Amanda Knox Was Exonerated. That Doesn’t Mean She’s Free.

In Britain, once a suspect has been charged, the law forbids journalists from speculating on their guilt or innocence until a verdict is reached, said Lieve Gies, a media scholar at the University of Leicester who studied the case. But because this crime played out in Italy, she said, that rule did not apply. “In terms of tabloid journalism, I don’t want to say it was a godsend, but it was a case that could be reported on without limits,” Dr. Gies said.

Indeed, before police had even released Ms. Kercher’s last name, images from her Facebook page — including one of the last taken of her, dressed as a vampire for Halloween — were beamed around the world, Ms. Burleigh said. Reporters rummaged through the social media profiles of Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito, lifting “Foxy Knoxy” — a soccer nickname going back to third grade, said Ms. Knox’s best friend, Brett Lither — from Ms. Knox’s Myspace, along with a photo of her posing with an antique machine gun at a museum, and one of Mr. Sollecito dressed up as a mummy, a butcher knife in his hand.

“To this day, people are like, ‘She’s guilty, right?’” said Jonathan Martin, the investigations editor at The Seattle Times, Ms. Knox’s hometown paper, who covered the story from Seattle. “It’s amazing to me how powerful that stampede of early tabloid coverage — a lot of it leaked straight from the prosecution — was to shape the narrative.”

Ms. Knox became a kind of “vessel” onto which society could project its fears and judgments, as well as its pornographic fantasies, said Yvonne Jewkes, a criminology professor at the University of Bath. Ms. Knox was perceived as an unsophisticated American, loud and flamboyant, ignorant of Italian culture. An exhibitionist and slob, who brought strange men to the house. She was a sexual deviant, who competed with her mother for attention, as the tabloids suggested. She was a Karen, who had accused an innocent Black man of the crime.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/style/amanda-knox-ten-years-later.html