots of girls in Umbria buy condoms and some may even have a jokey vibrator like the one Knox was given, in the shape of a rabbit. But it is unlikely they would keep them in a transparent washbag, as the University of Washington student did.
Italians shrug off extramarital sex, yet they are prim in their attitudes to premarital sex, at least outside the stable context of fidanzamento (engagement). They use the same words for boyfriend and fiance.
So many were taken aback to learn that, by the time she was arrested at the age of 20, Knox had had sex with seven men. They were less outraged by how this information was obtained: Knox was told in prison she was HIV-positive and asked to write a list of her lovers. Before she was told that a mistake had been made, the list was passed to investigators, one of whom passed it to a journalist.Nobody denies Knox was tipsy in the YouTube video. But her mother said the rape story was for a degree course (in creative writing), and her sister maintained that Knox made up the story about her encounter on the train (indeed, the name of her presumed lover does not figure on the list she made in jail). Her nickname came from her foxiness on the soccer field, not with men. As for the machine-gun photograph, Deanna Knox said that was a joke (though an arguably tasteless one in view of the sisters' part-German backgrounds). Time and again, Knox's touch of social dyslexia has worked against her, renewing doubts about her true personality.She arrived on the first day of her trial smiling and turned up for a hearing on Valentine's Day in a T-shirt emblazoned with the Beatles song title, All You Need is Love. Neither was clever. But then gaucheness is one thing; evil quite another.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/04/two-faces-of-amanda-knoxI know some people think she is guilty and others cite the lack of evidence but clearly the media has played a big role in this case
I think this case clearly demonstrates the need for regulation of some kind for coverage of trials and crimes but in a way that doesnt interfere with Freedom of Speech
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