PR Shill Jan Goodwin Shows Extraordinary Bias

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I’ve just read perhaps the most shockingly biased article yet about the case.

It is by Jan Goodwin and appears in the magazine Marie Clare. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Studying abroad should have been a grand adventure. Instead, Amanda Knox has spent a year in jail, accused by a corrupt legal system of murdering her roommate.

For starters, the journalist makes the wild and unsubstantiated accusation that the Italian legal system is corrupt.

Amanda has been sitting in prison for a year now, while the Italian press dissects her past and her behavior, framing her as a sex-crazed ugly American who didn’t properly mourn the death of her roommate. Did she kill her, or is Amanda but the latest in a long line of women deemed guilty in the court of public opinion for acting in ways that subvert the script? Be it the U.K.‘s Kate McCann or Australia’s Lindy Chamberlain, both of whom were judged harshly in the disappearances of their daughters, a woman’s demeanor and the way she grieves is sometimes her greatest crime.

Have the Italian press really spent a year dissecting Amanda’s past and her behaviour? I certainly haven’t seen one reference to Amanda being an “sex-crazed ugly American” in the Italian press and I’ve been reading the Italian articles for months.

Jan Goodwin seems very confused.

Amanda is sitting in jail, not because she has been found guilty in the court of public opinion for acting in ways that subvert the script, her demeanor or the ways she grieved, and Amanda showed no grief whatsoever over Meredith’s death, but because the evidence against her is overwhelming.

The judges at the Italian Supreme Court told Amanda: “The clues against you are serious.” The judge at the preliminary hearings in the case, Claudia Metteini, also noted that there were “serious clues of guilt”.

Jan Goodwin’s article goes onto to say:

On the morning of November 2, everything changed. As she remembers it, Amanda returned home from a night at Raffaele’s and found a few drops of blood in her bathroom and the door to Meredith’s bedroom locked.

Jan Goodwin should have researched her story more carefully. If she had seen the photograph of the blue bathmat in the bathroom, she would know that it wasn’t “a few drops of blood”, but actually a bloody footprint. It’s apparent that Jan Goodwin really knows very little about the case:

They broke into Meredith’s bedroom and discovered her lying in a pool of blood, half-naked, her windpipe crushed in an attempted strangulation and her throat partially slashed.

There were three knife wounds on Meredith’s neck. Two lesser wounds, but the final one was delivered with such brutal force, it left a huge, gaping hole in Meredith’s neck. There was nothing partial about it. Whoever inflicted the fatal wound wanted to kill Meredith.

Jan Goodwin’s article seems deliberately misleading to give the impression that there isn’t much evidence against Amanda and Raffaele:

Three days after the murder, the senior police investigator on the case sought out Amanda and Raffaele to question them. When he discovered them casually eating in a pizza restaurant, he grew suspicious. Soon after, they were arrested. “That was how it started,” says Paul Ciolino, an American forensic examiner who was the primary investigative adviser for the Innocence Project, which has helped exonerate more than 215 prisoners jailed in the U.S.

No, the police were actually suspicious of Amanda and Raffaele because they both lied to the postal police from the very first time they spoke to them.

Example: they told the postal police they had phoned the police and were waiting for them. Raffaele admitted in his witness on 5 and 6 November they hadn’t actually phoned the police before the postal police turned up unexpectedly:

I tried to force the door but couldn’t, and at that point I decided to call my sister for advice because she is a Carabinieri officer. She told me to dial 112 (the Italian emergency number) but at that moment the postal police arrived.” He added: “In my former statement I told you a load of rubbish because I believed Amanda’s version of what happened and did not think about the inconsistencies.

CCTV footage shows the postal police arriving at the cottage at 12.35 on 2 November. Raffaele phoned the police at 12.51 and 12.54.

[Quoting Paul Ciolino again]  “I was stunned that this was why he suspected Amanda and her boyfriend were involved in the crime,” he says. “These two kids, never in trouble, classic middle-class college students “” it’s ludicrous that they were implicated.”

Amanda Knox was arrested for hosting a party that got seriously out of hand with students high on drink and drugs and throwing rocks into the road, forcing cars to swerve.

The students then threw rocks at the windows of neighbours who had called the police. The situation was so bad that police reinforcements had to be called. Amanda was fined $269 (£135) at the Municipal Court after the incident - Crime No: 071830624.

Amanda’s friend Madison Paxton makes the following comment: “The papers have called her a drugged-up skank, and that’s just incredibly untrue. She respects her body; she doesn’t like to party too much.”

I think Amanda’s neighbours would wholeheartedly disagree that Amanda doesn’t like to party too much. Amanda herself made the claim that she had smoked so much cannabis she (conveniently) couldn’t remember much about what happened on the night of the murder. She doesn’t sound like somebody who doesn’t like to party too much.

In grade school, Amanda’s soccer teammates nicknamed her “Foxy Knoxy” because she would crouch down like a fox on the playing field. European tabloids picked up on the name, calling her “Foxy Knoxy: a sex-mad American party girl.

European newspapers, including the quality newspapers, called Amanda by the nickname she called herself. She would have known at the age of 20 that the word “foxy” has sexual connotations. Amanda made a conscious choice to use a nickname with sexual connotations. The newspapers were simply using the nickname that she used.

After her arrest, Amanda was detained by the police and interrogated for 14 hours.

Actually, Amanda was being questioned as a witness, and the claim that her interrogation lasted 14 hours has widely been demonstrated to be untrue.

I’m struggling to find a single correct fact in this next paragraph:

Since then, the police investigation has been chaotic and bumbling. Take the alleged murder weapon, a cooking knife that belonged to Raffaele. Amanda’s DNA was found on the handle “” not surprising, since she used it for cooking “” and officials said Meredith’s DNA had been found on the blade. But new DNA evidence released shows that after 183 attempts to match the material on the knife to Meredith’s DNA, there is only a 1 percent chance that it is hers, making it unlikely that the knife is, in fact, the murder weapon.

At a recent hearing, Renato Biondo, from the forensic police, said, “We are confirming the reliability of the information collected from the scene of the crime and at the same time, the professionalism and excellence of our work.” Paolo Micheli wanted independent confirmation that the forensic scientists had followed all the correct procedures and their findings were completely accurate. Renato Biondo provided this confirmation unequivocably.

The crime scene wasn’t “violated”. The possibility of Meredith’s bra clasp being contaminated was excluded by Patrizia Stefanoni, and she also confirmed that Meredith’s DNA was on the blade and Amanda’s DNA was on handle of the knife that was hidden in a shoe box at Raffaele’s apartment.

The defence lawyers were putting on brave faces, but that hearing proved a truly disastrous day for Amanda and Raffaele. Raffaele had been placed in Meredith’s room, removing her bra, and Amanda’s DNA was on the knife that was almost certainly used to kill Meredith.

A knife that had been intentionally cleaned. A knife that was placed on Meredith’s bed sheet and that left a bloody trace on it. A knife that matches the wound on Meredith’s neck.

The claim that there is only 1 percent chance of the DNA on the blade belonging to Meredith is not surprisingly not attributed to anybody, let alone an independent forensic expert.

The following statement is outrageous and deeply offensive to the victim herself:

There is also no indication that Meredith was subjected to sexual violence..

This is a claim that has been frequently made by Amanda’s Knox supporters.

To suggest that there was consensual sexual activity between Meredith and Rudy defies belief. Meredith did not consent to any of the unspeakable horrors that were inflicted upon her that night.

Jan Goodwin follows a well-rehearsed and overused script when outlining the case for Amanda’s “innocence”:

Miraculously, Amanda did finally get a break when the Italian supreme court tossed out the results of her interrogation this past spring on the grounds that she had not been provided with a lawyer or interpreter.

Miraculously?!

What Amanda Knox’s supporters invariably forget to mention is that one of Amanda’s statements in which she admits to being at the cottage on the night of the murder was not “tossed” out by the Italian Supreme Court. Her letter to the police is almost identical in content to the statements that were not admitted as evidence. This incriminating letter was admitted as evidence.

Jan Goodwin should have written a balanced and objective article, not an anti-victim piece, and done some actual reading and research. She has instead written for MarieClaire what is essentially a free advertisement for the Free Amanda Knox Campaign.

She could have asked pertinent questions, such as why did Amanda deliberately and repeatedly lied to the police, or why did Amanda and Raffaele give not only conflicting witness statements, but also completely different accounts of where they were and what they were doing on the night of the murder.

But Jan Goodwin seemingly didn’t. And presumably MarieClaire’s editor paid her, regardless.

Posted by The Machine on 10/23/08 at 04:00 PM in News media & movies,  Hoaxers from 2007,  Paul Ciolino,  More hoaxers,  Hoaxers: media groups,  CBS Network,  Innocence Project

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Comments

A really terrible piece by Jan Goodwin, callous, sneering, and very sloppy.

Jan Goodwin has made a career out of writing books and short pieces on women in difficult places and, believe it or not, is generally quite respected.

Perhaps Jan Goodwin has not bothered to recognise that the vistim is ALSO A WOMAN.

And in an even more difficult place. In her grave.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 10/24/08 at 10:34 PM | #

Excellent job, The Machine. Thanks for setting the sorry record straight.

By the way, Marie Claire in the UK is owned by IPC Media, described on its website as “a leading UK consumer magazine publisher. Almost two in every three UK women and over 45% of UK men read an IPC magazine. That’s almost 27 million UK adults.”

IPC’s diverse print and digital portfolio offers something for everyone. Our 80 magazines include What’s on TV, Pick Me Up, Woman, Now, Marie Claire, In Style, Woman & Home, Ideal Home, Nuts, Wallpaper*, Country Life, The Field, Rugby World, Practical Boat Owner and Look, our latest high street fashion and celebrity weekly. Our digital properties include NME.com, the third largest commercial music website in the UK and housetohome.co.uk, the UK’s first homes portal. IPC’s brands are very simply at the heart of the UK’s cultural life.

Posted by Skeptical Bystander on 10/24/08 at 11:14 PM | #

How very callous of Jan Goodwin and how out of character. Jan Goodwin writes books on women’s rights as victims of atrocities, I have read several of them, and they were kind and compassionate and moved me. Meredith Kercher is a perfect example of the kind of victim Jan Goodwin normally tries to get exposure for, not Amanda Knox. Shame on her, this is really despicable.

Posted by Hattie on 10/25/08 at 03:00 PM | #
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