Amanda Knox: Life After the Crime That Wasn’t Hers

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit—and became a notorious tabloid story in the process. Though she was exonerated, it’s taken more than a decade for her to reclaim her identity and truly feel free.

Amanda’s new book, Free recounts how she survived prison, the mistakes she made and misadventures she had reintegrating into society, culminating in the untold story of her return to Italy and the extraordinary relationship she’s built with the man who sent her to prison.

Amanda tells the story of her personal growth and hard fought wisdom, recasting her public reckoning as a private reflection on the search for meaning and purpose that will speak to everyone persevering through hardship.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Sherman Show.
0:15.5	If you want to give this a little love, we are a 501C3 not-profit science education and research organization. Skeptic.com
0:21.7	slash donate. By the way, this latest issue is on crime and punishment. That's apropos of today's
0:28.6	topic because my guest... Yeah, did you... I know. Did you organize that? No, no, that just came about.
0:35.2	You hear my guest speaking now. Amanda Knox, she spent eight years on trial and four years in an Italian prison for a crime. She did not commit. And as a result, became a notorious tabloid story in the process. Here's what happened. Amanda, if you don't mind, I'll just get everybody up to speed, which is in your first book, which you were on for.
0:59.5	In the fall of 2007, the 20-year-old college co-ed left Seattle to steady abroad in Italy,
1:05.9	but her life was shattered when a roommate, Meredith Kircher, was murdered in their apartment in Perugia, Italy,
1:09.8	where a burglar named Rudy Gade broke into her cottage when no one was home.
1:11.4	When Meredith returned, Gide raped and killed her, then her cottage when no one was home. When Meredith returned,
1:16.9	Gadey raped and killed her, then fled the country. Amanda was not there. Gadee left his fingerprints and footprints in her blood, and he left his DNA in and on her body. The ammo of the
1:23.0	break-in matched his previous burglaries, and he was known to carry a knife.
1:28.1	He confessed to having been at the scene of the crime, and ultimately he was tried and
1:31.9	convicted for the murder, sort of, place closed.
1:35.8	Well, not quite.
1:37.2	An overzealous Italian prosecutor named Giuliani Magnini determined, based on nothing more
1:42.8	than is vivid and at times perverted, I would say, imagination, along with some so-called evidence concocted by police after they illegally interrogated Amanda for endless hours without an attorney present, that Meredith's murder was actually the result of a sex game crime gone wrong by Amanda and her one week
2:02.8	long paramour Raphael Solicito, Solicito, reinforced in his mind, that is this Italian
2:09.4	prosecutor named Giuliano Magnini, reinforced in his mind by the discovery that Amanda's nickname
2:14.8	was Foxy-Noxy. Oh my God, that is convicting evidence right there. It rhymes.
2:21.4	If the glove don't fit, you must acquit. Johnny Cochran famously said in the OJ trial,
2:26.4	in which every single person watching knows he did it. But it was such a clever, rhyming thing.
2:32.0	How do you get past that? All right, we're going to talk about that.
	...

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