Judy Bachrach Appears THE Most Adamant That Mr Mignini Has Somehow Hoodwinked All Of Italy



Hmmm. Isn’t Mr Mignini already suing people for hurtful claims about him not unlike those made very dogmatically in the video above?

And the similar hurtful claims made very dogmatically in the two videos down below here? Certainly Mr Mignini would seem to have what you might call a not-unstrong case.

  • First, the numbers of police, investigators and judges hoodwinked would have to have been truly huge. This case has a VAST cast of characters in Italy seeking true justice for Meredith - a jury, for example, and twenty judges by present count, and a nationally known and respected co-prosecutor.

  • And second, nothing in the judges’ sentencing report, which PMF and TJMK are in the final laps of translating into English, appears to back up her claims. Judge Micheli’s report a year ago, which explained Guede’s conviction and the reasons for sending Knox and Sollecito to trial, was already an almost unassailably tough document. And the report by Judges Giancarlo Massei and Beatrice Cristiani? It is even tougher.

Judy Bachrach has popped up repeatedly to straighten out us lesser beings on the case. For her, it appears to be almost a small industry. She is perhaps the most vehement and impervious of all the proponents of the notion that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are somehow being railroaded, by a corrupt prosecutor, Mr Mignini, and an incompetent legal system.

Wouldn’t you expect Judy Bachrach, as a professional journalist and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair,  to research her articles more meticulously? And to verify every single one of her claimed facts? In the same way that the Italy-based reporters we like to quote have incessantly managed to do - really quite brilliantly?

We have been analyzing Judy Bachrach’s many, many articles and TV commentaries about the case, and they all seem to point to the following conclusions. 

  • That she hasn’t ever read the Micheli report and doesn’t seem to have actually ever mentioned it.

  • That she hasn’t had full access to the prosecution’s 10,000-plus pages file of evidence, and maybe she has had no access at all.

  • That she didn’t attend the key court sessions in which highly incriminating forensic and circumstantial evidence was presented.

  • That she hasn’t absorbed the numerous factual newspaper and magazine reports about the key forensic and circumstantial evidence.

  • That she seems to rely either a lot or totally on sources with vested interests who feed her wrong theories and false information.

  • And that she comes across to us as the reporter most often showing on US media outlets the most complete ignorance of the case.

Quite a track record. We wonder if she is really very proud of it. She seems to sound so. Now to examine the details of some of her small jungle of wrong claims.

False Claim #1

Judy Bachrach made the following claims in an article entitled “Perugia’s Prime Suspect” for for Vanity Fair.

Rudy Guede’s DNA would be found all over her dead body the next day….“His DNA was found not only all over the British girl’s body but also in his bloody fingerprint staining one of her cushions and on the straps of the bra she wore the night of her death.

Judy Bachrach’s claims that Rudy Guede’s DNA was all over Meredith’s body have long been demonstrably false. According to the Micheli report here quickly translated here there was only ONE instance of Rudy Guede’s DNA on Meredith.

Where exactly did Judy Bachrach get that false information from? It clearly wasn’t from the DNA results from the tests carried out by Dr. Stefanoni and her team, or any official court documents, or the Micheli report.

And why exactly did she propagate it? Was she perhaps deliberately trying to exaggerate the evidence against Rudy Guede? Whilst playing down or completely ignoring the forensic and circumstantial evidence against Knox and Sollecito?

False Claim #2

In the same Vanity Fair article, Judy Bachrach makes the claim that “Amanda had tried three times to reach Meredith by cell phone, without success.”

If Judy Bachrach had examined the mobile phone records which are part of the prosecution’s 10,000 page report, as the court did and as we have done, she might have concluded otherwise - that Amanda Knox never ever made even one genuine attempt to contact Meredith.

Two of Knox’s phone calls lasted only 3 seconds and 4 seconds.

Judy Bachrach would have also realised that Knox’s claim that Meredith’s Italian phone “just kept ringing, no answer” was in fact a lie. And that Knox’s e-mail version of events at the house on 2 November is totally contradicted by what is in those mobile phone records.

Our poster Finn MacCool rather brilliantly drew attention a year ago now in this post here to how very, very incriminating those phone records are. (They also seem to incriminate Amanda Knox’s mother. Why doesn’t a good reporter actually ask her about this?)

Judge Massei and Judge Cristiani certainly don’t believe that Knox made a genuine attempt to contact Meredith. And they provide a very detailed explanation of why they don’t, in the sentencing report we are now translating.

And as you will soon see in that report, they also pull totally apart Knox’s email version of the events on 2 November to her friends and family in Seattle.

 


False Claim #3

Judy Bachrach has claimed that the bra clasp in Meredith’s bedroom was “discovered” only in January 2008.

But to complicate matters, a forensics team took a second look around the House of Horrors in January; this time they discovered a clasp that had been cut off the same bra. On that clasp they found Raffaele’s DNA.

House of Horrors? A callous way to refer to the sad place where a remarkable girl with a grieving family and many grieving friends was tortured and then deliberately left to die.

And in actual fact, Dr. Stefanoni was fully aware that the bra clasp was missing from the time she reviewed in the Rome labs the evidence collected from the crime scene - early in November. The clasp couldn’t be collected until the defense experts had agreed upon a date.

There was no other cause to the delay, and the bar clasp was never simply “discovered” at the second evidence visit in January. The forensic team went there specifically to get it. And it was actually recovered on 18 December 2007.

False Claim #4

Perhaps the reason why Judy Bachrach gets so many of the basic facts like those above wrong is that she seems to rely very heavily on sources who feed her false information. One example:

But three legal sources in Perugia (two unfriendly to Amanda) tell me the injuries sustained by Meredith were inconsistent with the blade of that knife.

All of Judy Bachrach’s “three legal sources”  provided her with wrong facts.

The double DNA knife found in Sollecito’s apartment is fully compatible with the deep puncture wound on Meredith’s neck. This has been widely reported by a number of journalists in the British and American media. For example “According to multiple witnesses for the defense, the knife is compatible with at least one of the three wounds on Kercher’s neck, but it was likely too large for the other two.” (Barbie Nadeau in Newsweek).

The sentencing report of Judges Giancarlo Massei and Beatrice Cristiani also now confirms that the knife is absolutely compatible with the large wound on Meredith’s neck.

False Claim #5

Judy Bachrach claims that when Knox and Sollecito changed their versions of events they did so because things got rough.

Simultaneously, in a separate room, Raffaele, too, was questioned by police. Like Amanda’s, his version of events seemed to change whenever things got rough.

Raffaele Sollecito actually changed his version of events most dramatically on 5 November 2007 when he was confronted with the telephone records that proved that he and Knox had lied. It was then that he in effect threw Knox under the bus, and he has never really backed her versions of events on the night fully ever since.

And Amanda Knox in turn changed her version of events most dramatically when she was informed that Sollecito had admitted that they had both lied, that he was wrong to go along with her version, and that he was in effect no longer providing her with any alibi.

Knox and Sollecito’s multiple conflicting alibis did NOT happen because “things got rough”. They actually happened because Sollecito and Knox were both repeatedly caught lying. And they changed their stories periodically merely to fit the new information as it became known - and at pretty well no time after they were first caught out in their lies did the stories of the two ever match. .

By the way, wait for something of a bombshell. Judges Giancarlo Massei and Beatrice Cristiani in their sentencing report expose more lies and contradictions by Knox and Sollecito which haven’t as yet been reported in any of the English-language the media.

False Claim #6

Judy Bachrach wrote an article about the case for the website Women on the Web headlined Amanda Knox’s Abusive Prosecutor.. (Hmmm. Smart title.)

Amanda was also told if she didn’t confess she would get the maximum ““ 30 years in prison. And ““ oh yes ““ at a time when, having just arrived in Italy, she spoke pitifully little Italian, she wasn’t provided with a translator.

Judy Bachrach clearly wasn’t in the courtroom when Amanda Knox’s interpreter, Dr. Anna Donnino, gave her evidence as to all the work she did on the night of the interrogations. And Judy Bachrach clearly hasn’t read the numerous articles that actually describe the interpreter’s testimony.

False Claim #7

Judy Bachrach claims that an Italian reporter was thrown into prison for being critical of Mignini. She is clearly referring to Mario Spezi.

Mignini is no special friend to journalists. One Italian reporter who especially upset the prosecutor a while back was thrown into prison “” in isolation. An American journalist who was that reporter’s friend was interrogated so harshly that, fearing incarceration himself, he hopped the next plane back to the United States, where he started a campaign (ultimately successful) to free his friend. Their crime? They were critical of Mignini.

Spezi is currently on trial for disrupting the investigation into the Narducci case. He has NOT been charged with criticising Mr Mignini.

Judy Bachrach has made a number of television appearances on CNN and other networks in which she was scathing towards Mr Mignini and the Italian legal system. As with her articles, Judy Bachrach makes many wild and inaccurate claims.

False Claim #8

She incorrectly asserts that the defence teams weren’t allowed to produce evidence of their own DNA experts - despite the fact that the Knox and Sollecito defenses each had large teams of DNA experts testify. From the videos in this post:

The defence wasn’t even allowed to produce evidence of their own DNA experts.

Gino Professor, Carlo Torre and Walter Patumi were some of the DNA experts who testified at the trial on behalf of Amanda Knox. Professor Vinci, Adriano Tagliabracci and Francesco Introna were some of the DNA experts who defended Raffaele Sollecito.

False Claim #9

Judy Bachrach has repeatedly claimed (you can see her do so in these videos) that Amanda Knox was kept in prison for two years before her trial.

They kept her in jail for two years even before trial [although] there isn’t an ounce of real hard evidence against her” And “It was decided to keep Amanda Knox in jail for two years prior to her trial.

If Knox and Sollecito had been kept in prison for two years before their trial as someone “decided” their trial would have started in November 2009. The reality is that their trial started in January 2009 and it was originally scheduled for December 2008, just two months after Guede’s. 

Judy Bachrach is not the only American journalist who is ignorant of the basic facts of the case, and responsible for some of the serious misinforming of the American public, both about the crime and about Italy.

But she sure does seem to be the only one to have made it into a little industry..

By the way, we sure look forward to the YouTubes of Candace Dempsey and Nina Burleigh propagating their own books on the case when those books are released. Will they now finally be describing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?

Don’t hold your breath.

Posted by The Machine on 04/15/10 at 01:56 PM in News media & movies,  Hoaxers from 2007,  More hoaxers,  Hoaxers: media groups,  CNN Network

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Comments

Judy Bachrach knows that the only way she’s going to get a coveted interview with Amanda Knox AND a Vanity Fair cover story is if she toes the Marriott line. In other words, she has sold out. It is hard to take seriously a journalist who did not attend the trial and yet claims to have figured things out.

Posted by Skeptical Bystander on 04/15/10 at 05:17 PM | #

Why anyone would have such a giant chip on their shoulders about ITALY of all places is quite beyond me. She is worse here than Timothy Egan - and that is really saying something.

I have traveled to Italy dozens of times, mostly for the United Nations (there is a big UN presence in Rome and smaller presences in Turin and elsewhere) and I cannot ever recall encountering ANYONE having any contempt at all for Italy.

It is really sad that the FOA have gone so far down the road in sliming this beautiful, moving, and often very funny country. Great food and great looking girls too - actually, almost all Italians look pretty nice. And they sure dress well. (Right, Nicki?)

I hope everyone here who has not yet seen Italy gets the chance to do so in the coming years. Perugia is quite haunting. A very special place.

Meredith loved Italy - she sure got that right - quite possibly more than England even. It was long her dream to get there. It is truly tragic that it was there she had to meet her fate.

Judy Bachrach is a smaller person for the huge grudge she holds. Reminds me of Peter Popham. Serial Italy slimers, both.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 04/15/10 at 06:03 PM | #

I bet they didn’t like her either. A deprecating sense of humor in Italy is a real sine qua non.

That, and a certain absence of self-importance.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 04/15/10 at 06:25 PM | #

A tip for the registered YouTube community, by the way.

If you click hard twice on the embedded youTubes above, you will be taken to each video’s homepage where others are already commenting.

The YouTube community seems about 90% in favor of the Knox verdict having being a just one. The same trend seems to be there on on all the YouTubes.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 04/15/10 at 07:03 PM | #

4/15/10

Mignini was not hoodwinked by Amanda. She’s the one running a scam. Compare this story with her statement to mom that she wanted to “stay in Perugia to help the police.”

Mirror.co.uk Nov. 22, 2007 by Ryan Parry: Outrage of freed Kercher suspect

Parry writes that Lumumba met AK on the day before she and RS were held by police. Lumumba said he bumped into Knox outside the university after a professor asked him to find a bilingual speaker to handle inquiries about MK’s murder. “I asked if she would do it. She said no and went on her way smiling,” said Lumumba.

Lumumba felt it was this moment when AK decided to implicate him to police.

Ms. Bachrach, would you want AK rooming with your daughter?

Posted by Hopeful on 04/15/10 at 11:07 PM | #

In the news in Seattle:
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Prosecutors-asking-appeals-court-to-give-Knox-life-sentence—-90951489.html

Prosecutors asking appeals court to give Knox life sentence

Posted by Hungarian on 04/16/10 at 12:43 AM | #

How can these so-called “journalists” get away with publishing untrue statements?  Isn’t there a law against that, other than the victim of the lies suing for slander?  There needs to be some law regarding truth in journalism, otherwise it should be banned from being called “news”.

Posted by Mo-in-Mass.,USA on 04/16/10 at 03:54 AM | #

Hungarian - thanks for that link, I’ve been asking for a while if that was possible - this is exactly what I would like to see, now if RS would break out and addmit exactly what happened, and take some responsibilty for it, I would lower his sentence to that of Rudy’s and raise Amanda’s to the max. - Justice served.

Posted by John on 04/16/10 at 08:23 AM | #

Hungarian,
I saw that article, too.  After the hell she has created for so many others, I hope she does get the maximum sentence. I will never understand how she can show no remorse; Sollecito either, for that matter.

Posted by Mo-in-Mass.,USA on 04/16/10 at 01:17 PM | #

Who the hell is Judy Bachrach?

Am I the ONLY one who is both scared and disillusioned at the likes of CNN, CBS, The Times etc ......

Isn’t there a journalistic credo about FULL facts, research and reliable sources? Or does that only hold true with Clark Kent ?

Posted by Chan on 04/17/10 at 09:56 PM | #

I have answered my own question. Get this:

“JUDY BACHRACH is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a professor of investigative journalism at John Cabot University. She writes regularly about how political leaders and personalities shape society and thinking in the U.S. and abroad.”

... a professor of investigative journalism ? 

I’m applying to Cabot to post my PhD immediately ....

Posted by Chan on 04/17/10 at 10:14 PM | #

EXCELLENT post Peter. It’s great to see someone taking on these huge news agencies and sloppy reporters, and showing them up for the lazy, partisan disgrace to the profession that they are.

Professor of investigative journalism?

Unbelievable. She couldn’t investigate herself out of a wet paper bag…

Posted by TT on 04/22/10 at 01:26 AM | #
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