Amanda Knox is a writer, a new mother, and co-host of the podcast Labyrinths with her husband, Christopher Robinson. She has spent the past six years trying to reclaim her life, her story, and her freedom after she was wrongfully convicted of a murder she did not commit in Italy in 2009.
00:36:04.140In fact, in the very beginning, I had mentioned a character named I think his name was shaky.
00:36:11.020I think his nickname was shaky because I remember he was a sort of sketchy guy who liked to dance and hang out with Meredith and her friends who once tried to like take sort of forcefully take me home with him.
00:36:24.780And I raised the police's attention to that person.
00:36:28.100But of course, he had nothing to do with the crime.
00:36:30.080And I remember the moment when Rudy Gaudet's name was finally made public.
00:36:36.300It was after they had already found his fingerprints and footprints in her or fingerprints, at the very least, in her blood, in Meredith's blood at the crime scene.
00:36:45.360They they were able to process those fingerprints, identify him from having his, you know, long history of burglaries and identify this person and track him down.
00:36:56.300And there's this like really interesting sort of moment of timing where the police released Patrick Lumumba almost at the exact same time that they arrested Rudy Gaudet so that they had someone sort of a switcheroo that they didn't have to once again admit fault in a big way because here they were.
00:37:16.220And I remember sitting there in my prison cell watching the news as this happened, as Rudy Gaudet was being arrested in Germany, and I saw his face.
00:37:26.320I heard his name and I thought, that guy, the basketball guy, like that's the guy.
00:37:33.800Like, sure, I've seen him before, but it never occurred to me that he would do this.
00:37:38.800Of course, I didn't know about his history of criminality.
00:37:42.260And I had this like moment of like relief, even when they found him, because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is going to be over soon.
00:37:51.960They found out who really did it and that it wasn't over soon, of course.
00:37:58.160But boy, were you were you wrong on that?
00:38:00.160Up next, I'm going to ask Amanda about the lies the prosecutor was openly telling about her, the active misleading they did with the press to try to get people to believe that it was Amanda, all of which fell completely apart.
00:38:13.880We're going to do that right after this quick break, and we'll come back with Amanda Knox.
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00:39:34.160I mean, you could get disbarred for doing such a thing as a lawyer here.
00:39:37.000But this is just one of the examples, and I know that there are others, of the ways in which they try to unfairly portray you in the media.
00:39:43.840Yeah, and I discussed this on Labyrinth about media selection bias because I think there's this ongoing perception that even if I'm innocent, there must be something wrong with me, or this wrongful conviction must be my fault because no reasonable person would act the way that Amanda acted.
00:40:04.700And, you know, even as recently as Malcolm Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers, where he analyzes the case, and he, you know, from the very get-go is like, we know who did this crime.
00:40:16.860But he then goes on to say, well, the reason why Amanda was wrongly convicted was because she's ultimately an innocent person who acts guilty.
00:41:01.100And if anything, I was the one who had the least amount of agency in this in this equation.
00:41:06.160So, you know, when I think about the ways that even just the ways that they portrayed Meredith versus me, right?
00:41:16.300Like they acted like Meredith and I were two extreme opposites of the ideals of femininity.
00:41:24.640They turned this into a morality play about female sexuality and morality.
00:41:30.220They portrayed Meredith as this perfectly invisible, ideal, serious, studious, non-casual like person who would never, ever, ever just go out with boys or have fun or do anything like that.
00:41:54.140Well, of course, you don't have to be, you know, a studious person who never goes out and has fun to be a victim of a horrible crime on on the first place.
00:42:03.380And Meredith was not someone who didn't just like Meredith did like to go and hang out and have fun with friends and go dancing and have like casual, you know, relationships like this.
00:42:11.640That was her as well. And on the flip side, there was the portrayal of me as when in reality I was actually quite similar to Meredith as someone who was uninhibited and and lustful.
00:42:25.760And and at odds, like jealous of Meredith's purity and and everything depraved that you could accuse a woman of, particularly through her sexuality and using that as an excuse to say, well, if she's capable of all of this sex, she must also be capable of violence, very much playing into the Madonna horror dichotomy.
00:42:48.440It's how did they find out the number of sexual partners you had had?
00:42:52.300I know you've talked about it, but like, how did they know that?
00:42:56.020Yeah. After I was arrested, I was in prison.
00:43:01.760I was very uncomfortably being talked to by an official in the prison who would bring me into a private room every day and interrogate me about my sex life.
00:43:12.220And one day he accompanied me into the doctor's office where I was informed that I had tested positive for HIV and me thinking suddenly that I'm dying and my life is over was told by the vice comandante that I should think about and write down all of the people that I had ever had sex with in order to determine who had given me HIV.
00:43:35.980So I went right back into my cell, started journaling, crying, thinking that I was dying, wrote down every single person I had ever had sex with in my entire life and what kind of protection we had used.
00:43:48.540And the very next day, the police raided my cell and took every scrap of paper that I had ever written on.
00:43:58.100And then a few days later, it was released to the press.
00:44:07.580You make such a good point about Gladwell, who I love and who's, you know, he's on your side.
00:44:13.400But you're right. He's got it a little wrong.
00:44:16.740You know, and I in his defense, I get it because we didn't get to like the cartwheels.
00:44:20.000I'll ask you about the cartwheels because that's what people think about.
00:44:22.900But honestly, it wasn't it wasn't your behavior.
00:44:25.740People may not really fully understand the extent to which they have been manipulated by a dishonest prosecutor who is he's like the Mike Nyfong of Italy.
00:44:36.040You know, he Mike Nyfong is the guy who tried to put those three Duke University kids in jail for an alleged rape that they did not commit.
00:44:42.300And he knew it was false, but he didn't care.
00:44:44.740That's that's what I think Mignini is.
00:44:48.460And people don't realize at home how he tried to manipulate them from from the sink to he went out and said Amanda Knox went home and she bought bleach and she bleached that entire bathroom.
00:46:24.780Certainly the narrative was that you were a whore.
00:46:27.420The Foxy Noxy thing came from an innocent thing on your own social media about, as I understand it, you as a soccer player and how you were sly as a fox on the on the field.
00:46:38.140I've been attacked by the media in vicious ways, but nothing compares to this.
00:46:41.940Yeah, well, and it's interesting because I wasn't in a place to even defend myself at that point.
00:46:48.220I was locked away and at the mercy of what the police was releasing to the press.
00:46:54.160And I'm so glad that you brought up like the the claim that I must have cleaned up my DNA, because I remember interviewing Mark Olshaker on Labyrinths.
00:47:04.580And he said, if Raffaele and I could have somehow selectively cleaned up our DNA from that crime scene and left all of the other evidence there intact, we deserve a Nobel Prize for chemistry.
00:47:17.660It's just it's but it's interesting because that was like if you imagine the sort of confirmation bias, the mental gymnastics that my prosecutor had to do to account for the fact that here's this crime scene where there's Meredith's body, Meredith's DNA and Rudy Gaudet's DNA and fingerprints and footprints all over the space.
00:47:38.180And nothing implicating me or Raffaele, that has to be explained somehow.
00:47:42.940Well, in his mind, it was I was somehow able to clean up all evidence, all traces of me and in order to implicate Rudy Gaudet.
00:47:53.240And I think the thing that like I I mentioned this in the episode of Labyrinths, where I talk about Rudy Gaudet, because for me, like and maybe we'll get to this later, but like for me, I cannot get over the fact that because the police and the prosecution did not want to admit from the get go that there was no evidence against me and that and drop the charges and release me and Raffaele from prison.
00:48:18.460Instead of doing that, they actually pursued a case that let Meredith's actual rapist and murderer off the hook.
00:48:26.980Yeah, he was tried separately from me.
00:48:55.200It's like, well, the reason for that is because the police and prosecution were covering their butts.
00:49:00.140Yeah, and they allowed him they allowed him the ability to make this argument, this crazy argument, notwithstanding all the proof pointing to him and only him.
00:49:09.980Now, there was a knife and this is at the heart of the case.
00:49:13.320The prosecutor claimed that it had both Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle.
00:49:19.640It's one of the reasons why the trial went south for Amanda.
00:49:22.320And it's also one of the reasons why I don't believe this was an inadvertent mistake by this prosecutor who really was out to get her.
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00:51:18.460And this would lead to the stunning moment in in the first trial, January 16th, 2009, where you stood up to hear the verdict and you heard what?
00:51:39.460Well, gosh, there's so much to say about the knife that's not just the fact that independent experts eventually examined it during my appeals trial and discovered that, first of all, the result or the DNA trace that was linked to Meredith was so small that it actually couldn't be reliably linked to anyone.
00:51:59.240And furthermore, it was tested in the context of 50 other samples of Meredith's DNA.
00:52:05.240And so contamination couldn't be ruled out.
00:52:07.800But I think that, like, for me, it's astonishing that it got that far in the first place because to believe that this knife was used in the crime, you have to believe a number of very, very strange things.
00:52:23.600The knife didn't match Meredith's stab wounds.
00:52:26.540And so you have to believe that whoever, if I killed Meredith with that knife, I would have half stabbed her with the knife, but not all the way.
00:52:37.000It was a knife that was not found at the crime scene.
00:52:40.740It was pulled at random from a kitchen drawer in Raphael's apartment, which was across town, meaning that this crime, the way that this knife could have taken part in this crime is if I was carrying that knife with me between Raphael's apartment and my house.
00:52:58.680And the prosecution has always maintained that this was not a premeditated crime.
00:53:05.220This was a crime that just happened spontaneously in this sort of drug-fueled orgy atmosphere.
00:53:12.200But if that's true, then you are logically saying that I'm just carrying around a large kitchen knife in my bag with me for what reason?
00:53:55.360And when, eventually, independent experts looked at that evidence, they threw out any sort of link to Meredith or blood in the first place.
00:54:16.100Yeah, apparently it was such a trace amount, and they had tried to amp it up and amp it up, trying to get more and more and more through the same machine that had just processed 50 other Meredith's samples.
00:54:25.740And that's how they believe it was contaminated, as found by the highest court in Italy, eventually, that this evidence had been contaminated and could not be relied upon.
00:54:34.440But then there was the clasp of Meredith's bra.
00:54:37.220And that, seven weeks after her murder and the evidence was being processed, finally, this prosecutor announces he's got Raphael, he's got his DNA on Meredith's bra clasp, which had been detached somehow, I mean, presumably during the struggle, from her actual bra.
00:54:54.840And I don't, I mean, you tell me, Amanda, I look at this and somebody put that there.
00:55:00.040How else did Raphael's DNA, we know Raphael did not commit this crime or have anything to do with it.
00:55:04.720How did his DNA get on Meredith's bra clasp if it wasn't police misconduct?
00:55:09.800Well, not just Raphael's DNA, also the DNA of two unknown males were also found on that bra clasp.
00:55:16.020And, you know, all I could think of is that Raphael had been to my house, right?
00:55:24.660I think they even found the other trace of DNA that they found of Raphael in my house was from a cigarette stub that was in, like, an ashtray in the kitchen.
00:55:34.540And so it's not that Raphael's DNA wasn't at the house.
00:55:38.180It just wasn't in the crime scene where Meredith had been murdered.
00:55:41.460And it wasn't until the police, who were not very highly trained, were going in and out of that room, carrying pieces of evidence with them.
00:55:50.160Like, by the time they actually discovered this bra clasp, it was long after not just the forensic police had gone through that house, but also the regular police had gone through.
00:55:59.860Like, turning over mattresses, throwing clothes around, like, ripping apart all of the house, looking for not DNA evidence, but other kinds of evidence.
00:56:09.940And it was over 40 days that they were touching things and moving things around without gloves that they eventually then found the bra clasp under a rug somewhere completely different in Meredith's room and said,
00:56:25.340Oh, here's our link, proving that Raphael was there in the room that night.
00:56:30.520But, of course, there's no other trace of Raphael in that room.
00:56:34.720How could he have participated in sexual assault and murder and only left one trace along with two unknown males?
00:56:41.900Meanwhile, like, there's a huge semen stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith's body that the prosecution decided not to test and refused to test.
00:56:54.180Even when my defense and Raphael's defense asked for it to be tested, we're looking at a sexual assault case.
00:57:01.100Meredith was raped before she was murdered, and they refused to test it.
00:57:06.340And the only reason I can think of why is because they weren't interested in pursuing a case against a male.
00:57:15.340They were interested in pursuing a case against me, and I don't produce semen, so it wasn't relevant to them.
00:57:25.620The question I'm asking myself right now is, did you just have a terrible defense lawyer in the first trial?
00:57:30.460Like, why wouldn't all of this have been persuasive first time around?
00:57:35.360Well, that's a really good question because I don't think that I didn't have a good defense lawyer.
00:57:41.280I think my lawyers pursued a very, very staunch defense in this case.
00:57:46.440But what was happening was, you know, one of the things that I remember my lawyer saying was zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero.
00:57:57.460There was this sense that the prosecution was throwing the kitchen sink at this case.
00:58:02.460And so if there's all this stuff that is being thrown into this case and debated and talked about something, there must be some substance to it.
00:58:13.160There must be Amanda's guilt is in there somewhere.
00:58:15.320Even if we can't really determine which piece of evidence is the thing that does it, there's so much that's being thrown in there that there must be something to it.
00:58:23.820And indeed, this is what and that got me convicted the second time, you know, after I was acquitted and the DNA evidence in that case with the bra clasp and the knife was thrown out, I was still tried for that same crime using this same kitchen sink approach where it's like, oh, Amanda confessed to the crime and all these witnesses say maybe they saw her or maybe they didn't.
00:58:46.980Or how do you explain her? Or how do you explain her DNA in the bathroom? Like there's there was this sense of like this overwhelming if if the prosecution is so convinced, there must be something to it.
00:58:57.000And it wasn't like I think it was really, really hard for people to, first of all, put themselves in my shoes and imagine what it's like to be.
00:59:06.820In an interrogation room and coerced into signing statements as a 20 year old surrounded by adults speaking in a foreign language and without the assistance of a lawyer.
00:59:16.980But I think also they couldn't really understand how the case could have gone this far if there wasn't something to it.
00:59:26.900Well, especially back to our original point of the media, every headline telling them how awful you are.
00:59:32.280You're just a terrible person. You're a freak. You're a devil worshiper.
00:59:35.320You're I mean, just stuff completely made up. A massive manipulation was taking place by the media, of the media, by the prosecutor, of the people.
00:59:47.340And people need to get smart. You know, they have to be their own advocates when it comes to information consumption.
00:59:53.820If you want to willingly jump in and believe the tabloid headlines, just know what you're being fed.
00:59:59.120You know, it's garbage in, garbage out. It remains such to this day.
01:00:03.060So just the quick without getting into the lengthy procedural stuff.
01:00:06.480I mean, so you were found guilty on nightmare. Then miraculously, it was reversed.
01:00:12.420Yay. That's what we wanted. You were you got to fly home to Seattle.
01:00:15.840It was like, thank God this horrible nightmare is over. I'm done. Whatever.
01:00:19.440And then the innocence was reversed. It was overturned.
01:00:23.120A new trial was ordered and you were found guilty again.
01:00:27.440So this is your second time being found guilty.
01:00:29.960And then thank God that guilty, that conviction was reversed again by Italy's highest court, this time for good.
01:00:38.980And the court cited errors and omissions by the prosecutor, sensational failures by the investigator and his helpers and contaminated evidence.
01:00:51.820I mean, ultimately, they saw what went on here and declared you not just not guilty, but you and Raffaele innocent that you did not commit this crime, which is huge.
01:01:04.100I mean, in Italy's defense, that is something we don't do here.
01:01:07.440And, you know, I'm sure a lot of people would like to see it.
01:01:10.520Absolutely. And it's something that the Supreme Court never does.
01:01:13.480That's why that clip at the very beginning, when you showed me reacting to them, it was because that wasn't even something that I dreamed was possible.
01:01:22.760And of course, it's within their power, but it is such a rare thing for the Supreme Court to not just overturn a wrongful conviction, but to definitively acquit someone.
01:01:32.860I'm really glad you talked about the media, because I think that, you know, like you said, to this day, we find criminal trials becoming politicized.
01:01:43.760And instead of the media doing its job, which is to hold authorities and power to account, to hold them to a higher standard, to the truth, we instead find media who are selling us stories that we want to hear.
01:01:57.820And that is the reason why I got into journalism myself, the reason why I'm an independent journalist who, you know, only has I the reason I have a podcast is because I have subscribers who believe in my work, like go to patreon.com slash Knox Robinson and you can do it.
01:02:15.660But like, this is like, I'm not, you know, like, this is a world where you, you should, we all need to be a little more media literate, because the media is not doing what it's intended to do.
01:02:31.820It is selling a story and it's going to sell the story that makes the most money, not the story that is the most truthful.
01:02:40.120And that's true in mainstream media and not just tabloids.
01:02:59.000It was in the mainstream, these characterizations of you.
01:03:03.000And that leads me to the unfortunate moment that you had with Chris Cuomo, who continued the character assassination in a bizarre interview he did with you.
01:03:23.660And now it looks particularly bad knowing that he's been publicly accused of sexually harassing his former executive producer, of being such a bully to his female executive producer, a different woman, that she was forced to leave the show.
01:03:36.420And now we have multiple allegations in the news today about him actively campaigning against the women who accused his brother, Andrew Cuomo.
01:03:45.060CNN at this moment is reviewing his future at the company.
01:03:48.240But here he is interviewing you in 2013, fresh off of all of this.
01:03:52.300This is their theory, that you went in there for some kind of freaky sexual activity that went wrong and your roommate wound up dying.
01:04:34.040You know, at the time, it's interesting, because at the time, I was putting up with a lot of that kind of thing from media.
01:04:41.540I've learned a lot since then, and a lot of times people have said to me, you know, I have to ask you these, quote, hard questions because it's what's good for you.
01:04:51.300You should have the chance to respond.
01:04:55.160And Chris Cuomo, among other people, said this to me as a sort of justification for pursuing this line of questioning towards me and questioning me in a frankly humiliating way.
01:05:10.480And the thing that I've realized now as a journalist myself is that he didn't actually have to pursue that line of questioning.
01:05:18.800He could have instead called out that theory in the first place because, one, what my sexuality is ultimately has nothing to do with the crime.
01:05:28.620There was no evidence that put me, that placed me at the crime scene.
01:05:32.100So why is my sexuality being the thing that's on trial?
01:05:35.420And instead, I thought that this was an opportunity to point out that there is a whole lot of smoke that is deeply irresponsible and is the deeply irresponsible storytelling that gets in the way of justice.
01:05:52.500So, you know, when I think about the kinds of like the way that I interview people on Labyrinths, I know what the stories are about them.
01:06:01.440What interests me is the story that you can unearth that is true and just and puts the person who you're looking at, gives them a sense of voice and ownership over their own story.
01:06:14.480The way that I was questioned in that interview was, again, putting me, making me have to respond to other people's stories about me instead of giving me the opportunity to tell my own story.
01:06:26.780Which he would have known, which he would have known with just a minor bit of homework, had absolutely no factual basis.
01:06:32.960There was nothing to it and there never had been.
01:06:35.440It would take you about two minutes of a Google search to know that.
01:06:39.360I believe what he was trying to do was gin up a sexy moment of him pushing this beautiful, smart, famous woman on, you know, her sex life and whether it's deviant in a way that he thought would get clicks or eyeballs or generate something good for him.
01:07:14.660He was I don't know if he was trying to embarrass you, but he was trying to promote himself at your expense, just like everyone before him had done to you so many times.
01:07:23.600And presenting it to me as the opportunity to address it head on, I think was, when I look back on it now, disingenuous because it's, again, not asking me to talk about the way that I was wrongly portrayed and how my sexuality was used to vilify me.
01:07:46.660It was instead putting me on the spot and asking me to sort of respond to what was presented as a kind of legitimate question and a legitimate reason to suspect me.
01:07:59.180So, you know, tone, Amanda, I mean, the tone, right?
01:08:01.840Like an insensitive question, but it's got to be like just the way you approach somebody who's been victimized the way you have.
01:08:09.040Whether you want to call yourself a victim or not, you've been victimized.
01:08:12.120Raffaele has to Meredith, obviously, is not that way.
01:08:16.660You know, this is I remember when I interviewed Tara Reid, Joe Biden's accuser.
01:08:19.420She said she gave the interview to me because she wanted somebody who was, quote, trauma informed.
01:08:23.980And I don't know whether Tara Reid was telling the truth about Joe Biden or not, but I understood she was making the allegations and how to treat somebody like that respectfully while asking about their story and sensitively.
01:08:35.080Right. And being careful, being ginger while still being a good reporter.
01:08:39.220And it's no wonder she had turned down CNN and gee, no wonder why she turned on Chris Wallace.
01:08:45.340I just feel like reporters that that was about him.
01:08:49.140And too often they make it about themselves in their pocketbooks and they have no thought for the pain that they continue to inflict on innocent people like you.
01:08:57.280So it goes on. You know, I wonder what you saw, what you thought when you saw like the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and all the jumping the gun about him.
01:09:06.900You know, we had so many press errors.
01:09:09.760The Kyle Rittenhouse trial, I mean, I think I have a sort of unpopular opinion from, you know, I run in liberal circles and I do a lot of social justice.
01:09:19.460But I do think that like people really wanted Kyle Rittenhouse to be a villain and they weren't a lot of people weren't willing to take the evidence of the case seriously.
01:09:32.240And instead, we're trying to convict him based upon us, like their interpretation of his character.
01:09:38.960And I think it was radically, radically irresponsible of the prosecutor to charge him with murder in the first place, because, you know, why like this?
01:09:47.720This was not a murder case. If you don't like, you know, there there's an interesting discussion to be had about like, OK, if you walk into a really highly charged emotional space that's uncontrolled and you walk into that space with a gun, are you provoking an attack?
01:10:03.360And I can see from the perspective of of his, you know, the people who were shot that, like, yeah, if you see someone, you hear shots around and you see a guy with a gun, you might think, oh, my gosh, I got to stop the shooter from shooting people.
01:10:15.080But that doesn't mean that Kyle Rittenhouse did not have the right to defend himself if he was not shooting people.
01:10:21.760And if you don't like the way that the laws are written, then you like if you don't like the self-defense law, then you can you can go to your legislature and say that you don't believe in self-defense.
01:10:32.040But like, I think that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, there was so much focus on irrelevant information and character assassination instead of the specific actions that led up to this tragic moment, which isn't to say that, like, I think that Kyle Rittenhouse should be celebrated as a hero either, because, you know, that's, again, playing him as a political football.
01:10:53.940He's a kid who made a mistake, but he doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison for it.
01:10:58.760Yeah, there's some similarities in the cases in that, you know, he didn't have quite as much coverage as you did.
01:11:05.040And his his story didn't go on as long.
01:11:06.980But he had the president of the United States, now president, then candidate, calling him a white supremacist.
01:11:12.140I mean, talk about poisoning the jury pool.
01:11:31.380And then they all did the OK sign, which Kyle Rittenhouse, his lawyers presented to the judge and the prosecution had nothing to debunk it.
01:11:46.060The Anti-Defamation League apparently did an investigation.
01:11:48.200The prosecutors looked at all of his cell phones, all of his social media, nothing, didn't follow a white supremacist, didn't know a white supremacist.
01:12:10.620And also, I would say that, like, whether or not he knows that he was doing an OK sign or a white supremacist sign is ultimately irrelevant in the same way that, like, if I were a professional dominatrix at the time that Meredith was murdered, it also would not have made a difference.
01:12:28.360It's irrelevant to the question of whether or not he's guilty of murder.
01:13:12.900So I wanted to ask you on the subject, because you, as you point out, you travel in social justice circles, and I know you've connected with the Innocence Project, which is brilliant.
01:13:55.120Democrats and Republicans need to pay attention because the way it was and the way Biden wants it to be.
01:13:59.640Mr. Biden wants it to be is no right to counsel, no right to cross examination, no right to discovery.
01:14:05.440You get tried in front of a kangaroo court stacked with, quote, victims rights advocates and not like an independent body who might be open minded to the fact that you might not be accused.
01:14:16.460And if you lose as a young man, you're expelled.
01:14:26.940So I'm not actually familiar with what Biden is doing currently.
01:14:29.900But what I can say about this is I remember at the very beginning of the Me Too movement, which I do think was an incredibly important moment of like reckoning with the fact that this happens over and over and over again to young or to women in general, not even just young women.
01:14:44.540But a lot on college campuses is I remember my friend, Brian Banks, who tweeted like, yes, you know, we need to be taking these accusations really seriously and doing what we can to prevent sexual assault from happening.
01:14:58.660But also here I am, a young man who was wrongly accused of sexual assault based solely on a young woman's accusation.
01:15:07.560And I went to prison and for that crime.
01:15:13.140Like due process still is incredibly important.
01:15:16.140And while we need to take sexual assault accusations extremely seriously, that does not mean that we don't take sexual assault accusations for the person who's being accused not seriously.
01:15:28.880Like it there is a difficult balancing act of not just fairness, but also safety that needs to be brought into consideration.
01:15:36.820And we can't pretend that if someone who is accused, that means they're necessarily guilty.
01:15:43.560You are living proof that when due process starts getting eroded in the name of something, right, prosecutorial zeal, a desire by the prosecution to be loved by the community for having made an arrest.
01:15:58.640Or now, you know, you know, it could be different things from pushing of other cultural agendas.
01:16:04.120It's it can be devastating, unfairly devastating on the person targeted.
01:16:08.400And we just can't start throwing away lives in the name of causes.
01:16:12.640You know, there's a reason we want the justice system to to follow the procedures we put in place long, long ago.
01:16:18.100That's the only way we can count on it to work.
01:16:20.580Well, that's why I think that sexual education is so important, because like one of the reasons why these things happen, especially on college campuses, is because these are highly charged sexual environments with young people who don't have a ton of experience sexually, who are who are, you know, pushing boundaries for the first time, exploring themselves and others.
01:16:41.720And of course, there are going to be slip ups and mistakes on both sides in terms of communication, both physical and and verbal.
01:16:49.460So I think that these are complex situations that require us to have sophisticated conversations about them instead of treating them as black and white narratives.
01:17:26.020I mean, I see you because I see you being very generous toward any everybody involved in the case, even Rudy, even Rudy, who's now out of prison and stirring up trouble again.
01:17:35.220He's trying to bring you back into it, pointing the finger at you, which we all know is nonsense.
01:17:40.040I don't know if I could find it in me to be generous toward Mignani.
01:17:42.700Yeah, the biggest thing for me has always been wanting to understand why, why this happened to me and why these things happen.
01:17:52.040And I don't find like the more I I sort of understand the way human minds work, the less impulse I have to just like to hate people or anything.
01:18:02.620And it's more I get a sense of like, OK, I understand why you think you did the right thing in that moment.
01:18:11.900But I the next step beyond that is, can we then arrive at a place of reconciling the truth that may be something that makes someone have to reevaluate themselves as a human being?
01:18:26.680And that's tricky. I mean, that is the ultimate labyrinth is you believe that you are one thing and you turn out to be another.
01:18:35.100And someone tries to point that out to you.
01:18:36.940And I, you know, I as someone who has been a victim of the criminal justice system and also an indirect victim of crime, like I understand that these things are complicated.
01:18:46.640And the the most important thing that we can do when someone is hurt, when someone is harmed is to acknowledge that harm.
01:18:53.700But of course, that means that we have to reevaluate ourselves and our actions in light of new evidence.
01:19:44.480Well, it's a complicated one. I have a whole episode of Labyrinths called The Forgotten Killer,
01:19:48.620where I discuss him being released from prison and never having been found fully accountable for his crimes and also for my name to be the name that is most associated with his crime.
01:20:03.880So first of all, I have to to point my gaze, my critical gaze on the tabloid media who has decided to give a platform to a rapist and murderer in order for him to continue to harm others by lying and allowing other peoples to take responsibility for his crime.
01:20:23.480So shame on the son, shame on Nick Pisa for the platforming and amplifying his lies, damaging my reputation and honestly just putting the Kircher family through yet more, you know, loops of pain like this, that shame on them.
01:20:41.500But for Rudy Gaudet, I honestly have to say that, like, I was almost rooting for him a little bit, like here's someone who spent 13 years in prison.
01:20:53.160I had hoped that he had rehabilitated in some kind of capacity. And while I could, you know, he has over the years, ever since he was arrested, taken the opportunity of the prosecution's unfair gaze on me and use that, exploited that opportunity in order to not be fully held accountable for his actions.
01:21:16.740I thought that if he had more time and distance from his crimes, that he would have had a more mature response.
01:21:24.560And instead, I believe that he's just continuing to do what he's done since the day he was arrested, which is to exploit the way that this case has been misrepresented and and to try to continue to have me be taken,
01:21:40.140to have me take the burden of his crimes onto my life so that he can continue on with his as if nothing's wrong.
01:21:48.980So, so glad you are out there speaking about it because you have a much bigger microphone than he does and people need to hear your message.
01:21:59.280The Kircher family, I understand you have reached out to them.
01:22:04.380Um, in various ways and various times over the years, it's a, it's a delicate issue, right? Because I, as far as I know, they do still associate me with Meredith's death in some way or another.
01:22:19.620And that's not their fault in the sense that like, too, they were misled, too.
01:22:24.540And it's a very, very difficult thing to look at objectively when it's someone that you lost that you care about so much.
01:22:31.760And so I have let them know through various channels that I am, I understand, I understand I, that there's this great potential for healing if we can connect and grieve about this incredible injustice and tragedy that links us forever.
01:22:51.320Um, that said, I also don't want to put them on the spot and I'm, I'm always hesitant to talk about this when people ask me because I don't want to put them on the spot and make them feel like they have to respond to me.
01:23:02.740That is not the way that you achieve healing.
01:23:05.920So, um, you know, I'm, I want them to know that I'm there and ready whenever they are ready.
01:23:13.920I wonder if it's even harder for someone to get past their beliefs in a situation like this, when the imprint that was made on them happened during their most vulnerable time of life, you know, when they were at their weakest, hurting their worst.
01:23:27.720That's when, you know, this prosecutor, the press misled them so severely, all the information pointing in the wrong direction.
01:23:36.140It's probably even harder to come back to stasis where you can take in truth and see, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff.
01:23:43.540Um, when, when it, you know, the damage that was done to you was done in, in those circumstances.
01:23:50.740You know, it's actually a really fascinating theory because they call that like cognitive opening and, um, you know, that's, that's something that they talk about with like the radicalization of people to, um, terrorism where something bad happens to them.
01:24:04.980Some tragedy happens to a person like a sister or a daughter dies and suddenly your mind, like your, your sort of feeling of security and place and, and your foundations in, in the world are shook.
01:24:19.080And you then latch on to a new ideology because it sort of gives you a new sense of purpose and, um, stability.
01:24:29.440And I think you're, you're maybe right that in that moment of intense vulnerability, they latched on to the ideology that the prosecution put forth to them, which is that I am an evil whore who was jealous of their daughter and murdered her for it.
01:24:47.060And it's like, the truth is right there.
01:24:50.340And I think once they come to terms with it, they'll, they'll somehow feel better.
01:24:56.320I bet it would be a nice moment for the two of you like to come together because you were her friend.
01:25:00.800I'm sure she cared for you and you cared for her and that all that gets lost entirely.
01:25:13.520Um, and I, I always appreciate it when someone tells me like, I'm sorry, um, your friend was lost because that's something that not a lot of people say to me.
01:25:22.760Like, I'm sorry that your friend was murdered that way.
01:25:26.400Um, and I do look forward to the day that I get to visit her grave.
01:25:32.980I just don't want to do that without the permission of her family.
01:25:36.580And so I'm, that's something that remains, uh, a, a deep desire and goal for me.
01:25:46.020You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and I, and I thinking about everything you've been through.
01:25:52.120It's like, in a way you were given a huge hefty gift of wisdom, wisdom early in your life, you know, like you learn so much about police and law enforcement and, you know, the justice system, um, media about human nature.
01:26:14.820But it makes me want to ask you whether, like, if you could undo, of course you would undo what happened in Meredith, but if you could undo what happened to you, would you?
01:26:26.080You know, that is a question that I never ask myself because none of us ever, ever, ever get to choose that.
01:26:35.560And instead, I think my goal, um, with my, my life and also my, on my work now with labyrinths is to look at how, when we are at our most lost, how do we find our way out and what do we gain in the process?
01:26:51.160Because, of course, there is the opportunity to lose so much, but there's also so much to gain in whatever struggle that you are going through.
01:27:01.500Post-traumatic growth is a real thing, just as much as post-traumatic stress is.
01:27:06.820And we all have the ability with a sort of mindfulness to examine whatever it is that life throws at us and try to make the best out of it.
01:27:16.380Um, and I'm always, always, always fascinated by the stories of people who similarly find themselves in different situations of feeling lost or the existential crisis of their life isn't what they thought it was going to be.
01:27:31.520Um, it's, it's great to hear you say that.
01:27:34.340I completely agree with you, but it's, it's great too, to see, you know, people, you get upset, you lose a job or you don't get that house you really wanted or what, whatever it is.
01:27:44.120Like, have you been convicted of murder when you didn't do it and sat in a foreign country thinking, I will never get out of here.
01:28:02.440When you look back on it, you know, what do you, what would you say was the lowest moment?
01:28:07.080Was it when you heard guilty in Italian or was it a different time, like sitting back in the prison cell?
01:28:13.220No, the scariest, scariest moment was in that interrogation room when I was made to, I was, I started to doubt my own sanity.
01:28:24.580That was the scariest moment for me in this entire process.
01:28:28.340It was the one where I felt the most vulnerable and, um, and then years later, I still felt a ton of self-blame until someone finally presented me with the actual truth about coercive interrogation techniques.
01:28:45.340Like the, I think the thing that makes innocent people so vulnerable to wrongful conviction is the idea of being wrongly convicted is not on our radar.
01:28:55.600Like we'll, like, we'll, our minds will come up with any other explanation for why this bad thing is happening to us, including self-blame.
01:29:03.460And especially when the world is blaming you, it's very easily, easy to believe the rest of the world that you're just, there's something wrong with you.
01:29:10.860And I'm really grateful to those who are dedicating all like their careers to studying this and revealing the truth about these, these processes.
01:29:20.440And in the meantime, like, you know, I'm not one to compare tragedies because I can't tell you, like I interviewed an, a ton of women for labyrinths about infertility and how they had lived their whole lives knowing that they were going to be parents.
01:29:38.860And suddenly they were faced with the realization that, oh my gosh, I'm struggling with this.
01:29:44.920And oh my gosh, am I ever, is it ever going to happen?
01:29:47.280And how you have to retell yourself who you are in light of these kinds of struggles is real.
01:29:55.200And, um, and is like some of those interviews that I had with those women are some of the most emotionally impactful interviews that I've ever had with people.
01:31:10.640Um, when he started, when he became friends with me, we were friends at first, like other people would come up to him and ask him, like, do you think she did it or didn't she do it?
01:31:18.560And he was like, look, I'm not interested in that lens through which to view her.
01:31:22.560I'm interested in this person that I met like a regular person and how we interact.
01:31:27.480And, of course, eventually when we started dating officially and people noticed, um, and started photoshopping knives into pictures of him and making claims about what kind of person he was to even associate with me, he did eventually do the Google search and read, um, read all the case, you know, the case files and read my book and do all the research so he could be informed.
01:31:48.920But that wasn't the lens through which he first viewed me.
01:31:53.320And it's been, you know, that's the ongoing struggle.
01:31:56.360Like, I am, for better or for worse, for worse, defined by a crime that I had nothing to do with.
01:32:05.200I am defined by someone else's horrific actions.
01:32:09.100And as much as I try to put good work out into the world, to this day, that is not what people know me for.
01:32:16.660And so that's, that's sort of my ongoing struggle is trying to acknowledge my experience and put my perspective to good work and not allow others to use my experience and exploit my story for their own ends and at my expense.
01:32:35.580Yeah, I know, I'm, I, Raphael, you've spoken publicly about the same feelings for him and difficulties he's faced because of the media storm and the unfair conviction.
01:32:45.560And, um, I loved what the New York Times, I will, I'll give a shout out to the New York Times, what they said about you in, in doing the story.
01:32:53.180I think it was about the birth of your daughter, but they were saying Amanda Knox's legal purgatory has ended.
01:32:58.000Her cultural purgatory has not, and it needs to, I mean, you're not the only one who should be fighting for truth here.
01:33:06.640The people who put you in this position, um, which includes the media need to do their part and not, and certainly not pile on and continue the abuse.
01:33:16.460But to, to say what we know is true, which is you had nothing to do with this crime.
01:33:22.920He's served a sentence that was rather close to a slap on the wrist.
01:33:27.080And what I pray for now is for people to realize that for you to have health and wellness and, and many more children, if that's what you want, keep telling your story and keep helping others.
01:33:37.600I feel like there's a reason you've been through this and I feel like we're all starting to see what it is.