Listen To This Episode on Your Favorite Podcast Platform
Guest Info
At 20 years old, Amanda Knox was wrongfully convicted for a horrific murder she did not commit. After spending years in prison, she was definitively exonerated by Italy’s highest court and allowed to return home to America. Today, she is an exoneree, journalist, advocate for justice and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Waiting To Be Heard.
Episode Info
Welcome back to another episode of The Elevate Podcast! Joining us is a guest who has experienced a harrowing journey through the criminal justice system, shedding light on the power of misinformation and the importance of open-mindedness.
Our guest today is Amanda Knox, an individual whose life was forever changed when she became the primary suspect in a high-profile murder case in Italy. As we dive into this episode, we’ll delve into Amanda’s firsthand account of the events that unfolded during her time as a suspect, the impact it had on her and her family, and the valuable lessons she has learned throughout her ordeal.
Amanda takes us back to the moment when she was declared a suspect, recounting the challenges she faced as the police pressed her for answers and withheld her ability to return home. We’ll explore the tactics used by the authorities and the narrative that was constructed around her, ultimately leading to her wrongful conviction.
In our conversation, Amanda shares her insights on engaging in difficult conversations and finding common ground, drawing from her own experiences of having to defend herself throughout her adult life. She introduces us to her four-step process for productive dialogue and highlights the importance of empathy and perspective when it comes to understanding others.
As we explore Amanda’s captivating story, we’ll also dive into the broader themes of cognitive bias, media sensationalism, and the flawed nature of our justice system. Amanda’s own journey of introspection and research into wrongful convictions gives us a powerful insight into the intricacies of our own beliefs and prejudices. Let’s get started on this extraordinary episode of The Elevate Podcast!
Learn More About Amanda Knox
Amanda’s Website
Amanda’s Podcast – Labyrinths
Amanda’s Memoir – Waiting To Be Heard
Follow Amanda: Twitter | Instagram
Full Episode Transcript
Amanda Knox: Here’s a reality check. Nothing I will ever do in my entire life will ever come to define me more than this horrible thing that I had nothing to do with. Like I would have to cure cancer on the moon in order to be known for something other than being the girl who was accused of murder.
Robert Glazer: You’re listening to the elevate podcast, and I’m your host, robert glaser. Join me as I talk to world class performers about how they build their capacity and reach greater heights in leadership, business, and life, and how you can do the same. Welcome to the elevate podcast. Our quote for today is from martin luther king jr. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. My guest today, amanda knox, has turned a personal calamity into a passion for securing justice for others. At just 20 years old, she was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a fellow exchange student in italy and spent years in prison and on trial before she was definitively exonerated by italy’s highest court. Today, she is an exonerae journalist, public speaker, and the author of the new york times bestselling memoir, waiting to be heard. Amanda and I met last month when she spoke to a private group of business leaders, and I was really moved by her story. So, amanda, thank you for joining us today on the elevate podcast.
Amanda Knox: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Robert Glazer: So, before we get into sort of what transpired in italy, I’d love to hear a little bit more about, I guess, BC. How would you describe your sort of childhood? What were you kind of passionate about? How did you spend your time when you were a kid?
Amanda Knox: Yeah, so I grew up in seattle. I still live in seattle today. So pacific northwest girl, meaning I spent a lot of time outdoors. I grew up in a divorced family, but one in which we were all very close. So my dad lived two blocks away from my mom. My entire extended family was within walking distance. So really, I was in this kind of small town environment that was composed of my extended family in the suburbs of seattle. And I grew up with really a profound and deep understanding that there are different places and different ways to be in the world, not just because I grew up moving between two different households that had two different rules and kind of different culture. My mom was born in germany, and so she was very german and european in her style, and we would have goulash and reladen and zvechkin knodel at my mom’s house, whereas my dad is mr. All american, and so we would have hamburger helper and hot dogs at his house. So it was really this deep, deep from my very earliest memories, understanding that there isn’t just one right way to be in the world. And it made me deeply curious about things like other places in the world. I used to draw maps when I was a kid, and then eventually I went on to study language, which is what brought me to and so the.
Robert Glazer: Public part of your story starts with deciding to study abroad in Italy. So what were you actually looking forward most to about that experience, and what had your early experience been before? We’ll just say things went sideways, which is probably an understatement.
Amanda Knox: Yeah. So I had actually studied abroad before I went to Perugia when I was 14. I spent several weeks living with a family in Japan when I was in high school. And then afterwards, around that same time, around when I was 15 years old, my family, all my extended family, went together and visited Italy, as well as visiting my various family members that still live in Germany. And that period of my life was super. It was just eye opening and wonderful. And so from that moment, I knew that I wanted to study abroad when I went to college. And my ideal version of this was to spend an entire year abroad so that I could fully immerse myself in a culture and come home fluent in the foreign language that I was immersed in. And I chose Italian a little bit because no one else was learning Italian. It’s definitely more of a romantic language than a practical one. Like, if you really want to be a very sought after interpreter, you’re probably going to be studying either Spanish or Mandarin. And I decided to go a completely different route. I had this ideal version of my life in my head where I was going to be translating poetry. That’s what my vision was. I was going to translate Italian poetry. And so what I signed up for was nine months of studying the language in Perugia at the Universita Per Stranieri, and then I would go to Rome, where they had a poetry program, and I would study poetry, and I would do translation for the following three months, and that would be my entire year. You know, those weird silver linings, definitely. My study abroad experience did not turn out the way that I had originally planned, but I did come home fluent in the language. So mission accomplished.
Robert Glazer: Well, and I know you’ve told your story in interviews, and your book, a lot of places for those who haven’t seen the Netflix special really goes into detail. So for those who either have heard it, but maybe not in your words or haven’t, I’ll just take the lead here for kind of as long as you want and walk us through sort of what happened from these first couple days and it was all going great till this kind of major detour in your experience, which is I think particularly a lot of people here have either depending on their age, heard pieces or sort of remember it, but don’t remember kind of all the details and probably have read the media narrative. Right.
Amanda Knox: Which is all over the place.
Robert Glazer: Right. We’ll dive into a little more in detail. So I’ll let you just go into storytelling mode here.
Amanda Knox: Yeah, absolutely. So to bring people into the place and the time this was in 2007, so right around the time that Facebook is becoming a big thing and the first iPhone is coming out. So it’s not the kind of world where, for instance, everyone has a smartphone with them everywhere, right? Like when I arrived in Perugia, I was still using that would have helped you actually probably tremendously. Made a huge difference.
Robert Glazer: You’re like, please track.
Amanda Knox: You know, eye in the sky, follow me at all times to prove where I am. But no, that was not the case. And in fact, I couldn’t even have WiFi at my apartment that I ended up staying. And it was very typical at the time for people to carry around flip phones that you had to buy minutes for and that you had to go to internet cafes in order to actually send emails to people, which is what I was doing at the time. So that was very typical of the time period. And for the first several weeks of my study abroad experience, I was honestly having the ideal experience. I found a beautiful apartment in this cute little cottage that was overlooking the valley. And I was living with three other young women, two of whom were Italian, one of whom was British. So I was a little bit immersed in the language at home as well. I was a few steps away from my university. I was spending time meeting other students. And I remember I started giving guitar lessons to this other girl in my class from Kazakhstan and I was teaching her how to play Beatles songs on the guitar. It was really again, I was having the ideal study abroad experience. I was meeting people, getting to know people. Several weeks into my stay there, I met this really sweet young Italian boy who was a computer engineering student, kind of nerdy and shy. We met at a classical music recital and we hit it off right away. And we just spent after we met each other, we spent every single day and every single night together. And five days after we first met again, I spent the night over at his house. And then the very next morning, it was a holiday and he, being the very gracious and chivalrous Italian host, wanted to take me out for a fun weekend. It was a long weekend. It was the day after Halloween, so a long weekend to a small town that was nearby called Gubio. Basically, I spent the night at his house. We made this loose plan to go and spend the weekend doing romantic weekend together. And my job was just to go home, get a change of clothes, take a shower and then head back to his place so that we could go off on our little romantic adventure. Well, I come home, and I discover that there are things amiss in my house. The first big red flag for me was that my front door was wide open, which was extremely unusual. This was the very beginning of November, so it was chilly out. It wasn’t like bright summer where you’re trying to get a breeze to come in. And our front door was actually notoriously sort of sketchy. It wouldn’t just close. You had to latch the key with a lock in order to keep the door closed. And so I thought, oh, I thought, what happened? Did someone just forget to turn the key and the door blew open? Maybe someone was leaving the house in a hurry and just didn’t lock the door all the way. But even so, I had never seen this before. So I thought, oh, something must have happened. So I go into my house. I call out to my roommates. No answer. None of them are there. Again, I got this eerie feeling of, like, that’s weird. Why would somebody and was it just.
Robert Glazer: You, or was it the two of you?
Amanda Knox: No, it was just me. Yeah, just me. Came home. I was going to take a shower and get changed. So I go inside. I call for my roommates. No one’s answering. But I look around, and nothing seems to be amiss. So I just assume the least worst case scenario. I don’t immediately jump to worst case scenario. I think, oh, somebody must have just not locked the door all the way and the wind blew it open. I am downplaying. What could be the potential worst case scenario? And then I go into my room. I get changed. I go in to take a shower. And while I’m in the midst of showering, I come out of the shower and I notice that there are a few drops of blood in my bathroom. Now, it’s not like a crime scene. It was a few drops of blood. And at first, I had assumed they were from me because I had recently gotten my ears pierced. So I was like, oh, am I bleeding? And I checked my ears, and nothing was going on. And so I was like, oh, that’s weird. Why would there be drops of blood here? And the doors open and the drops of blood? And so I’m trying to piece together what might have happened. And of course, again, I’m not thinking the worst case scenario. I’m not thinking somebody in my house got murdered. I’m thinking, oh, maybe somebody hurt themselves and maybe cut themselves in the shower and ran really quick to the pharmacy to get a bandaid. I have no idea. But in my world, the world that I grew up in, I do not think automatically that someone got murdered. And so I pack up my things, I go back to my boyfriend’s house, and I tell him what I’ve seen. And I’m like, do you think I need to be concerned about this? Because I’m second guessing myself. I don’t actually know what to think. And he says, well, you should definitely call your roommates. Like, see what’s up, see what’s going on with them. And so I start calling my roommates, and I call Meredith. She doesn’t answer. I call Laura. She doesn’t answer. Finally, I get a hold of Philomena, and she says, well, go back to the house. I’ll meet you there. We’ll check it out and see if everything’s okay.
Robert Glazer: So you had called out the first time and didn’t hear from anyone, so assume they weren’t home.
Amanda Knox: Yep, exactly. So I go back to my house with Rafaeli this time, and Philomena meets us there. And while we’re all there in the house, we discover that Philomena’s window is broken in her bedroom. Her window is broken. We call the police, and when the police arrive, we take note. We’ve gone through the house, and we say, hey, there’s this door that is locked, that isn’t normally locked, and it’s Meredith’s bedroom. And it’s unusual that it’s locked. It’s not like it’s the only time it’s ever been locked. I’ve definitely encountered it locked before. But the fact that Meredith is not inside, or at least not answering when we’re knocking on the door is odd. And so we ask the police to break down the door. The police are actually hesitant to do this because they don’t feel like they have the right to break property, so they actually hold back. And Philomena’s boyfriend kicks down the door and discovers the crime scene.
Robert Glazer: With the police there.
Amanda Knox: With the police there. Yeah. So what we discovered was that Meredith had been raped and stabbed to death in her own bedroom. And I, fortunately, did not see into her room. Philomena did. And she just started screaming. And then everyone started speaking in very rapid Italian that I could not understand. And we all were rushed out of the house by the police. Essentially, what ends up happening is the next five days of my life are completely taken over by this murder case that happened out of the blue, completely out of nowhere. It was extremely shocking. In this small town, you don’t hear a lot about violent murders. The biggest sort of criminal enterprise in the town was drugs, mostly because there’s such a big student population, and so people are potentially selling, like, marijuana and things like that. That’s the kind of crime that’s happening in this community. It’s not the kind of place where people get raped and murdered horrifically. And so the entire town is completely shaken up. I’m completely thrown through a loop because I’m thinking, oh, my God, if I hadn’t just spent the night at my boyfriend’s house, I could be dead right now. Because it was my house. It was in Meredith’s bedroom. She was murdered in her own bedroom. It’s not know she was out in some sketchy part of town. Like, this was our own house, the one place you would think that you would be safe. And it really felt like, first of all, it seemed like we had no idea who could possibly have done this, because, again, it was such a violent crime. And I remember in the very early stages of the investigation, I was questioned a lot by the police. I thought that everyone was being questioned a lot by the police. I didn’t realize that I was being questioned more by the police than everyone else. I actually was brought in for a total of 53 hours of questioning over five days. So over 10 hours of just being in the police office answering question after question after question.
Robert Glazer: And you did not assume you were a suspect. Right. I don’t know what the Miranda rights sort of equivalent is, but I’m sure you’ve learned a lot.
Amanda Knox: Yes. This is the really important thing that I feel like I wish more people knew, and that is that you have very different rights depending on whether or not you are officially considered a suspect or not. So the very same things are happening to you. You’re in the same room, you’re being questioned by police, but if you are not considered a suspect or you’re not officially a suspect in the case, you do not have any right. Like, you don’t have any right to an attorney, you do not have any right to counsel.
Robert Glazer: And do you have to be told that? Is that something that has to be communicated, whether you’re a suspect?
Amanda Knox: Yes. So typically, what you’re supposed to do is be told, we’re questioning you because we think that you are not being honest or that you had something to do with it. You’re officially a suspect. And the line for where that gets drawn is sometimes really thin and porous. And unfortunately, the vast majority of us who have lived upstanding lives and have never had to interact with the police have no knowledge of this. So here I am, being questioned for hours a day by the police, the entire time being told that the only reason I’m being questioned this much is because I’m very, very close to the victim. So Meredith was my roommate. I was the first one to come home and discover that my home was a crime scene. I was of Meredith’s roommates. I was the one who was closest to her in age, and so I knew more of the people that she was hanging out with and interacting with. And so the way that I was talked to by the police was that I was their most important witness. I was the person who was going to help them solve this crime. And they even told me things like when my family called and was really worried about me and afraid that there was a serial killer on the loose. What did they know? I had nowhere to live. They were concerned. They kept telling me, you need to fly back home. Like, it’s not safe there. And the police specifically told me that I couldn’t fly home because they needed me to help solve the case. And so my mom actually decided to fly to Italy in order to support me instead of me flying home. And it was while she was on a flight to Rome that the police brought me in for an overnight interrogation that culminated in my arrest and imprisonment. And so my mom never actually got to make it there to support me in time. And I think, in part, that was by design, because of all the people that were around that they were questioning about this case. I was the only person that the police had tapped phones for. They tapped my phone and my phone alone out of everyone. And so they were listening into the conversations that I was having with my family members, and they knew that my mom was due to arrive that very day. And so they brought me in overnight and questioned me overnight and told me a very specific story, which was that I was traumatized from having witnessed the murder, and so I had no memory of it. However, I was there, and I witnessed it, and if I didn’t try really hard to remember who the murderer was, I would never see my family again.
Robert Glazer: So did they tell you who the murderer was, or they said, you weren’t the murderer, but you knew who the murderer was? Again, most people listening to this have probably never been kept overnight in a sleep deprived state. We watch Law and Order. We watch how people sign things, and it’d be helpful to sort of understand the mindset there and whether you started questioning yourself, right?
Amanda Knox: Yes, absolutely. I mean, the way that it unfolded over those many hours of overnight interrogation was they first started they didn’t initially just sit me down and go, you’re suffering from amnesia, and you can’t remember the truth. What they did was they started asking me to again tell them over again what happened, what was I doing the night of the murder? And they called into question my own memories. They said, well, are you sure that you went over to Rafael’s house? And Are you sure that you had this for dinner? And are you sure that they started out by sort of making me feel uncertain about my own memories, by calling them into question and saying, well, it couldn’t have taken you an hour to eat dinner. What if it was a half an hour that you ate dinner? Well, what were you doing the rest of that half an hour? And so they really were, like, asking me they were deconstructing the narrative of my night in such a way that it called everything into question.
Robert Glazer: And I assume they were doing the same with him separately, right?
Amanda Knox: Yes, with my boyfriend. He was in a completely separate room. They were doing the exact same thing to him at the exact same time. And ultimately, the thing that really shook me was I kept telling them, look, I’ve told you tons of times, this is exactly what happened that night. I can’t tell you the exact time that I had dinner, but it was around this time. I can’t tell you the exact time that I watched this movie, but it was around this time. And then they come in, and they tell me that Raphael says that I was no longer at his apartment with him. So they come inside and say, you’re either lying or you don’t remember the truth, because your boyfriend says that you weren’t with him that night, and that.
Robert Glazer: Was a lie, right?
Amanda Knox: That was a lie by the police. So what the police had done was they had again put Raphaele through the exact same kind of questioning, and they got him to say, well, at a certain point, we went to sleep. And I can’t say, obviously with 100% certainty that Amanda was with me when I was unconscious. That was what he was willing to sign to. So after getting him to say that, they came into my room and said, your boyfriend says you weren’t with him that night, and you must be traumatized, and you must have witnessed the crime and have blocked it out from your memory. So we need you to start trying to remember what you have forgotten. And then the very key thing happened. They didn’t tell me who they thought the murderer was. I had no idea who the murderer was. But what they did was they went into my cell phone records. They asked for my cell phone. They looked at my cell phone text message log, and they found that I had sent a text message to my boss. I was working for a local pub owner. His name was Patrick. And the night of the murder, I was supposed to come into work, but he said that it was a slow night because it was a holiday, and so I didn’t have to bother to come in. And I said, okay, have a good night. See you later. And they took that text message to mean that I had made an appointment to meet with my boss, Patrick. And so they assumed that what actually happened was that I left Raphael’s apartment that night, met up with my boss, Patrick, and he raped and murdered Meredith. And I witnessed it, but then blocked it out of my memory because I was so traumatized. So they’re pushing this narrative on, even.
Robert Glazer: Though there seems to be no I mean, again, I don’t understand. What’s the connection between your roommate and.
Amanda Knox: Your it’s it’s very obscure. Like, Meredith had come and visited me at the pub, a couple of so.
Robert Glazer: It was a love triangle or something like that?
Amanda Knox: Supposedly, yeah. So supposedly, in the police’s mind, patrick had seen Meredith when she came to visit me at the pub and had decided that he was going to rape her. And his way to do that was to get me to let him into my house so that he could rape my roommate. And that was the idea that they then put into my mind that I must have done this, I must have met up with my boss. He had manipulated me, he brought me back to the house and then he had raped and murdered Meredith. And I must have witnessed it and been so traumatized that I couldn’t remember anything. So they’re pushing this on me. They’re pushing this on me. And at a certain point, I start feeling like I don’t know what’s up and down anymore. I don’t know what’s true and not true anymore. The police are yelling at me, they’re hitting me.
Robert Glazer: And you’re completely sleep deprived.
Amanda Knox: I’m sleep deprived and I’m utterly confused. And so I finally say, I guess that must be what happened. And they then write this all up in a police report, have me sign it, and they go off to go arrest Patrick and they arrest me as well as an accomplice. They arrest my boyfriend as an accomplice and we are brought to prison.
Robert Glazer: So your boyfriend and Patrick, who presumably would not have nothing to do with each other either, right?
Amanda Knox: Exactly.
Robert Glazer: Yeah.
Amanda Knox: I think Raphael had only once been to Patrick’s pub again to come see me. I don’t think he ever actually met Patrick. So very, like, basically arrested three people on very scant, confused testimony and no physical evidence. And no physical evidence whatsoever, because a few weeks later, finally, they get some results back from the physical evidence that they’ve collected at the crime scene. And lo and behold, none of it has anything to do with Raphael, with Patrick or with me. None of it. All of it has to do with this local burglar who’s known for breaking and entering into homes and carrying a knife named Rudy. Good day. And he has an arrest record. He’s well known by the police. And lo and behold, he also just so happens to have skipped town. And the police are then in a very difficult position. People are coming forward saying that they were with Patrick that night, that multiple people are coming forward saying that he has this rock solid alibi. Raphaele and I spent the night with each other. We didn’t go out. We were just at home at his place. And so what the police decide is, instead of saying, oops, we arrested the wrong people at first, we’re going to go and do a manhunt and find the actual murderer. What they do instead is they take Patrick out of the equation and sub Rudy Gadet in. And they say Amanda orchestrated a sex orgy that ultimately culminated in these two young men who did not know each other, holding down Meredith while Amanda stabbed.
Robert Glazer: Her to why wouldn’t that produce physical evidence that you were in the room, right?
Amanda Knox: Well, you would think so, but the police said that I was able to go back to the house the following morning and clean up all traces of my DNA, but leave all the traces of Rudy Gadett behind so that I could frame him for the crime. Which I don’t know how familiar everyone is with DNA, but it’s invisible, and there’s no way that that’s humanly possible. So it was an extremely frustrating experience because here I am sitting in a prison cell feeling like my innocence should be obvious. Like, why is my innocence even in question? That’s really honestly, originally, what made me so vulnerable to the police is because it never occurred to me that they would ever suspect me. I felt like my innocence was so apparent that no thought of defending myself ever came to my mind. And even as they’re going for the.
Robert Glazer: Real stretched out bridges, complicated like this.
Amanda Knox: Is way past the simplistic right at this, you know? And then meanwhile, the guy who actually committed this crime, Rudy Goodet, his story is well, first of all, he says that he was at the house when some stranger came into the house and raped and murdered Meredith while he was sitting on the toilet.
Robert Glazer: What was a burglar doing at your.
Amanda Knox: He was in reality, he was breaking and entering and trying to steal money. His story was that Meredith and him had met up on Halloween the day before the crime occurred, and they had just spontaneously decided that they were going to hook up together the next day. So Rudy Gadet comes over to the house, finds Meredith there, and they start hooking up. But in the midst of them hooking up, he gets a ache and decides to go use the bathroom. And while he’s using the bathroom, a completely different person comes in and rapes and murders Meredith while he’s in the bathroom. And then that person leaves. And he comes out, discovers that Meredith is dying, tries to save her, which is why he ends up covered in her blood. He then leaves. Just leaves her there, doesn’t call the police, doesn’t do anything, just leaves her there, goes back to his house, changes his clothes, goes to a nightclub, goes out dancing, and then the next day skips the country and starts using a false identity as soon as he crosses the border into Germany.
Robert Glazer: Yeah, we can get into this later, but I want to ask you this point, because we’ll talk about this. You said something I thought was interesting about disconfirming evidence. I’m curious whose theory this was at this point. Was this the police, the prosecutors, and then once they kind of got going, had they had this information about Rudy earlier, do you think they would have. Followed that path, or once they got down these crazy paths, was it just really hard to sort of admit that maybe their initial theories weren’t know?
Amanda Knox: If you ask the detectives what was going on in their minds in those early days of the investigation, what you hear a lot is them saying that they were trusting their investigative intuition. So they had a gut feeling that I or someone close to the house was involved in the crime. They saw the evidence of a break in, but they weren’t.
Robert Glazer: It was an inside job. They were just convinced it was an inside job.
Amanda Knox: They were convinced that somebody in the house had something to do with it because they didn’t really believe in the break in. For whatever reason. They just weren’t convinced by this idea that it was a real break in. So instead, they started looking at everyone in the household, and they said that their investigative intuition made them believe that I was the one who was most likely responsible or involved somehow. They didn’t know how, but they just.
Robert Glazer: Couldn’T find any direct proof. But they had lots of conjured up theories, right?
Amanda Knox: Lots of gut feelings based upon, they say, my behavior. They say that I wasn’t acting the same way as the other people who were responding to the facts of this case. And they point to things like, oh, look, Amanda was standing outside of the crime scene getting cuddled by her boyfriend. Well, what they don’t say is that of the two roommates who were there, I was the one who had not seen into the crime scene. I had not seen Meredith’s body. I did not speak fluent Italian, and so I was the one who had the least amount of information, and I was incredibly confused about what was going on. And I was basically seeking solace from my boyfriend, who was trying to give me information about what was happening. And they point to things like that or even just the fact that during my questioning, they said that my answers were confused, but they don’t acknowledge that I was having to speak a foreign language at the time, and I was not fluent. I was maybe speaking like an elementary school student.
Robert Glazer: And it was all in Italian.
Amanda Knox: It was all in Italian. I was being questioned in Italian. And so it was an incredibly confusing period, and I think they felt a lot of like, from the get go, there was a ton of media pressure. Like, international media descended upon the town immediately. There was this huge call for an arrest immediately. And so they decided to arrest someone before they actually had any results from the physical and forensic evidence that they had collected at the crime scene. And so I think you’re like, if they had waited to arrest someone based upon the physical evidence that they found at the crime scene, then they would have landed upon Rudy Gadet. They would have seen his criminal history, they would have seen that he fled the country, and they would have focused on him. But as it so happened, they decided to jump the gun and arrest people before they had any evidence. And instead of admitting fault, they instead orchestrated this theory of the crime that sort of let them off the hook. And they no, no, we weren’t wrong to arrest these know amanda’s this cunning liar and manipulator. So she’s obviously the mastermind behind this crime, and she’s the one who’s using her feminine wiles to get these two men who don’t know each other to spontaneously one night rape her roommate for her and hold her down so that she can murder her, for whom there.
Robert Glazer: Really isn’t a motive. Right. I’m still trying to figure out where the roommate gets involved. Unless the roommate was dating the boss. Right.
Amanda Knox: Yeah. No. Again, the police tried, and specifically, the head prosecutor tried various times, tried out different theories of what the motive may be like. At first, it was potentially it’s a satanic crime because it was the day after Halloween, and so maybe there was some occult ritual that was going on, and then they changed that to, oh, well, maybe Amanda and Meredith didn’t get along as roommates. And so Amanda was trying to take out her anger on Meredith. But then, of course, nobody could come up with any sort of there was no witnesses that said that we ever didn’t get along. And we hung out with each other and we got along. And so then they changed it to, oh, well, Amanda is just this depraved sex criminal person who maybe was on drugs, so maybe she just one day was on drugs and decided to do this murderous sex game, even though she has no history of this. And then finally, actually, what ultimately ended up being the motivation presented by the court that convicted me was that just one day, I decided to do an evil thing just to be evil for the sake of being evil. And that was it. That was the motive.
Robert Glazer: So the press was not your friend during this, and there was obviously the Foxy noxy narrative. And as you said and they wanted local people, they wanted a story, they wanted safety. This kind of blew up the security. So when you think about the media, it’s easy to come up with all these things and jump on it in the bandwagon. But then there seems like there’s a lot of holes right. In this story. There’s usually an investigative journalist or two who would really like to make their name by kind of digging into this. But it seemed like that person or people didn’t show up in this story and that it was the tabloid showed up and not the person saying, you can drive, like, ten buses through this story. That’s what happened afterwards. But it doesn’t seem like anyone in that moment or came over from London or did they? Or what happened.
Amanda Knox: So the problem was that the investigation of this case lasted a very long time, which meant that the only information that journalists had available to them were what the police were willing to secretly release to the press. And so for the eight months that this case was being investigated, after my arrest, the press was given a story, was hand delivered, a story by the prosecution. And it seemed at the time like there must be all this evidence they brought out. They had super witnesses and they had forensic evidence that supposedly tied me to the crime scene and all these people coming out and, yeah, you know, Amanda’s got weird sex things, or like they were able to dig up and even go into my MySpace profile and find pictures of me goofing off. And they were like, oh, look at her being so crazy and out of control. And they basically really built up this narrative of the girl next door gone bad, this sort of fantasy version of the American girl gone wild, but taken to the next extreme. And it was really founded upon a ton of flimsy speculation, but they were able to construct enough of it at the time, and there wasn’t the possibility at the time to counteract that narrative, especially because at the time, my attorneys were really advising, especially my family, to try to stay out of the media. They were afraid that the media was just going to interfere with the trial. And so they were advising us to stay out of it, let the press go nuts. They ultimately were going to play this thing out in court where they would prove that all of this stuff that the prosecution said they had was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero. And ultimately, it was over a year before after my arrest, before the trial even started. And the trial itself took another full.
Robert Glazer: Year to who else was arrested? Because I know you’re the one that gets all the attention, right? But was Rudy and Raphael?
Robert Glazer: But you and Raphael, you were mean. So they convict the person actually the crime. And I’m still patrick wasn’t I thought it was him. So was everyone else just a conspirator?
Amanda Knox: Is that the right yeah. So the way that they ultimately ended up convicting Rudy Gadett is they said that he wasn’t the one who was responsible for stabbing Meredith to death. He was the one responsible for raping her and holding her down while I stabbed her to death.
Robert Glazer: Got it. And managed to wipe only your DNA off of a crime scene as an international DNA expert.
Amanda Knox: Exactly. So Rudy Goodet is quietly convicted to 30 years, which was reduced to 16 on appeal because they got out.
Robert Glazer: Right.
Amanda Knox: He got out over a year ago.
Robert Glazer: Okay.
Amanda Knox: Because he served 13 of those years and then got out on good behavior. And he’s a free man now, and it’s 2023. This happened in 2007, so it’s been some years. But to this day, he maintains that he was just having consensual sex with Meredith when some other people showed up while he was in the bathroom and murdered her while he was in the bathroom, which is utterly absurd.
Robert Glazer: Some lucky timing on his part. Right.
Amanda Knox: Well, and also interesting, his criminal history of breaking and entering into people’s homes and being aggressive towards women and carrying a knife. He’s either the most unlucky person in the world, or he’s lying. And it’s really frustrating because one of the big outcomes of this case is that very few people actually know the name of the person who murdered my roommate. I remember even when he was released from prison, the big headline for that news was amanda Knox’s roommate’s killer released from Prison. So Meredith’s name didn’t even make it into the headline, much less the murderer’s name. It was just my name because people associate this tragedy with me. My identity has become wrapped up in this horrific crime that some other man committed against some other woman. And that just shows how backwards and twisted this story became, because, again, my name never should have become the identifying feature of this case.
Robert Glazer: So take us to the moment in the court when you first to sort of conviction to when this eventually exoneration, which was a long time.
Amanda Knox: Yeah. So, as I mentioned, the first trial took an entire year. And so we were coming in multiple days a week, hearing witnesses, hearing DNA experts debate all the evidence in this trial. And it was only during the trial that the journalists were actually hearing the defense’s arguments. And as you mentioned, some investigative journalists really started turning things around and going, wait a second. We were promised all of this evidence that proved Amanda was this girl next door gone wild sex killer. And we’re not seeing any of that evidence. But for other journalists, they didn’t really care what the evidence was. They were talking about whether or not I was smiling at my family members at court or what I was wearing, or they were reporting on the case as if it was this soap opera scandal instead of a very serious crime. And I was presented to the world as Foxy Knoxy, and that character really resonated with people, even though it was completely made up. Anyway, I was ultimately convicted and I was sentenced to 26 years in prison, and I appealed that conviction. It took another two years for that appeal to go through. And when I appealed, the court found that there was no physical evidence that tied me to this crime, and so they acquitted me. But the story did not end there because in Italy, prosecutors are also allowed to appeal verdicts. My prosecutor appealed my acquittal. My acquittal was overturned. I was retried again for the same crime.
Robert Glazer: And you were in prison the whole time or just couldn’t leave the country?
Amanda Knox: No. So I was released from prison after four years. That first appeal, when I was acquitted, I was released and I was allowed to leave the country. But then I was tried again in absentia, which means that while I was not there and I was facing extradition for a further four years until finally the Italian Supreme Court definitively acquitted me and put an end to the case. So it was at that point that both Rafael and I were definitively acquitted. But meanwhile, we spent four years in prison, a total of eight years on trial, fighting to prove our innocence in a case where it seemed like nobody really cared what the evidence was. It all came down to this story about a sex game that everyone was just unwilling to let go of. And it was really scary because for the longest time, it felt like the truth didn’t matter. It felt like people didn’t really care what the truth was because they were so titillated by the story.
Robert Glazer: It wasn’t as interesting.
Amanda Knox: Yeah, exactly. And they didn’t care about the actual murderer either. Like the fact that his sentence was reduced from 30 years to 16 was barely a blip on anyone’s radar. The fact that he’s out today, you don’t see people up in arms about that. They’re up in arms about the satanic sex witch character that was invented by the prosecution.
Robert Glazer: This was before social media. I can only wonder how we glob on to these 160 character stories today. So, four years in jail. You were a college exchange student. You had, I think, two sisters, right, that were younger.
Amanda Knox: Three sisters that are younger than me. Yeah.
Robert Glazer: How did your family manage this?
Amanda Knox: I’m glad you asked that, because I’ve learned a lot about wrongful convictions since this happened. To me. It’s not something that I ever thought I would even it was just never on my radar again. I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle in a middle class family. My life was know, college and family and like, that was what I envisioned my world to be. And I never ever thought about I was privileged to never have to think about the criminal justice system at all. I assumed that bad people went to prison and it was simple as that. And similarly, my family was completely unprepared and inexperienced for what had happened and the depth to which my family had to dive in order to just save me for all those years. All those years, everyone in my family, my entire extended family, their entire lives became about saving me. So every other consideration financial, emotional, all those other considerations were secondary to the purpose and the mission of saving me and proving me innocent, which resulted in not just tremendous financial burdens on my family, but like I said, emotional ones where they’ve had to grapple with their own well being. Particularly, I’m thinking of my sisters, who my youngest sister was nine when I was arrested.
Robert Glazer: I’m sure your parents were on planes.
Amanda Knox: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, there was always someone in Italy to visit me. I was allowed 6 hours of visitation a month and they always had someone in Italy there to visit me. So I never missed a visitation from my family. But what that meant was that various family members of mine would be isolated and in this world where they didn’t speak the language and they were alone, just sitting in a tiny crappy little apartment that they rented.
Robert Glazer: Right. No one’s supporting them because you’re the bad person. Right.
Amanda Knox: Yes. And then in the meantime, the rest of the family just trying at all turns to figure out what they can do to help. Whether it’s raising money, whether it’s finding people to help translate court documents because again, we don’t speak Italian. And all this expert testimony, everything that’s happening is happening in Italian in a foreign country where we’re having to rely on foreign attorneys, no understanding. It was a tremendous thing that my family had to go through. They made immense sacrifices. And it’s something that in all wrongful conviction cases, is not just the person who’s been accused who ends up getting their life completely derailed. It’s everyone around them. It’s tearing a hole in a large fabric of society.
Robert Glazer: And you said, was your faith broken? I know initially it sounded like, look, I’m innocent. This can’t happen, this can’t be happening. It’s like a bad movie. Someone will figure this out. That seemed to be sort of the narrative. But at some point, were you like, oh my God, I might be here for 27 years, or were you able to hold on to that sort of North Star that somehow justice would prevail?
Amanda Knox: Yeah, this is the big difference between me and my family because the first two years of my imprisonment leading up to the verdict. So before I received a verdict, we were all on the same page. My mom said that it was like we were all in this deep, dark tunnel, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, so the truth will prevail. My innocence will be vindicated, I’ll be freed, I’ll get to go back to my real life. And I very much felt like for the first two years of my imprisonment, that I was living someone else’s life by a mistake. This is all just a big mistake. And the adults in the room would figure it out, and I would get to go back to my real life of being this anonymous college student, not this internationally renowned accused person. And when the verdict was handed down and I heard them pronounce me guilty and they sentenced me to 26 years in prison, I had an immediate epiphany that, oh, my God, everything I thought I could count on in life and in this world is not there. I almost felt like the ground beneath me fell away and I was just falling, and I had nothing to hold on to anymore. And I immediately found myself thinking, I’ve been confused all along. This is not somebody else’s life that I’m living. This is my life. This is my life. This is the only life I’m getting. And it’s a very sad and unfair life, but who’s to say that anyone’s life is supposed to be fair or is supposed to be happy? Even? Everything I thought my life was going to be was gone. And this actually led to this really big rift between me and my family because my family, they really were still in this paradigm of we’re in this dark tunnel and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just longer and more arduous than we thought it was. But for me, I lost faith that I would ever be vindicated and freed because it very clearly seemed to me like the truth didn’t matter to anybody anymore. And the question for me then became, how do I make this life that I really do have worth living? How do I do that? And so I spent the next two years of my imprisonment trying to figure that out. And I did that through various means of figuring out my prison hustle and understanding that there was an intersection between the resources that I had available to me and the needs of the people around me. I was one of the very few people that were as literate. And so I spent a lot of time helping other prisoners read and write letters and understand their court documents, that kind of thing. But then, even after I got out, and even after I have been vindicated and freed and recognized as an innocent person, even after those eight long years of trial, I’m still having to grapple with that same question of, holy crap, this is my life. Here’s a reality check. Nothing I will ever do in my entire life will ever come to define me more than this horrible thing that I had nothing to do with. Like, I would have to cure cancer on the moon in order to be known for something other than being the girl who was accused of murder. And how do I accept that? How do I incorporate that reality into my life in a meaningful way that isn’t just met with despair and hopelessness? And that’s really been the ongoing question of my adult life, has been, how do I take this horrible thing that happened to me and try to do my best? Honestly? And there are a lot of it sounds kind of corny and ridiculous, but there are things that I actually am when I think back. I’m grateful now for I know how bad prison is. I know that it’s not helping people. I know that the vast majority of people who are in prison are people who have been victims of crime long before they committed crimes themselves. I know just how fragile our sense of justice and our criminal justice system is. I know a lot about human nature. I know a lot about cognitive bias. I know a lot about just things that we take for granted in this world I no longer take for granted. And I’m grateful for that. I truly, truly am, because I feel like while I would never wish this experience upon another person, I am a better person for having survived it. And I’m really grateful to be alive to even survive it at all. Because, again, going back to that horrible day that I came home, one of my first thoughts when I heard and I truly understood that something horrible had happened to Meredith was a selfish thought, and it was, I could be dead, too, right now. And in a weird way, I often think about how Meredith and I, we were so similar. We were just two kids studying abroad with our entire lives in front of us, and I was the one who ended up being the lucky one. I went through a horrific experience, but at least I’m here to tell the tale. And so, in a weird way, I feel insanely lucky just because of how things turned out.
Robert Glazer: When you said this. I think I don’t know if you use these words, but this applies to leadership or all day or every day, this disconfirming evidence. Once the prosecutors or the police kind of went down this path or rabbit hole or whatever we want to call it, they just seem to pull straws to find loose link evidence that would support a crazy theory rather than scientific proof is about. It has to be able to be proven non true in order to be true. So what’s the learning in general, particularly with the algorithms and social media these days. I think we all live in a confirmation bias world and how do we pull the stick up and start looking around and saying, and this is probably social media has made this so much worse than when this happened to you? Because again, you see what you already believe. How do we challenge ourselves or pull up and say what evidence could I find that would prove my belief or my theory wrong? Not how do I just try to find stuff that supports it?
Amanda Knox: Yeah, you are absolutely right that the way that algorithms, especially in social media but also in news media today work is they work based upon what gets your attention. And so what gets your attention is either something that causes you to experience outrage or something that causes you to experience a sense of righteousness and so something that confirms your preexisting beliefs. That’s why certain people go to very liberal media and stay there and don’t look for any information elsewhere. And other people go towards conservative media and only stay there and they don’t look for any disconfirming evidence elsewhere because it’s an unpleasant feeling to be wrong. It’s very human to want to be right and to avoid the unpleasant feeling of being wrong. And I think one of the things that we would all benefit from is recognizing that there are consequences to that. Like, you are a less effective and moral person in the world if you’re unwilling to even entertain the notion that things might not be what they seem to you. And I think that we would all benefit from exposing ourselves purposefully to the very best of other people’s arguments that challenge our preexisting beliefs and really making that a practice even just for the sake of being more strongly sure about ourselves. Because we’ve actually gone through the trouble of putting our ideas into the ring and letting them duke it out for actual superiority or actual confirming evidence. And I think the problem is that it’s very easy for all of us to just sit comfortably in our little sphere in our little echo chamber, in our little sphere of limited knowledge, and to not reach out of that, because we all have busy lives. And there’s yet another new distraction. Every 10 seconds, your phone is distracting you with something else. And so giving anything the thought and the time it requires to really understand takes time and effort that we’re all not inclined to put towards it, especially when we’re incentivized and rewarded for just having strong opinions about things and expressing them regardless of whether or not they’re well informed.
Robert Glazer: I like strong opinions loosely held. I always think that’s a good framework.
Amanda Knox: Absolutely. And I have a very strong opinion about the fact of my innocence. It’s very strong. But that’s because I’ve earned the right to have a strong opinion about that. And when I have strong opinions about things. I hold them loosely because if it’s not something that I 100% know, I will be open to new information. Even when it’s about things like what was going on in the minds of my prosecutor and what was going on.
Robert Glazer: I was just going to ask you that. In a meta sense, I assume you would be furious and angry at them. I can also imagine that that might not serve you well. So you have thought about how you should think about the pressure that they were under or why they did this or otherwise? I was about what to ask that question.
Amanda Knox: Yeah. Well, one of the big questions that’s always really bothered me about this whole case was the why question. Why did this happen to me? Why did they go after me? Why did they continue going after me even when the evidence was not there? And one way that I could look at that is I could say they were evil people, they were just making bad choices, knowingly and willingly, and that’s it. Done and done, black and white. And that has never been a very satisfying way for me to think about this, because, one, I don’t think it’s true. I intuitively feel like there are probably very few true psychopaths in the world who are knowingly and willingly putting innocent people in jail. And instead what’s happening is something more complicated, which is that people think they’re doing the right thing even when they’re doing the wrong thing, and they convince themselves that what they believe is right, even when it’s wrong, even in the face of disconfirming evidence. And that has led me down those rabbit holes into cognitive bias. I’ve written extensively about this kind of stuff, or I’ve even talked about it on my podcast, Labyrinths. It’s something that I’ve really deep dived into, particularly because I want to understand not just how it happened to me, but how it keeps happening. One of the big emotional moments for me was realizing that I was not the only person that this had ever happened to, and that wrongful convictions happen with alarming frequency, even here in the United States. And I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of other people who have spent years and years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, in large part even after DNA evidence proved their innocence, because the prosecution could not admit that they were wrong.
Robert Glazer: One of my favorite books, I don’t know if you read it before, it’s called Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me.
Amanda Knox: That’s a great title because that’s always how it is.
Robert Glazer: So it’s actually like the definitive book on cognitive dissonance. And one of the case studies in it is that when DNA evidence started coming out and they started telling all these prosecutors about these cases and that the people weren’t there, otherwise they all came out of retirement, worked the cases for free, tried to because being told that the. Evidence said that it wasn’t the person. And the theory is that in Indistenance was like, I’m a good person. I would not have put a wrong an innocent person in jail, therefore it cannot be correct. And it’s just so interesting. It is the best name of a book ever, but they just go into that. All these prosecutors came out of retirement and tried to retry the people rather than saying a mistake was made.
Amanda Knox: Yeah. I made an honest mistake.
Robert Glazer: Right. Yeah.
Amanda Knox: And it really does come down to identity because it is so disconcerting, the idea that you might have had a role in putting an innocent person through something as horrible as wrongful imprisonment and trial and completely ruining their life. And so it’s almost easier to think, no, this is just a guilty person who’s getting off on a technicality or the DNA is wrong. And I was right all along because I’m the kind of person, like, I believe in justice and I believe in truth, and I’m a good person, so therefore I cannot be wrong. I see that over and over and over again. Not just in wrongful conviction cases, but just kind of in general. I feel like that’s a really general attitude that people take when they approach the problem of ideas. And it’s because they identify with their ideas. They think that because I’m a good person, my ideas must be good.
Robert Glazer: Ideas are identity now.
Amanda Knox: Yes. And if you call my ideas bad, you’re calling me a bad person. And I know that’s wrong, so you must be wrong. And I think that really we need to take a step back and be willing to allow for the possibility that as good as our intentions are, our ideas could be wrong.
Robert Glazer: Yeah. And again, when our ideas, our identity, it becomes a new type of religion where they just can’t be they can’t be wrong. No one’s not made mistakes yeah. Their whole life. Right. Because we’ll be thrown out of our tribe and that’s dangerous and a lot of very primitive things that that triggers. So, look, a lot of people I know, they have turned pain into passion. I think for a lot of people, they don’t realize it or know it or realize it, you know it’s from some childhood thing, and then they end up being advocate. Clearly, for you, the connection is very strong in terms of all the advocacy work that you’ve been doing and the Innocence Project and all this stuff, and just the way that you’ve also thought about things and how to communicate and how to have grace. I thought one of the really interesting things would you mind telling us a little bit about your tattoo and sort of what that stands for? Thought it was a great example of that.
Amanda Knox: Thank you. Yeah, I have this tattoo on my arm that’s sort of my steps for having difficult conversations or confronting difficult and.
Robert Glazer: You had a lot of difficult conversations.
Amanda Knox: Had a lot of difficult conversations. I’ve had to, I’ve had to explain myself and defend myself at every turn. And my entire adult life has been sort of around the idea of being willing to confront difficult conversations with people, especially if they strongly disagree with you. And I’ve come up with a simple four step process for having productive conversations and I’ve tattooed them symbolically on my arm, which is because they’re so important and something to remind myself of constantly. The first step is find common ground. So that is represented by a Ven diagram. And really I think that one of the things that allows a conversation to even get started is an acknowledgment that the person sitting across from you is a person like you. Even if they’re not exactly like you, you have some kind of common ground. And so finding that common ground is really affirming that you’re not there to just fight against some evil idea in your brain. You’re here with another person having a conversation. The second part is a helmet and it’s representative of the steel man. The steel man is if you’ve heard the term attacking the straw man, it means that you are attacking the weakest form of another person’s argument in debate. It means that you’re really not honestly engaging with the other person’s ideas. So steel manning is the opposite of that. It means doing engaged, listening to what the other person believes and being able to repeat back to them their belief or their argument in such a way that they would say yes, that is exactly what I mean when I say blank. Then after that step, third step is heart. So have compassion for how the person arrived at that conclusion or idea. So even before you start debating them, have compassion for what that person’s history and context and everything that led to them arriving at that belief state. Recognize it and have compassion for it. Because as much as we like to think that we are really driven by ideas and our intellect and our reason, ultimately most of us are truly just driven by our feelings and by our instincts and we find justifications for our instincts and we use rationality to justify what we deep down in our heart feel. But ultimately you have to get not just to a place of understanding a person’s reasoning, but understanding where their heart is behind their convictions in order to actually have a true debate with them. And only then do you arrive at step four, which is the delta symbol. It’s the delta symbol which means change. And the idea is that you need to be willing to have your own beliefs be challenged and changed before you can honestly expect someone else to be compelled or challenged by your beliefs. And so really come into a conversation with an openness to the idea that you’re not there just to change someone else’s mind, but you’re also there to potentially get new information that could change your mind and then have a conversation.
Robert Glazer: Yeah. And the piece of that that’s so consistent. What I’ve heard from other people, we had Daryl Davis on the podcast who got 100 KKK members to give up their hood by sitting down and talking with them and understanding. You can imagine. Right. You might sit down with one of the prosecutors or policemen and find out that the last case, they went easy on a suspect and they almost lost their job, and everyone was all on them. To not have that happen, you don’t not agree with it, but you at least understand where people came from. I think I remember in one of the famous cases of a rabbi who sat down with a KKK guy who had been calling, leaving all these message. He was abused as a child and just not loved, and they became really good friends. But if they had not had sat down and had that conversation and tried to understand, there wouldn’t have been any breakthrough, right?
Amanda Knox: Absolutely.
Robert Glazer: So I know a couple of years ago you became a parent, and I think recently again. So how do you think this experience has shaped your parenting approach? And I’m sure you’ve thought about how and when you’d share this with your daughter, with your children. I’d love to get your thoughts on that.
Amanda Knox: Sure.
Robert Glazer: Really complicated topic.
Amanda Knox: Yeah. How do I talk about prison with my daughter? Good question. It’s something that I almost approach it a little bit, the way that I feel. We’ve all learned to talk about any kind of taboo subject, like sex, for instance. I feel like we’ve all learned that not talking about it is not helpful. And in fact, it’s much better to give your children age appropriate information every step of their journey as they’re growing up. And I think one of the best things that I can do as a parent is be present and open with my daughter. And so at no point am I ever lying to her or withholding information from her. She comes with me to either speaking events or to fundraisers for the Innocence Project. She is exposed to this world of people, and I am going to trust her natural sense of curiosity to be her guide. And then I will just be the source of information that is going to honestly convey what she’s going to be inevitably curious about. And so I want to foster an environment where my daughter feels safe and encouraged to ask questions and be it about things like the birds and the bees or about prison. And why does everyone be the most.
Robert Glazer: Taboo subject in your household?
Amanda Knox: I know. So I feel really deeply at peace with the idea of just being an open book to my daughter and my future son and really just letting them feel safe and respected with the truth.
Robert Glazer: So, last question. Although I could probably maybe have part two. I probably ask 100 more here. I’m always curious with something like this, and I’m sure you’ve thought about this, but if I could wave a magic wand and make this never have happened, would you want that? Or do you see this now as sort of I don’t know, whether it’s destiny or a part of your life or part of your story? I don’t know. Have you thought about that? I assume you have.
Amanda Knox: I mean, people ask me that, and my biggest response is, well, one, you can’t. So it is what it is.
Robert Glazer: Don’t waste my time with that.
Amanda Knox: Things either are or they aren’t. And once they are, they just are. But I’ve learned to appreciate the perspectives that I have today that I would not have otherwise had this experience not happened to me. So I have been tested and challenged in ways that I never should have had to be tested and challenged in my life. But in the process, I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned a lot about the world. I find myself with a sense of purpose that is extremely fulfilling. And so if that magic wand existed, I would not take it. You know, I wish what happened to Meredith didn’t happen.
Robert Glazer: Yeah, that’s fair. So where can people find more about you and your work and book and the things that you’re doing, particularly around victims advocacy?
Robert Glazer: Maybe soon on threads. We’ll see.
Amanda Knox: Oh, God, I don’t even know what that is. Is it like TikTok? I don’t use that.
Robert Glazer: It’s Instagram’s new Twitter that launched like a week ago, and it’s going so got it. Well, Amanda, thank you for joining us today. I mean, your story is extraordinary, and I really just appreciate hearing about how you kind of turn this worst part of your life into a powerful mission to help others.
Amanda Knox: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Robert Glazer: All right. You can learn more about Amanda and her work and everything she just told you on the episode page at Robert Laser.com. If you enjoyed today’s episode or the Elevate podcast in general, I’d really appreciate if you could just take a few minutes to leave us a review or a rating. That is what helps new users discover the show and great guests like Amanda. So thank you again for your support. Until next time. Keep elevating.
