Category: Examples 419-446

10. Knox Book Lies 419 To 446

Posted by Chimera



More implacable nastiness in Star Wars.  Click for Comments.

1. Overview Of This Series

My opinion is that this book is essentially Amanda Knox’s way of getting back at everyone in Italy she ever encountered, while falsely making her notoriously brash, sharp-elbowed, frequently drugged-up persona look endearing, naive, and squeaky-clean.

Knox includes numerous lies, smears, and stories to compromise literally dozens of others. None of them help clear up what happened to Meredith.  And given how rampant the lies are, it doesn’t really clarify anything about Amanda Knox either.

Two more quick posts after this one and the series will be done here. Then we will repost the final version on a new Knox Liewatch page with each of her false claim numbered, and draw the attention of the media. The nine posts before this one can all be read here.

Page numbers are those of the expanded 2015 paperback.

2. Dissection Of Pages 394 to 403

[Chapter 31, Page 394] The questions and choices I made during the first trial ate at me. What if Id spoken up more, clarified more when other witnesses took the stand, pleaded my innocence more forcefully Would it have made a difference? I’d waited for the jury and the world to realize that there was no evidence against me. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

  • What if you’d spoken up more?

  • You did speak up that you ‘‘vaguely remembered’’ Patrick murdering Meredith.  It got you 3 years for calunnia.

  • You did speak up in June 2009 that you were hit by police.  You have another calunnia trial pending.

  • You got you parents to speak up that you were being mistreated.  It got calunnia complaints against them.

  • You frequently spoke up that you were mistreated.  Your own lawyers told you publicly to shut up.

  • ’‘Not speaking up enough’’ is not the problem.  The opposite in fact.

  • You waited for the jury to realize their was no evidence?  So, what were Mignini/Comodi presenting to the court?

  • You were waiting?  Well, when the defence files an appeal, the prosecution won’t be presenting ‘‘any’’ evidence.  Hmm…..

  • You won’t make the same mistake twice?  You keep making the same mistakes.

[Chapter 31, Page 395]  Though I trusted my lawyers completely, this time I wanted to be involved in every decision. I owed it to myself. I couldn’t survive another guilty verdict if my team and I overlooked a single speck of favorable evidence.

  • You trust them completely, but now want to start micromanaging? 

  • If you overlook a ‘‘single speck’’ of favourable evidence?  Are you reduced to looking for ‘‘specks’‘?

[Chapter 31, Page 395]  Once I started thinking about what might be possible, nothing seemed out of reach. Should I write to the new judge? The U.S. secretary of state? Why not the president?

  • You later tried that with Judge Nencini, while skipping your Florence appeal.  Didn’t go over well.

  • The Secretary of State (Hillary Clinton at the time)?  Sure, she doesn’t have any pressing foreign matters to deal with.

  • The President (Barack Obama)?  Sure, running the free world is just a part time gig.

  • Why might U.S. oficials be reluctant to get involved in ongoing murder trials?  Don’t know.

[Chapter 31, Page 395]  Rather than write, I read. The 407-page report from Judge Massei explained why we’d been convicted and how Raffaele, Guede, and I had murdered Meredith.  The supposed motive was as far-fetched as a soap opera plot. “Amanda and Raffaele suddenly found themselves without any commitments; they met Rudy Guede by chance and found themselves together with him at the house on the Via dells Pergola where ... Meredith was alone,”

  • You and Raffaele suddenly found yourselves without any commitments?  Well you did get that text not to come to work.

  • Sollecito doesn’t have a job, so he likely didn’t have any commitments either.

  • You met Guede by chance?  You do seem to know him.

  • Guede ended up at the house with you?  You mean he didn’t break in leaving your blood mixed with Meredith’s?

  • Meredith was alone?  Okay, that is actually true.

[Chapter 31, Page 395] The judges and jury hypothesized that Raffaele and I were fooling around, and that Guede started raping Meredith because we turned him on. Instead of helping Meredith, we inexplicably and spontaneously joined Guede, because it was “an exciting stimulant that, although unexpected, had to be tried,” he wrote. “[The criminal acts were carried out on the force of pure chance. A motive, therefore, of an erotic, sexually violent nature which, arising from the choice of evil made by Rudy, found active collaboration from Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.”  The report rejected the prosecution’s claim that Meredith and I had had a contentious relationship.  The judge wrote “the crime that was carried out ... without any animosity or feelings of rancor against the victim. . .”

  • You have said you want the Kerchers to read your book, but you put information such as this in?

  • Judge Massei didn’t contradict the claim of a strained relationship.

  • Meredith took your job at Le Chic .... and no hard feelings?

[Chapter 31, Page 395]  They allowed that there was no evidence of contact between Guede and me””no e-mails, phone calls, or eyewitnesses. They discounted the testimony of Hekuran Kokomani, the witness from the pretrial and the trial who said he threw olives at me and who “identified” me by the nonexistent gap between my teeth. And they conceded that Raffaele and I were not likely killers.  Rather we were “two young people, strongly interested in each other, with intellectual and cultural curiosity, he on the eve of his graduation and she full of interests . . .”

  • No evidence of contact between you and Guede?  You admit that he visited the men downstairs.

  • No contact?  You say that their was laughter when Guede was asking if you were available.

  • No contact?  You admit to taking his order at Le Chic.

  • No contact?  You admit to contact in THIS VERY BOOK.

  • Casual sex, drugs and alcohol are ‘‘cultural events’‘?  Wow, the travel brochure leaves all this out.

  • If drugs and sex are ‘‘cultural’‘, that might explain things with Federico Martini.

  • You were interested in hooking up with Harry Potter.  Is that ‘‘cultural’‘?

  • ’‘Strongly interested’‘?  You knew each other for a week.

[Chapter 31, Page 396]  Another factor, the judge wrote, was that Raffaele and I read comic books and watched movies “in which sexuality is accompanied by violence and by situations of fear . . .”  He brought up the disputed theory that Raffaele’s kitchen knife was the murder weapon, in addition to a new theory that I’d carried the knife in my “very capacious bag.” Why would I? “It’s probable, considering Raffaele’s interest in knives, that Amanda was advised and convinced by her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, to carry a knife with her ... during the night along streets that could have seemed not very safe to pass through at night by a girl.”

  • Yes, you were convicted on the basis of Manga porn and Amelie..

  • The theory is disputed because your own lawyers dispute it.  Self fulfilling prophecy?

  • Raffaele is guilty because he collects knives .... not the bloody footprint, DNA on Meredith’s bra, or false alibis.

  • Perugia is not safe?  Right, it’s a deathtrap that hadn’t seen a murder in 20 years.

[Chapter 31, Page 397]  The lining of my bag wasn’t cut. The police found no blood in my bag. How can I prove what Ididn’t do?

  • The knife could also have been wrapped in something else.

  • The knife could still have been transported ‘‘to’’ the scene without blood.

  • Well, you can prove where you actually were when Meredith was killed.  That might help.

[Chapter 31, Page 397]  The prosecution had based their case on misinterpreted and tainted forensic evidence and had relied heavily on speculation. But Judge Massei’s faith was blind. Patrizia Stefanoni would not “offer false interpretations and readings,” he wrote.

  • This all sounds impressive, but do you care to elaborate as to what evidence was misinterpreted or tainted?

  • Do you care to elaborate on what this ‘‘heavy reliance on speculation’’ is?

  • As for tainted evidence, why did your lawyers refuse to attend the testing?

[Chapter 31, Page 397]  The appeal wouldn’t be a redo of the first trial. Italy, like the United States, has three levels of justice””the lower court, the Court of Appeals, and the highest court, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, their version of our Supreme Court. The difference is that, in Italy, someone like me is required to go through all three levels, all the way to the Cassazione, whose verdict is final.  Cases often take turns and twists that would surprise and unsettle most Americans. Even if you’re acquitted at level one, the prosecution can ask the Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict. If the appeals court finds you guilty, it can raise your sentence. Or it can decide that a second look is unnecessary and send you on to the Cassazione for the final stamp on the lower court’s decision””in Raffaele’s and my cases, to serve out our twenty-five- and twenty-six-year sentences.  At each level, the verdict is official, and the sentence goes into immediate effect unless the next court overturns it.

  • The appeal wouldn’t be a redo if the first trial?  So Hellmann releasing you was not double jeopardy.

  • Since you seem to understand the 3-level trial process, why lie and say it was over?

  • Getting 2 automatic appeals would suprise and unsettle most Americans?  Surprise them at least.

  • Yes, appeals court (in the Common Law courts too), can increase sentences for frivilous appeals.

  • To quote Alan Dershowitz, being released by an appeals court is not double jeopardy.

  • With this paragraph, Knox throws out her claim of being ‘‘retried’’ again.

[Chapter 31, Page 397]  In Italy’s lower and intermediate levels, judges and jurors decide the verdict. And instead of focusing on legal errors, as we do in the United States, the Italian appellate court will reopen the case, look at new evidence, and hear additional testimony””if they think it’s deserved.

  • So you get an automatic appeal that allows the case to be reopened?

  • And this appeal allows for additional witnesses and evidence to be called?  Not restricted as a Common Law appeal?

  • Many defendants in the U.S. would be envious of such a legal avenue.

[Chapter 31, Page 398]  In our appeal request, we asked the court to appoint independent experts to review the DNA on the knife and the bra clasp, and to analyze a sperm stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith’s body that the prosecution had maintained was irrelevant. In their appeal request, the prosecution complained about what they thought was a lenient sentence and demanded life in prison for Raffaele and me.

  • You did ask for experts.  However, criminal procedure only allows for it to be done at the lower trial level.

  • If this stain wasn’t analysed, then how exactly do you know it’s semen?

  • You appealed your convicted, and the prosecution ‘‘cross-appealed’‘, asking for a sentence increase.  Makes sense.

[Chapter 31, Page 398]  I read and reread the Massei report, looking for discrepancies and flawed reasoning. I’m not a lawyer, but I had an insider’s perspective on the case, three years in prison, and eleven months in court. In one of Guede’s depositions, he claimed I’d come home the night of the murder, rung the doorbell, and that Meredith had let me in. Obviously he didn’t know it was our household habit to knock, not buzz. It was a little catch, but it was something my former Via dells Pergola housemates, Laura and Filomena, could confirm.

  • You are reading a 400 page legal document in Italian?  Guess we can drop all pretence you are limited in the language.

  • Looking for discrepencies?  How about all your different stories and alibis?  And Sollecito’s?

  • Looking for flawed reasoning?  Plenty of it.  Oh, you mean the prosecution’s flawed reasoning?

  • You had an insider’s perspective on the case?  You mean a front row seat with a lead role?

  • So, if someone buzzes the doorbell, you would not answer?

[Chapter 31, Page 398]  For example, Madison wrote, “Witnesses: the prosecution knowingly used unreliable witnesses.

“Interrogation: the police were under enormous pressure to solve the murder quickly.
“There’s a pattern of the police/prosecution ignoring indications of your innocence. This must be pointed out. You were called guilty a month before forensic results, you were still considered guilty even though what you said in your interrogation wasn’t true, obviously false witnesses were used against you.

  • So, Madison Paxton accuses the prosecution of suborning perjury?  Nice to drop her in it, Knox.

  • Police have a pattern of ignoring signs you are innocent?  What signs did they miss?

  • You were called guilty before forensic results?  What about those statements where you say you were there?

  • Knox claims to be a witness to someone committing the crime.  Why would anyone think she was there?

  • False witnesses were used against you?  Patrick could make that claim.

[Chapter 31, Page 399]  I knew that the most critical point was to be able to say why I’d named Patrick during my interrogation.

  • Once again, you were not interrogated.  Raffaele was called to the police station, and you came along.

  • Since you insisted on being there, Rita Ficarra asked if you would help make a list of potential contacts

  • Sollecito revoked your alibi, and you named Patrick, thinking it would get you off the hook.  It backfired.

  • That about covers it.

[Chapter 31, Page 399]  The prosecution and civil parties argued that I was a manipulative, lying criminal mastermind. My word meant nothing. The court would always presume I was a liar. If, in their mind, I was a liar, it was an easy leap to murderer.

I had been done in by my own words. I’d told the judges and jury things like “I didn’t mean to do harm” and “You don’t know what it’s like to be manipulated, to think that you were wrong, to have so much doubt and pressure on you that you try to come up with answers other than those in your memory.”

  • To go out on a limb here: if you are a manipulative liar, your word probably means nothing.

  • To prove the point, you are manipulating words to make it seem like people assume you are a killer.

  • You were done in by your own words.  For once, ‘‘best truthing’’ didn’t work.

  • You false accuse Patrick of rape and murder, but you didn’t mean any harm?

  • The only pressure was having to come up with a new alibi on the spot.

[Chapter 31, Page 399]  Thankfully Madison had researched the science on false confessions. She found Saul Kassin, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. A specialist in wrongful convictions, he took the mystery out of what had happened to me.

  • Blaming an innocent person is not ‘‘falsely confessing’‘.  It is ‘‘falsely accusing’‘.

  • Saul doesn’t seem to be a very good psychologist if he can’t distinguish between ‘‘confessions’’ and ‘‘accusations’‘.

  • Saul also doesn’t seem to grasp any of the hard facts in the case, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

  • A specialist in wrongful convictions?  From the Susan Smith School of Criminal Justice?

  • What about Saul’s realization that ‘‘false confessions’’ generally happen to weak-willed people?  Something you are not.

  • Saul Kassin must be connected to Saul Goodman (scummy lawyer in Breaking Bad).  Mystery solved.

[Chapter 31, Page 399]  Before my interrogation, I believed, like many people, that if someone were falsely accused, they wouldn’t, couldn’t, be swayed from the truth while under interrogation. I never would have believed that I could be pressured into confessing to something I hadn’t done. For three years I berated myself for not having been stronger. I’m an honest person.

  • You were not interrogated.  You were asked for a list of contacts, when Sollecito withdrew his alibi for you.

  • You were swayed by the loss of your alibi witness.

  • You didn’t ‘‘confess’‘. You ‘‘accused’’ Patrick of raping and murdering Meredith while you were in the kitchen cowering.

  • Of course, to false accuse, you have to claim to be present, and to be a witness.

  • For not being stronger?  Like not having a ‘‘better’’ backup alibi?

  • You are an honest person?  I just threw up in my mouth.

[Chapter 31, Page 399]  During that interrogation, I had nothing to hide, and a stake in the truth-1 desperately wanted the police to solve Meredith’s murder. But now I know that innocent people often confess. The records kept of people convicted of a crime and later exonerated by DNA evidence show that the DNA of 25 percent of them didn’t match the DNA left at the scene. The DNA testing showed that one in four innocent people ended up confessing as I did.

  • Once more, you were not interrogated.

  • You wanted to solve Meredith’s murder?  Makes sense, you left Guede’s traces intact.

  • DNA testing shows that 1 in 4 innocents falsely accuse others of crimes?

[Chapter 31, Page 400]  According to Kassin, there are different types of false confessions. The most common is “compliant,” which usually happens when the suspect is threatened with punishment or isolation. The encounter becomes so stressful, so unbearable, that suspects who know they’re innocent eventually give in just to make the uncomfortably harsh questioning stop. “You’ll get thirty years in prison if you don’t tell us,” says one interrogator. “I want to help you, but I can’t unless you help us,” says another.

This was exactly the good cop/bad cop routine the police had used on me.

  • So which were you, the ‘‘compliant’’ false accusation, or the ‘‘internalized’’ false accusation?

  • Not having an alibi from Raffy was that stressful, unbearable, you just had to make it stop?

  • Patrick will be relieved to hear it was just those ‘‘Jedi mind tricks’‘.

  • Who were the good cop(s) and who were the bad cop(s)?

[Chapter 31, Page 400]  Besides being compliant, I also showed signs of having made an “internalized” false confession.  Sitting in that airless interrogation room in the questura, surrounded by people shouting at me during forty- three hours of questioning over five days, I got to the point, in the middle of the night, where I was no longer sure what the truth was. I started believing the story the police were telling me. They took me into a state where I was so fatigued and stressed that I started to wonder if I had witnessed Meredith’s murder and just didn’t remember it. I began questioning my own memory.

  • You showed signs of?  I think the term is ‘‘malingering’‘.

  • 43 hours?  You told Judge Nencini is was over 50 hours.

  • You also said (in this book), everyone from the house was detained, and that you spent most of your time sitting around with Meredith’s British friends.

  • You went to class on Monday, and skipped Meredith’s memorial to go strum a ukulele.

  • You also went underwear shopping with Raffaele, and had some ‘‘fun’’ with him.

  • You were also with Federico Martini (a.k.a. Cristiano) and got more drugs in return for sex.

  • When were these 43+ hours?  You seemed to have a lot of free time.

  • Does an ‘‘internalized false accusation’’ make someone really bad at time and math?

[Chapter 31, Page 400]  Kassin says that once suspects begin to distrust their own memory, they have almost no cognitive choice but to consider, possibly accept, and even mentally elaborate upon the interrogator’s narrative of what happened. That’s how beliefs are changed and false memories are formed.  That’s what had happened to me.

  • This sounds impressive, but the questions stopped at this point.  There was no narrative to elaborate on.

  • Beliefs are changed?  As in the police don’t believe you now, but maybe if you come up with something .....

  • False memories?  Like you cowering in the kitchen with your hands on your ears, WHILE SOMEONE ELSE killed Meredith?

  • That’s what happened to you?  Is that your ‘‘best truth’‘?

[Chapter 31, Page 401]  Three years after my “confession,” I’d blocked out some of my interrogation. But the brain has ways of bringing up suppressed memories. My brain chooses flashbacks - sharp, painful flashes of memory that flicker, interrupting my conscious thoughts. My adrenaline responds as if it’s happening in that moment. I remember the shouting, the figures of looming police officers, their hands touching me, the feeling of panic and of being surrounded, the incoherent images my mind made up to try to explain what could have happened to Meredith and to legitimize why the police were pressuring me.

  • Did you also ‘‘block out’’ what happened to Meredith?

  • There was no shouting except from you, when you faked having a fit?

  • You ‘‘remember’‘?  This from the woman who writes about things her mind made up….?!

  • How were they pressuring you when they stopped asking questions?

[Chapter 31, Page 401]  In my case they’d put several interrogators in a room with me. For hours they yelled, screamed, kept me on edge. When they exhausted themselves, a fresh team replaced them. But I wasn’t even allowed to leave to use the bathroom.

  • There were teams of interrogators waiting for you?  Why exactly?

  • You showed up unexpected that night, and Rita Ficarra told you to go home.

  • You weren’t allowed to use the bathroom?  Your own lawyers have publicly said you were not mistreated.

[Chapter 31, Page 402] It had been the middle of the night. I’d already been questioned for hours at a time, days in a row. They tried to get me to contradict myself by homing in on what I’d done hour by hour, to confuse me, to cause me to lose track and get something wrong. They said I had no alibi. They lied, saying that Raffaele had told them I’d asked him to lie to the police. They wouldn’t let me call my mom. They wouldn’t let me leave the interrogation room. They were yelling at me in a language I didn’t understand. They hit me and suggested that I had trauma- induced amnesia. They encouraged me to imagine what could have happened, encouraged me to “remember” the truth because they said I had to know the truth. They threatened to imprison me for thirty years and restrict me from seeing my family. At the time, I couldn’t think of it as anything but terrifying and overwhelming.

  • How was this elaborate trap in place if it was night time, and you showed up unannounced? 

  • All they were asking was a list of potential men who might have visited the home.

  • That part was truthful.  Sollecito did say you asked him to lie, which left you without an alibi.

  • Why does a 20 year old need to call her mom, when being asked questions about a murder?  Never mind.

  • Actually, you were free to leave at that point.

  • You didn’t understand the language?  What was your interpreter, Anna Donnino there for?

  • If you didn’t understand the language, how did you know they thought you had trauma-induced amnesia?

  • Police are looking for a killer, and they ask you to ‘‘imagine’’ things?  Right.

  • Yeah, getting busted for murder can be pretty overwhelming.  No argument here.

[Chapter 31, Page 402]  Number one, I would have written to the Kerchers. I wanted to tell them how much I liked their daughter. How lovingly she spoke of her family. Tell them that her death was a heartbreak to so many.

  • Well, you could help them by not publishing embarrassing details.

  • Please don’t tell them you like their daughter.  And please don’t ask to see the grave.

  • Her death was a heartbreak to so many.  Oh, right, I was one of them.

[Chapter 31, Page 402]  Number two, I’d have written Patrick an apology. Naming him was unforgivable, and he didn’t deserve it, but I wanted to say that it wasn’t about him. I was pushed so hard that I’d have named anyone. I was sorry.

  • Yes, naming him was unforgivable.

  • No, it wasn’t about him, it was about saving your own ass.

  • You pushed yourself to come up with something once Sollecito said you went out—alone.

  • You did name anyone: Patrick, Rudy, Juve, Shaky, Spiros, Federico Martini ....

  • You were sorry that it didn’t work out?

[Chapter 31, Page 403 ]  Dear Patrick,

The explanation you’ve heard a number of times about my interrogation is true and I’m sure you understand well since you were arrested the same night without being told why.  Ifee1guilo and sorry for my part in it.

  • He was arrested ONLY because of you, but shit happens, right?
Posted on 03/26/14 at 05:35 PM by Chimera • Click here for my past posts, via link at top left.
Archived in Knox False Claims,  Examples 419-446
Permalink for this post • Tell-a-Friend • Comments here (10)