Curt Knox PR Manager David Marriott’s Legacy; Did He On Balance Help Or Hurt AK?

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Please see the new Part 4 above on further reading on the PR in the early days which is added in response to some emails.

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Ten years ago the original PMF and soon after TJMK came alive directly because of the excesses of the PR and the brutal effort being put into trying to stamp out truthful reporting in English.

Meredith was to be a non-person. Knox was to be the victim. Dirty tricks like this were proliferating.

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/lifetime_movie_included_a_serious_wrong_charge/

And now we can see how the dice were really being loaded against Knox’s own future, unnecessarily. The compassionate Mignini was offering her a way forward in 2007 by pleading that Meredith’s death was not intended.

It took several hard months of “educating” Knox by her inflammatory family and lawyers to turn Knox into a hater (see her book for a rare truthful part) and now we see the monster she has become and negative reactions resulting.

By the time Knox finishes defaming all 7.5 billion people on the planet she will be quite worn out. Best if she accepts her release was illegal and goes back to Italy gracefully, and serve out her term?

Commiserations to his family and friends.  However, it is a shame that David Marriott will be best remembered for sending a charter plane to Italy to secure Knox’ great escape.  The disrespect shown to the Kercher family and Italy, is what the Gogerty-Marriott misinformation & fake news PR will long be associated with in most people’s minds.

Hi KrissyG

Thanks for the reminder of the brokered private plane arrangement described in the British papers here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/30/knox-plane-standby-appeal

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/knox-has-private-jet-waiting-to-fly-her-back-home-court-told-26777567.html

There was a problem and this drew attention to it. So at the end of the day the private flight was abandoned and Knox & family left Italy for London post-haste on a commercial flight.

The problem was that it drew way too much attention to the bending of the appeal (in part by Greg Hampikian of the Innocence Project, as we were describing several weeks ago) and fears that the Supreme Court would issue an immediate stay on the release of AK and RS. 

It was widely known that the head of the Perugia courts’ criminal division Judge Chiari had been forced off the case in 2010 - he resigned and gave angry interviews.

It was widely known that Judge Hellman was not a criminal judge and had handled only one other murder case which also resulted in a fiasco.

It was widely known that Hellman had shown bias from the first day of the trial, that Prosecutor Comodi had publicly complained about bias, that the appeal showed mission creep (that’s why the outcome was later annulled) and that the jury had taken 12 hours to reach a verdict indicating quite a lot of internal unhappiness at the bending.

Even the defenses knew there was a very strong chance of an annulment and so Knox had to be raced off. Sollecito also took off out of Italy a short time later.

Tricky to keep them private, these court bendings…

Judge Hellman was edged into early retirement and in face of the ridicule did some weird sniping from the sidelines, even saying that yes the pair could indeed have done it. .

I don’t like to say it but I think AK looks ghastly in her recent appearances.

She just looks ready to scream.

As Andrew Hodges says in his book,‘she needs prison’.  Maybe certain others the same!

Hi DavidB.

Agreed. Knox’s morphing looks and demeanor are coming in for a lot of online comments. Under Daily Mail articles maybe 50 percent of them. 

This post is a detour from our VICE Media series (the one on the arch-demonizer and fake demonization Knox trying to exude compassion with real demonization victims).

I’d really recommend to scroll down here to the video, and to David Mulhearn’s new and very insightful essay, in which he gets into the quite real phenomenon of killer-groupies, the ones for whom a plainly guilty but defiant Knox 2.0 is the apple of their eye.

http://www.truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/how_a_mismanaged_and_disoriented_vice_media_abysmally_failed/

On Knox’s hurried flight out of Italy after Judge Hellman released her. According to the Independent (link, above):

‘Amanda Knox has a private jet waiting to fly her home to Seattle on Monday if she is acquitted of killing Meredith Kercher, her appeal hearing was told yesterday.

Giuliano Mignini, the chief prosecutor, claimed Knox (24) would immediately “escape” from Italian justice and flee abroad if she was acquitted.

Under the Italian judicial system, prosecutors would have the right to appeal in the Supreme Court in Rome, but lawyers fear they will not get the chance to do so.

“We know what will happen if you absolve. She will escape overseas and we won’t be able to do anything about it,” the chief prosecutor told the jury in the court in Perugia.’

As we know, after Hellmann’s egregious ‘acquittal’ and freeing of the pair, Knox escaped to the USA to evade justice for evermore.  Even if Judge Marasca had integrity and upheld the verdicts of Massei (trial) and Nencini (appeal) of guilty, she would still probably be hiding behind an ‘extradition battle’.

So yes, this is the FOAK-ers greatest fait accompli.  As Marriott was the first to meet her off the plane at Seattle, with Steve Moore ready to chauffeur her away, there is little doubt who arranged the super-fast exit out of Italy, no sooner than the Hellmann rabbit pulled out of the hat.

The success of the PR agencies in getting up every little piece of fake news about Knox no matter how trivial is vividly illustrated here in how all the mainstream papers are promoting her latest venture into minor celebrity-dom, disguised as a story about trendy #metoo ‘slut-shaming’.

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Here are images of Knox and Mariott at Seattle Airport on Knoxs return (first time they met); and at 5’40” in the YouTube you can hear Marriott.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvB3LHz8_mM

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KrissyG

Yes. Agreed. People here in the US still dont realize how blindingly obvious the bending of the Hellman court was. We knew. Everybody knew.

Even Knox knew. She was pretty sure in advance that she was going to be released. Cellmates in Capanne heard her say so.

Mignini wanted to take all of this to the Supreme Court to stop it, but his boss then (Galati who had just transferred from the Supreme Court ) told him they would win an appeal hands-down at Cassation.

As they did with the annullment. That was NOT a prosecution being vindictive about Knox (oh, and about Sollecito, anyone know that name?!). It was a prosecution required under the rules to take up judicial misbehavior with the Supreme Court.

Hellman was then censored by the Supreme Court and then kicked out by the Council of Magistrates. As you know Conti & Vecchiotti also took a roasting, at the Nencini court.

And yes again. Knox sure wasn’t going to hang around to help the Italian authorities to find the real killers (shades of Doug Preston, taking off like a rabbit).

Later Knox and Sollecito both did promise to make finding the killers a main task. How’s that going?!

Well it seems to have been reduced these days to mischaracterizations of both Guede and the array of real evidence.

Posts are coming up on how the pack attack on Meredith is a total given. Ask even the defense teams.

The role of PR in absolving murderers like WM3, Steven Avery, Adnan Syed and Ryan Ferguson continues apace. They on the other hand benefited from committing their crimes in America, so podcasts and documentaries digging up false theories and leads became quite lucrative.

Knox, however, much as the media and Innocence Project (TM) loves to amplify her ‘the medieval Italians persecuted me’ narrative, finds herself followed by the simple-minded who believe her obvious falsehoods and couldn’t conduct the simplest searches on the net to knowledgeably comment on the case.

@Ergon: there is a real pattern running through all of these cases.  It’s almost as though there is a PR masterclass in how to market your client so that the public pressurises the courts to overturn your client’s conviction, and how to market them as a bundle: film, tv, book, magazine.  The four ‘P’s of marketing:

- Product

- Packaging

- Placement

- Price

Seriously though, it is the cult of the personality.  Get Johny Depp to speak for you, jump on a victimhood bandwagon, turn up as key note speakers at heart-tugging Innocent Conferences.  Become a leading expert on prosecution and police misconduct.

Hi KrissyG and Ergon.

Sharp perceptions. That is what “good” PR does. But see if you might agree with this.

As the top post shows, the exceptional aggression and deep ignorance of the case and xenophobia that were Marriott’s rules-of-thumb have not left Knox with a good end-game. Not actually being exonerated, she is left at considerable and growing risk. Italy can so easily mow her down. 

Marriott in the view of some good PR exponents who have read & posted here broke a cardinal rule of PR: shade the truth, but never never go up 180 degrees against it. Marriott said he was proud to not know the facts of the case and to never have visited Italy or ever met Knox prior to the shots above.

But! As Finn MacCool long ago posted, here the devil is in the details, and as our wave of document acquisition and translation of the past several years shows the details Marriott & co never even knew are simply not pro-Knox.

Talking of Seattle, whither Steve Shay and Jonathan Martin and Candace Dempsey and Timothy Egan and Anne Bremner and Tom Wright and the hothead who owns and runs the West Seattle Herald? (And whither Knox herself at the WSH?)

We’d value some buzz.

Everything about Seattle I have always liked (I ran some Federal workshops there, actually in hotels right at that airport, and visited MicroSoft), and few US cities are more fun to cruise - well, were, until the traffic all gummed up. And the astonishingly beautiful Vancouver is just up the road.

Three times at least much of Seattle quite noticeably (even from afar) distanced itself from Knox who many or most think lacks class.

(1) Once when she was arrested and there was a muttering of “That figures”.

(2) Once when there was an FOA panel at Seattle University and Seattlites stayed away in droves, and half of those few who did attend quietly walked out.

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/today_an_obsessional_group_rant_about_no_evidence/

(3) Once when this craziness occurred.

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/fervent_knox_supporter_tom_wright_seemingly_strongarms_knox_high_schoo/

When his Seattle PR firm closed down, Marriott went to work for Allison & Partners, the Seattle branch of a San Francisco firm.

This image is the only reference to him on their site. Hmmm. Dear Seattle, is everybody there taking their meds?

Click for larger image.
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Ergon, you hit the nail on the head.

We suffer for having so much substance, unfortunately.
 
The masses have no interest in taking the time to read and absorb the evidence and see the big picture, all available here.

The bought PR has us out-played, as it knows how to capture the TV commercial length attention span. 

Once again I lament that we don’t have a major filmmaker to take up the story and reach the masses.
 
Where are you, Herzog, Moore, Morris, Burns . . . ?  Michael Kirk, how about a PBS Frontline episode?: “Justice Sold and Lost in Translation.”

Hi whatswisdom

Check out comment threads on Daily Mail etc? Those are low-information observers (so are we all on a lot of things) but for many or most what their gut is telling them about Knox aint nice.

Maybe its not brought out enough in the top post, how Marriott and Anne Bremner would spend half their time on the case calling reporters etc to roar and threaten. Marriott had Fischer running his “yellow journalists” campaign. My guess is that is all gone. With the mafia angle dangling, all power moves to us. See a list in my comment above of those in Seattle not heard from for a while now.

Film makers? I do like that. Check out the many True Crime YouTubes, pick some we can embed? We already have the Lifetime movie (hardly a Knox plus, RS was going to sue)(so whats new?!) and also the Andrea Vogt documentary which has had hundreds of thousands of looks. Now the mafia angle is alive, several of the US networks seem positive about revisiting the case. Check out SHAWN RECH? He already decimated one of our nemeses, fake detective Paul Ciolino.

http://deadline.com/2018/02/convicting-a-murderer-steven-avery-follow-up-documentary-filmmaker-shawn-rech-1202298462/

Today Italy’s populist parties of the right (with Guilia Bongiorno) and left might agree to combine to form a government.

President Mattarella gave the leaders, both pro-Trump, today’s deadline after which he will appoint his own person to lead.

https://www.thelocal.it/20180510/italy-five-star-movement-league-differences-government

We in the UN worked to get a myriad of good systems installed in all the countries. That is where they really all should go. Italy could really hum.

But the EC was of zero help. Ask the UK.

Italy needs a general compelling vision a few years out, and some adjustment to stop the Euro valuing it too high, and putting 3/4 of the economy under water as a result.

Many systems it does rather well. italians make great teams.

The UK has a floating currency, so at least not both hands are tied behind its back. But good systems?!  Think Titanic and National Health and the car industry…

Two weeks on this for everyone at high school, and the muddling around would stop. Just open everyone’s eyes.

Where next:

Or to next entry How The Public Relations Campaigns Misled Millions, To Society’s Great Cost

Or to previous entry Demonizations By Knox: Yet More Cowardly Aggression Against Italians