People often assume that the worst my moment of my life was that first guilty verdict, where I collapsed in the courtroom. Or that nothing could be worse than those years trapped in a cell. They’re wrong. The worst moment of my life was my interrogation. A thread:
I was 20, I was 3000 miles from home, my friend had just been killed, the killer was on the loose, and I spoke Italian maybe as well as a ten-year-old. I was confused and afraid.
In that state, a group of seasoned adults questioned me without an attorney for 53 hours over 5 days in a language I could barely speak. And they lied to me repeatedly. They told me I was a witness, that I was helping them. A lie.
They told me that Raffaele had contradicted my alibi. A lie. They said they had evidence that placed me at the crime scene that night. A lie.
They refused to believe my simple & true story that I’d been at Raffaele’s house that night. That I knew nothing. & so they engaged in a relentless campaign of lies & gaslighting. They isolated me and made me vulnerable.
They had tapped my phone & knew my mom was due to arrive in Italy the next day, that I would soon have an adult to protect me. That’s when they decided to break me. They’d recorded all previous “interviews,” but, conveniently, not this final session.
They kept me up overnight. They told me I had amnesia, that I was so traumatized by events I’d witnessed, that I’d repressed them. They shouted at me to remember, REMEMBER! They slapped me.
My phone was ringing on the table--it was my mom, she’d arrived in Italy--& they wouldn’t let me answer it. "You were there," they said. "If you just remember, everything will be fine."
They found a text-message on my phone that I’d sent to my boss, Patrick Lumumba. He’d given me the night off work that day in question, & I’d written him, in my broken Italian, “Ci vediamo piu tardi. Buona serata.”
That was my literal attempt to write “See you later. Good night.” This English idiom doesn’t exist in Italian. The cops interpreted it as a literal appointment I was making to see him later that night.
"You must have met him at the house. Remember! Remember the truth!" They made me feel insane. Like I couldn’t trust my own thoughts, my own memories. I started to believe them that I had amnesia, that I’d witnessed something horrific.
They wrote a statement for me, a confused and contradictory statement, that implicated my boss Patrick, and placed me at the scene of the crime. Shaking and tired and gaslit into submission, I signed it.
They congratulated each other & rushed off to arrest my boss. I was thrown in a cell. Hours later, I recanted that statement, said I couldn't stand by it, that I was confused, that it was all a jumble. They ignored me.
This was all before any forensic evidence had come back. When it did, two weeks later, it indicated a single perpetrator, Rudy Guede, whose DNA was inside & on Meredith Kercher’s body. Whose fingerprints and footprints were left in her blood.
Guede had even been arrested just days prior for breaking into a place to burglarize it, & he was found to be carrying a knife. But rather than admit they had been wrong, the authorities doubled down.
They twisted all available evidence to fit the incoherent statement they had coerced me into signing. That “false admission” was crucial in both my guilty convictions. & for years, I blamed myself for what happened that night.
My Italian was too poor, I told myself. I was unable to explain myself well. It was my fault they misunderstood me when I told them the truth. & THEY, too, blamed me for it, convicting me of slander against my boss, whose alibi proved the incoherence of that false admission.
To this day, people all over the internet blame me for that statement. They say I “falsely accused someone.” That even if I’m innocent, I’m a rotten, self-serving cunt who would throw another innocent man under the bus to save her own skin.
They say this about the worst moment of my life. About the time I was most terrified, most confused. About the time I was broken down by police twice my age who lied to me relentlessly to get a confession.
But there is a happy ending to this story. After my first conviction, I was contacted by a psychologist from New York named Saul Kassin. He asked me to write down everything I could remember about my interrogation & send it to him.
I did, and only then did he send me his research. I was shocked to find that what had happened to me was COMMON. That police the world over use similar techniques to break down suspects. That these techniques yield false confessions.
The Central Park Five were coerced into false admissions implicating each other. Marty Tankleff (@xoner8ed) was pressured into admitting to killing his own father after police lied to him. The list went on and on.
Suddenly, I no longer felt alone. I no longer felt like that interrogation had gone wrong because of me. I understood that from the beginning, I had no agency in that equation, that the police were in control.
That the police had abused their authority to everyone's detriment - to mine, to Raffaele’s, to the Kercher family’s.
Saul Kassin gave me a gift unlike any other I’ve ever received. He gave me the knowledge that I was not crazy, that I was not at fault for what happened during that interrogation, & that I was not alone in my suffering.
Right now, there is a bill in NY state awaiting legislative action, Bill S324, that would ban police from deception in the interrogation room. This is a crucial reform, for that deception, that gaslighting, is what yields false confessions.
& false confessions occur in 29% of the Innocence Project’s documented DNA exonerations. Everyone assumes they would never say something false when questioned. That only a criminal would "lie" when interrogated.
Trust me: you too can be made to feel crazy. You too can be broken down by police. You too could be made to implicate yourself, or another. & it would not be your fault.
Please follow Saul Kassin’s work, and read his excellent op-ed.
nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opi…
nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opi…
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