Whenever she meets anyone new Amanda Knox goes on trial again. It’s not enough that she has twice been acquitted of murder. That didn’t exonerate her in the court of public opinion.
Knox has to continue to patiently defend herself 12 years after she was wrongfully convicted in Perugia in one of the most notorious trials of the past half-century.
Rudy Guede, the man who killed Meredith Kercher, is forgotten. Even after his early release from prison he gets none of the vilification that Knox, who was Kercher’s friend, has faced.
“The controversy, not the truth, is what people care about more,” Knox says.
She lives with hatred heaped on her for still existing.
Knox’s conviction, in the eyes of the law and public, depended almost exclusively on appearances, and it resulted in her serving four years in prison.
Despite Knox’s acquittal, there has been no #MeToo re-evaluation of how she became the scapegoat for a man’s crime. Instead, while the real Knox is told to disappear, our dramas don’t let “Foxy Knoxy” go.
It's pure “hypocrisy and cruelty”, she says.
Knox has criticised the film Stillwater, based on the Kercher murder, and the BBC drama Showtrial, about a female student arrested for murder in a “sex game gone wrong.”
This, when almost all violence against women is perpetrated by men, Knox says, is pure “misogynist fantasy.”
Knox’s hope is that by the time her daughter is old enough to be aware of the playground whispers about her mother she will have managed to win over some of the public jury.
“I want her to exist in a world that is going to be much kinder to her than it was to me,” Knox says. “And I’m trying to figure out how I can have a role in that.”
The “why don’t you disappear?” sentiment is strongest from the UK, which feels protective of Kercher’s family.
Often it is framed as a moral duty for Knox to suffer and be silent. She argues that for her to have a public voice is not dishonouring the memory of Kercher.
Knox has met Monica Lewinsky. “She also internalised a lot of self-blame. We ended up becoming the scapegoats for other people’s bad actions."
“Her advice to me has always been from a place of it having taken a long time to achieve a recognition of her humanity in the world."
The French interior minister said that 31 migrants had died and two were fighting for their lives in hospital. Another was thought to be missing at sea thetimes.co.uk/article/migran…
The death toll is the highest in a single incident involving migrants since the latest wave of attempted Channel crossing got under way two years ago, police said
More than 600 migrants including young children and babies made the perilous journey across the Channel in makeshift boats to arrive at Dungeness today thetimes.co.uk/article/childr…
Director Ridley Scott and costume designer Janty Yates tell The Times how they created the film’s wardrobe. thetimes.co.uk/article/the-fa…
“The dressing certainly promised to be interesting,” says Ridley Scott. “And the period the film covers — the Seventies, the Eighties and the Nineties — I went right through that lot because of my age. So it was very simple for me.”
Scott’s costume designer was his long-time collaborator Janty Yates. “Ridley and I would look at each other and go, ‘Well, we were there,’” she says, “because we are both ancient.” She laughs.
The TV presenter tells @Fhamiltontimes that she is still traumatised by the way police officers handled her ex-husband’s claim that she assaulted him. thetimes.co.uk/article/melani…
“The doorbell went and I answered the door, and they told me that they were there to arrest me. I was just, like, ‘You are joking.’ I was totally shocked. It felt like an out-of-body experience.
“I’m not a violent person, I’m not capable of it.”
It was the evening of November 12, 2013, and Sykes had shut herself in her kitchen after a fractious argument with Jack Cockings, her husband at the time. The couple, who had been married for six months, separated that night and later divorced.
A while back, the 5:2 diet acquired cult status. But new research finds that the 5:2 is hardly more effective than your GP’s traditional weight loss advice. thetimes.co.uk/article/the-5-…
The diet calls on people to restrict their intake of food and drink to just 500 to 600 calories on two non-consecutive days each week, roughly a quarter of the usual recommended amount.
Variations of the diet have been circulating for some time, under names such as the dodo diet (day on, day off), the ADF (alternate day fasting) and the on-off diet.
Exclusive: Former Conservative minister Mike Penning used House of Commons stationery while he was a justice minister to write a personal recommendation for a donor who had given him tens of thousands of pounds thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-m…
Sir Mike Penning wrote an open letter commending Jan Telensky and a company to which he is closely linked, without mentioning the sums he had contributed to him and his constituency party
Three weeks after the letter was written, Telensky gave Penning free tickets worth £500 to watch England get knocked out of the Rugby World Cup at Twickenham by Australia
Months earlier, Penning’s constituency party had received £10,000 from Telensky
In a letter to The Times, he says: "If you are possessed of an independent mind and are unassociated with the liberal/left, you will have more chance of winning the lottery than getting the job"
He describes the BBC as a “great, civilising force” which he would “die in a ditch to defend” but added it needed to be “saved from both itself and the frighteningly well-resourced streaming giants”