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The story of Amanda Knox
Brut America
Follow
4/5/2023
She was accused of murdering her roommate and sentenced to 26 years in prison … before she was acquitted.
So why does the case still fascinate people? This is the story of the case against Amanda Knox.
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News
Transcript
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00:00
She was accused of murdering her roommate and sentenced to 26 years in prison before being acquitted.
00:06
This is the story of Amanda Knox.
00:09
It was, oh, a woman did it.
00:12
And it became sexualized.
00:21
I think if you went back to Italy right now, you could ask anyone, say, yeah, she's a killer.
00:31
It's November 2nd, 2007, in Perugia, a city in central Italy.
00:37
On the first floor of this building, the police make a gruesome discovery.
00:42
It's November 2nd, 2007, in Perugia, a city in central Italy.
00:49
On the first floor of this building, the police make a gruesome discovery.
01:02
Meredith Kircher, a 21-year-old British student, is found dead in her bedroom.
01:07
Her body has been stabbed 47 times and had a gaffing wound to the throat.
01:16
Her American roommate, Amanda, and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele, were the ones who called the police.
01:22
She met this guy, Raffaele Selecito.
01:25
She literally had met him like seven days before this crime occurred.
01:31
And he was a big hash head, so there was a lot of smoking hash and they were high all the time.
01:38
The couple claimed to have spent the night of the murder together at Raffaele's house.
01:42
Amanda says she returned the next day to her apartment
01:45
and discovered bloodstains in the bathroom that she shared with Meredith.
01:50
She'd seen there was some blood on the towel or the bath mat in the bathroom.
01:55
Nobody was there and she'd had a shower and then she'd gone back to Raffaele.
02:08
As they talked about it, she thought it felt a bit unusual and they tried to call Meredith.
02:20
Then they called the police and when the police arrived,
02:23
they broke down the door to Meredith's room and that's when the body was discovered.
02:28
Please.
02:32
Amanda Knox was 20.
02:35
She came from a broken home in Seattle and acting in a way that,
02:41
let's say Italian girls of that age don't, you know, sex, drugs,
02:48
you know, doing yoga exercises in the police station after the roommate was murdered.
02:55
She quickly attracted the attention of the prosecutor.
02:59
The reason that Amanda Knox was in the frame
03:02
was purely on the basis of the theories from the local prosecutor, Magnini.
03:08
Magnini's theory was first and then after that,
03:11
it was a case of them trying to find any piece of evidence which will then come into that.
03:16
He said that the body, Meredith's body, had been covered with a duvet.
03:21
As he told me when I interviewed him, this was really clear to him.
03:24
He said that a woman must have been involved
03:26
because only a woman would cover the body of another woman.
03:30
A clue is discovered that backs up Prosecutor Magnini's suspicions.
03:35
The police claim to have discovered a knife at Raffaele's home
03:38
with Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle.
03:44
A few weeks after the start of the investigation,
03:47
a piece of Meredith's bra, which she was wearing on the day of her death,
03:50
is found at the crime scene.
03:53
It has Raffaele's DNA on it.
03:55
The Italian, British and American media go into a frenzy.
04:00
This was such a sensational case.
04:03
It became like a soccer game or something.
04:06
Like the three national interests.
04:09
Then it became sexualized.
04:11
Then it became a circus of speculation.
04:15
Her nickname was Foxy Knoxy.
04:18
It was totally distasteful.
04:20
It had nothing to do with the death of Meredith Kircher.
04:23
It had nothing to do with looking for justice.
04:27
Under intense questioning, Amanda accuses Patrick Lumumba,
04:31
the owner of the bar where she works, of killing her roommate.
04:36
She retracts her statement shortly after.
04:39
Because I wasn't sure what my imagination was or what reality was.
04:45
At the crime scene, investigators find DNA traces belonging to Rudy Guedi,
04:51
a young Ivorian man arrested in Germany.
04:54
During his trial, he claims his innocence and accuses Amanda Knox.
04:58
I had the chance to look through the window
05:01
and see Amanda Knox's trace.
05:05
Two years after the murder, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollicito
05:08
are on the defendant's bench.
05:10
Prosecutor Menini accuses them of killing Meredith Kircher
05:13
as part of a macabre sex game.
05:16
The three, under the influence of the narcotics,
05:18
and probably also of the alcohol,
05:20
decide to implement the project of involving Mets
05:24
in a serious sexual game.
05:26
Meredith was my friend and I didn't hate her.
05:29
The idea of taking revenge on someone who has always been kind to me is absurd.
05:35
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollicito are respectively sentenced
05:38
to 26 and 25 years in prison.
05:43
It was a witch trial, and the prosecutor was a very, very religious man.
05:49
Like, hardcore religious.
05:51
The focus immediately was on this photogenic woman
05:56
and whose presence on the crime scene instantly provoked
06:01
this prosecutor's traditional superstitions.
06:05
I traveled to Perugia and interviewed him,
06:08
but he struck me immediately as somebody who was not interested
06:12
in reason and logic and following the evidence.
06:16
I just got a feeling of somebody who was detached from reality.
06:19
The prosecutor said Knox's DNA was found on the knife's handle,
06:22
while the victim's DNA was found on the blade.
06:24
The knife was found at Raffaele's house, where Amanda spent loads of time,
06:28
so obviously it would have her fingerprints on it.
06:30
And the DNA which was found on the blade was so scant and unreliable.
06:36
There's no proof to say that that was Meredith's DNA at all.
06:39
But importantly, the knife was too big.
06:42
It didn't match the injuries that she had on the body.
06:47
All this work that was done was done by making a series of mistakes.
06:52
Not one mistake, but a series of mistakes.
06:54
But you could see images, video images of various people
06:58
from different elements of the Italian authorities
07:01
walking into the crime scene.
07:03
There's video footage of them just smashing the glass on the door
07:07
and kicking it in order to try and get in.
07:10
It's not light-touch professionalism that you'd imagine to see in other places.
07:15
It was quite clear that everything was contaminated.
07:18
So anything that they collected from that crime scene was of very, very little use.
07:22
Apart from a bloody footprint, which entirely matched the size and shoes
07:26
that were worn by Rudy Guerde.
07:30
Months before the murders, the summer before the murders,
07:33
he was actually doing home breaks.
07:36
What he thought were empty offices and houses.
07:39
In his first conversation that they taped, Rudy Guerde says,
07:43
Amanda had nothing to do with it.
07:45
Soon as he got back to Perugia, he started putting her in.
07:54
You don't need to have a law degree to understand what's going on.
07:58
You don't need to be a lawyer to understand what's going on.
08:02
You don't need to have a law degree to understand what was going on there.
08:08
When they understood that he was involved, they didn't turn the ship around.
08:14
They just continued on.
08:16
And they did because there were 20 TV trucks in the piazza.
08:19
And they could not get up in front of them and say,
08:22
we made a giant mistake here.
08:24
It's a process, unfortunately, with unacceptable media pressure.
08:32
After four years in an Italian prison,
08:34
Amanda Knox is acquitted of the murder of Meredith Kircher.
08:38
So is her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
08:42
Outside the courthouse, an angry crowd expresses their outrage.
08:47
Let her go! Let her go!
08:52
I think if you went back to Italy right now, you could ask anyone.
08:56
They'll say, yeah, she's a killer. They got her out.
08:59
We now respectfully ask you to give Amanda and the rest of our family
09:03
our privacy that we need to recover from this horrible ordeal.
09:08
Meg has been almost forgotten in all of it.
09:11
The media photos aren't really of her.
09:16
There's not a lot about what actually happened in the beginning.
09:21
So it's very difficult to kind of keep her memory alive.
09:25
In 2014, Amanda and Raffaele are once again convicted.
09:29
Amanda is sentenced to 28 years in prison,
09:32
a sentence even heavier than the first one.
09:36
But the following year, they are both acquitted definitively.
09:41
Now I just want to go back to living
09:43
and forget everything bad that happened to me.
09:47
Rudy Gade is now the only person convicted for the murder of Meredith.
09:52
He was released from prison in 2021 and still claims his innocence.
09:59
I was a smart, psychopathic, dirty and drugged whore.
10:09
Guilty and sentenced to death.
10:13
Because in the court of public opinion, you are not a human being.
10:19
You are an object to be consumed.
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