Criminal Justice

Billy Binion | From the January 2025 issue

Amanda Knox's story is one of the most infamous and controversial criminal cases in recent memory. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, she was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was convicted and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated in 2015. Her wrongful conviction was a media spectacle that sensationalized every aspect of her life.

In March 2024, Hulu announced an eight-episode limited series about Knox's story, with Knox joining Monica Lewinsky as an executive producer. Notably, this is one of the rare times Knox has been offered a say in the way her story is told by others.

In October, Knox spoke with Reason's Billy Binion about her role in one of the first modern true crime stories, the psychological impact of being imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit, and what she calls "the single victim fallacy." She hosts a podcast called Labyrinths with her partner, Christopher Robinson. Her book Free is set to be released in March 2025.

Reason: You were arrested and imprisoned in November 2007. Two years later, you were found guilty of a murder that you would ultimately be exonerated for. We know wrongful convictions happen across the world. There is someone, somewhere, right now in a similar situation. What would you say to that person if they were sitting in front of you?

Knox: I never want people to think that you can rely on the truth ultimately coming out. That is not something that we can count on necessarily. I can't promise that justice will ultimately result in any of these cases.

There's no telling how it's going to work out. There's a lot of factors that go into that. There's luck. There's the right people showing up at the right time. There's the evidence coming through. There's technology that becomes available. All of that plays into whether or not an innocent person is going to get out of prison and then successfully reintegrate into society. The thing that they always need to know, though, is it is entirely up to them to figure out how to be their best selves in these circumstances. That is their power, and no one can take that away from them.

But prison is pretty horrible, is it not?

It's 100 percent a horrible place. When I was in that space, I woke up sad, I spent the whole day sad, and I went to bed sad. That was just my emotional default setting, which was very new to me. I was a very happy person up until this circumstance happened. That didn't change the fact, though, that there was always something that I could do in any given day that would make it worth living. And it might be something really simple like writing a letter to my mom. It might be reading a book and educating myself. It might be doing as many sit-ups as I possibly could. There were always things that I could find that were meaningful to me, even in their humble ways that made at least life in that moment worth living.

Do you find that that's transferable to people experiencing tragedies that have nothing to do with wrongful convictions?

Yes, I think it's applicable to anyone going through a horrendous circumstance. I really thought that this experience I was going through was very unique and it made me feel very ostracized from the rest of humanity. That was part of the sadness—feeling like I didn't belong to the rest of humanity anymore. I slowly, over the course of years, have realized that we are all carrying our own private tragedies and we all can feel like we don't have agency. And my message to people is, regardless of where you are and where you belong, there is something that you can do that matters to you. Find that and do it.

You've written about some of the more dramatic indignities that you experienced—constantly being solicited for sex and harassed by people in positions of authority, a cellmate attacking you and not being able to defend yourself because it would've hurt your chances in court. Because you were ultimately exonerated, many people would be horrified on your behalf. But they should be horrified even if someone is guilty, right?

Absolutely. The indignities that so many people face in prison—guilty or innocent alike—are not doing any of us any good. A lot of the people that I met in prison were sitting there feeling victimized and feeling like they could not wait to get back out and make the same mistakes over and over again. It's a little bit "fuck off." There was this feeling of "I'm not sitting here becoming a better person. I'm sitting here being victimized all over again."

So many of the women that I was imprisoned with had been victims of crime long before they had ever committed crimes themselves. They were swimming in a world where crime........

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