Thread by @amandaknox

It’s #InternationalWomensDay, and I’m thinking about the women who’ve had my back, but also the ones who haven’t. I’d like to share with you two stories about casual cruelty from other women through the lens of my wrongful conviction. One of them has a twist ending. /🧵

I’m not a huge fan of murder mystery thrillers (shocker, I know). But I’m even less a fan when Foxy Knoxy pops up as shorthand for “weirdo slutty killer” in fiction, like it does in the latest book by Paula Hawkins, author of the #1 NYT bestseller The Girl on the Train.

“There was something about that girl, something off. Weaselly. Pretty, sharp-toothed. Sexually available.” Those lines are from Hawkins’ book Slow Fire Burning. Here’s the full paragraph. To be frank, reading that felt shitty. I’d like to take you through a close reading of why.

Some context: the narrator is revealing the thoughts of Carla, who is suspiciously eyeing another character named Laura, or “Mad Laura” as she’s called. The book opens with Laura cleaning blood off herself. Is she guilty of the murder at the center of this plot?

Even if she’s innocent, Laura, by her own admission, suffers from “low self worth . . . hypersexuality, poor impulse control, inappropriate social behavior, aggressive outbursts, [&] short-term memory lapses.”

In reviewing the book for the @Washingtonpost, @MaureenCorrigan adds that Laura displays the further sins of "envy and covetousness." I’m not ashamed to have felt a bit of schadenfreude reading that review… wapo.st/3HSRhbY

…because I was called all of these things. Hypersexual, weaselly (foxy), lacking in impulse control, prone to outbursts, envious of my roommate. Perhaps the most insidious adjective used to slander me, though, was the word “off.”

It’s such a vague, catchall attack, and it’s often used against the wrongly convicted to displace blame from the police & prosecutors who wield all the power, and put the blame onto their victims, the accused. If these victims are “off,” it’s their own fault for being suspicious.

But Paula Hawkins isn't content to just create a character that happens to exhibit all the negative traits I was accused of having. That alone would have called “Foxy Knoxy” to mind. Hawkins felt the need to go further.

“She put Carla in mind of that cartwheeling young woman who’d been all over the newspapers a few years back, the one who murdered her friend.” ...There’s a lot wrong with this.

First, there’s that fictional cartwheel I never did, that lie used to slander me, which keeps getting trotted out. Then there’s the phrase “who’d been all over the newspapers,” a formulation which has always bothered me.

It’s like when people say, “Amanda Knox made headlines for a decade.” No, I didn’t. The Daily Mail made headlines. Journalists made headlines. I made nothing. I wasn’t all over the newspapers; they were all over me, and I had no legal recourse to stop them.

And worst of all…”the one who murdered her friend.” Even fictional characters hate me for something I didn't do!

To be fair, the character Carla immediately follows that up with, “Or didn’t murder her friend?” Which is better, but still terrible. The presumption of guilt comes first with a follow-up “maybe she’s innocent?” Like Carla couldn’t be bothered to find out.

It’s as if the guilt or innocence of this cartwheeling young woman doesn’t really matter to Carla. Either way, she’s “off” and “sexually available.” And if it wasn’t crystal clear that she was thinking about me, well, Hawkins felt the need to spell it out even further.

“Somewhere in France? No, Italy. Perugia, that was it.” France? No, you’re thinking of a totally different case, the one with Matt Damon’s daughter.

https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746

At this point, Hawkins has effectively subtweet slandered me through the voice of her character, not explicitly naming me (for legal reasons?) but making it absolutely clear Carla is thinking about me.

But isn’t Carla self-aware here? Her next thought is: “Jesus, what on earth was she thinking about now? She knew almost nothing about THIS girl.” (caps=ital). That’s good, right? Carla is doubting her own judgments of Laura…

But that italicized THIS implies that while she knows next to nothing about THIS girl, Laura, she DOES KNOW something about Amanda Knox, that cartwheeling slut who maybe murdered her friend?

What does Carla actually know about Laura? “In fact, the only thing she did know was that in her spare time [Laura] visited old ladies to help them with their shopping. And here was Carla, casting her as one of the Manson family.”

Here’s a nice moment of self-reflection, Carla recognizing her impulse to judge based on little information, when in fact the only real information she has is positive. If only Carla, and by extension Paula Hawkins, had given me that same courtesy.

I make it a practice to give people the maximum benefit of the doubt. So what’s the best case scenario here? Well, Carla isn’t a likable character. In fact, she’s the real killer! (Sorry, IDGAF about spoilers at this point).

jenryland.com/spoilers-for-a…

Could it be that Hawkins is intentionally painting Carla as the kind of judgmental and lazy person who casually absorbed slanderous coverage of me and can’t be bothered to learn of my innocence? Carla is supposed to be terrible; that’s why she’s espousing this harmful view of me.

I wish I could believe that. The problem is, Hawkins just uses me as a prop here either way. She invokes me as a figure to represent sluttiness, offness, suspicion, cunning, and guilt in the mind of her character, and doesn’t bother to correct that slanderous depiction of me.

Even if her goal was to make her character, Carla, look bad, Hawkins ends up further propagating a different character, Foxy Knoxy. She ends up adding a few more turds to the pile of shit I’ve been trying to climb out from under since 2007.

And she does so to a massive readership. She’s one of the most successful thriller writers of the last decade. And here’s the kicker: she didn’t have to reference me at all! Cut that paragraph and the book is virtually the same.

She went out of her way to blow on the embers of that dying myth, Foxy Knoxy, when she could have left it to smolder, or even poured water on it.

The irony is almost painful here, that in showing her character Carla to be self-aware of her lazy judgmental attitude toward Laura, another fictional character, Hawkins herself perpetuates a false, lazy, and judgmental narrative about me, a real person.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think Hawkins was trying to hurt me. I don’t think she ever imagined I would read that paragraph. I think it never crossed her mind that she might not only affect my reputation, but hurt me personally.

And it does hurt. Imagine you opened a popular thriller novel one day and found a paragraph reiterating the greatest set of lies ever told about you. Gee, thanks. Happy #InternationalWomensDay to me!

But I’m also willing to acknowledge that I may have totally misread this. I’m willing to give Hawkins the chance to correct me here (I would @ her if she was on Twitter). Or acknowledge this negligence. I’m easy to find. I’d love to have a chat.

That’s my first story. And I don’t know how it ends yet. Maybe Paula Hawkins will reach out to me, maybe she won’t. The second story is the one with the twist ending. And it’s about a woman named Emily.

Emily is a model, and ten years ago, she took part in a photoshoot that has haunted her ever since. She was accustomed to being valued for her beauty, but that day, she had been used as a weapon.

She felt compelled to tell me her story in the latest episode of #Labyrinths.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/46-…