When I first got out of prison and fully entered the public eye, I wanted to disappear. I wanted to be featureless, shapeless, blurred like a poorly pixelated background NPC. Desire made me a target, or at least that was the message I had internalized. Not just sexual desire, but the desire to be seen, to be known, to connect. To this day, it still stuns me that I had to rediscover my sexuality in the most repressive and punishing place imaginable: prison.

[To read this formatted as an essay:
]tinyurl.com/35vmercz

Today, an Italian judge ruled that there is sufficient evidence for Rudy Guede—the man who murdered my roommate eighteen years ago—to stand trial for a new set of charges against another young woman: sexual assault, domestic battery, and stalking.
/thread I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. Not by the evidence, which includes witness testimony as well as thousands of photos, text messages, and audio files. Not by the bravery of the young woman who came forward.

It's my birthday today. I'm thinking about how I stopped celebrating my birthday in prison. It felt like a pointless ritual that belonged to the outside world. I was facing more years inside than I’d been alive so marking the passage of time wasn’t something to celebrate.
/🧵 I turned 21 in prison, with no rousing cheers for a first legal drink. Not even prison hooch, though my cellmates did attempt to ferment pineapple juice with pizza yeast in a two-liter water bottle hidden behind the toilet.

This battle over Abrego Garcia is simple. It doesn't matter that he was here illegally. It doesn't matter if he's a gang member or if he's a wife beater (both of which are disputed). It doesn't matter if you think he deserves to be deported or to be in prison. / thread It doesn't matter if you think the county is overrun with immigrants who entered illegally. It doesn't matter if the system is burdened with processing these immigration hearings. Only one thing matters here, and all the rest is a distraction:

"I'm not OK with sentencing innocent people," says JD Vance while defending the decision to send a man to an El Salvador prison without due process, without a trial, without the presumption of innocence. We've arrived at the Ministry of Truth.

https://twitter.com/JDVance/status/1912328722914410652

Yes, every system has an error rate, and wrongful convictions are inevitable. That is why error correction mechanisms are crucial. This is why we have appeals. This is why when an automaker installs a faulty part, they issue a recall. RECALL Kilmar Abrego Garcia!

I remain wrongly convicted of slander in Italy, and loads of people still think I'm a killer despite my acquittal. I am at peace with this. I will also never stop fighting to clear my name.

This is a paradox. Embracing this paradox is a key that can free you from suffering.
/🧵 You must accept that the world is on fire and simultaneously try to douse the flames. You must accept that your life is perfect, with all its flaws and annoyances and griefs and burdens, and still strive to improve yourself and your circumstances.

Before Italy, I was only vaguely aware of that ancient stereotype that all women secretly hate one another, that we are incapable of true friendship. Some call it “venimism”; others refer to “mean girls”.

/thread In 1893, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote: “Due to women’s latent antipathy for one another, trivial events give rise to fierce hatreds...these occasions lead quickly to insolence and assaults.” The source of our antipathy? Sexual jealousy, of course.

I've been on trial half my life. Yesterday, my 18-year legal drama finally came to an end when the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, definitively convicted me of criminal slander.

/thread Many people are familiar with my wrongful conviction for Meredith Kercher’s murder, but this lesser charge, arising from statements I signed during my interrogation, is the one that has continued to haunt me.

I’m currently still on trial in Italy and I have a verdict coming in 4 days. The waiting is the hardest part. So I turn to my comforts, like Star Trek. You probably know that it’s always been a progressive show, but it’s also featured many wrongful convictions!

/thread It’s not surprising that Star Trek would feature such stories. The original series broke ground in casting @NichelleIsUhura as Uhura and
@GeorgeTakei as Sulu. It was rare at the time for a Black woman and Asian man to be cast in positions of authority.

Rarely do I meet people whose compassion floors me. That’s the case with @ScarlettMLewis . She lost her son Jesse in the Sandy Hook tragedy, and it would have been easy for her to become angry and vengeful. But she took a different path. /
thread In her first interview in the wake of her son’s murder, she said “I take my part of the responsibility for what happened to Jesse in his school.” Her sister told her, don’t you ever say that. It’s not your fault. And Scarlett said, “If I don’t, who will?”

I’m writing this from the Panama Hotel and Cafe, which sheltered the valuables of Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during WWII, and which sheltered me during one of my darkest periods. This is a letter of gratitude to the Japanese.
/thread Most people see my name and think of Italy, but the first foreign culture that captured my heart was Japan. Manga and anime and sushi led me to study Japanese in high school, and I would often stop through Japantown on my way home from school.

You should never be in a room with police for more than an hour. If they read you your Miranda rights, you’re a suspect. Shut it down. Demand a lawyer. This is just some of the advice I got from a retired FBI Special Agent, and two renowned false confessions experts. /thread After talking with half a dozen exonerees who’d been coerced into making false confessions, and interviewing the world’s leading experts, I wanted to know what advice they’d give. Here’s what they said...

Dec 4 - another dark anniversary. 15 yrs ago, I never imagined I would actually be convicted of murder. But my fate was sealed by false statements I never imagined I could be coerced into making. And here’s the bad news: You, too, are at risk for falsely confessing.
/ thread You probably think you’re unlikely to wind up as a suspect in a homicide investigation. I certainly thought so. But consider this: the same interrogation techniques used by homicide detectives are also used in schools and in workplace loss-prevention departments.

Today, I’m grateful for the people who threw me in prison, and those who feasted on my suffering—the police, my prosecutors, the tabloids—because they all taught me so much.

/thread They taught me how vulnerable I can be, but also how strong I am. They taught me how easily we can be fooled by our biases, and how we can become convinced of something that is not true.

When the police coerced me into implicating myself in a murder I knew nothing about, little did I know they were following a method: The Reid Technique. It’s used by police across the world to bully suspects into confessing. Protect yourself by learning how it works. /thread It begins with a non-confrontational Behavioral Analysis Interview. Here, the police act friendly, try to earn your trust, and they look for signs of deception. And if they think you’re lying, they’ll move you into the interrogation phase. But here’s the problem:

After my conviction, staring down more years locked up than I'd been alive, I couldn't imagine how I'd make my life worth living in that concrete box of pain and deprivation and loneliness. But I could imagine how to make this day, today, worth living. /thread So I did as many sit-ups as I could. (My record was 900 in one day). I helped the Nigerian women write saucy love letters to their boyfriends on the outide. I rolled out pizza dough with a broomstick. Some days, I struggled to write a single letter to my mom.

When I was found guilty of murder & sentenced to 26 years, I lost all hope that the truth of my innocence would ever matter. The prison put me on suicide watch. It was shortly thereafter that I received a curious letter from a psychology professor. /🧵 He told me that he was an expert in police interrogations, and he asked me to describe my interrogation to him with as much detail as I could remember. So I wrote him a letter back. It was difficult, because that night was the most terrifying night of my life.

When my roommate, Meredith, was brutally raped and murdered, I should have been a footnote in her tragic story. Instead I was accused of a crime I had nothing to do with & catapulted into international infamy. After I was exonerated, I faced an impossible question: Now what? /🧵 I could never return to being an anonymous college student. I was the girl accused of murder. I was trapped in that story. I didn’t feel free. It’s taken me over a decade to make meaning out of my misfortune. I created my own freedom. That's the subject of my new book: FREE.

It’s been an ugly, bloody week for the US. Alabama just executed Alan Miller, which makes five men executed since Sept 20th. We need to abolish the death penalty. Here’s a dozen reasons why. /Thread #1. We end up executing the innocent. The evidence against Marcellus Williams, executed by Missouri on Tuesday, hinged on unreliable witness testimony. None of the DNA or fingerprints from the crime scene matched him.

Marcellus Williams will be executed on Sept 24--despite plenty of evidence of his innocence, the prosecutor's confession of racial bias, and opposition from the victim's family--unless Governor Mike Parsons (@GovParsonMO) finds his conscience. /🧵 Marcellus Williams has been on death row for 23 years proclaiming his innocence for the murder of reporter Felicia Gayle in 1998. The crime scene had tons of forensic evidence: fingerprints, footprints, hair, and even DNA on the murder weapon. None of it matches Williams.

The Italian justice system has been gaslighting me for 17 years now. It began during my interrogation, and it continues in the courts, most recently in the legal motivation released on August 8th which explains why they found me guilty of slander back in June. /🧵 This gaslighting is upsetting and triggering—hearing a judge offer illogical arguments, present falsehoods as facts, and label me a liar—but it also inspires me to keep fighting, because the police should be held accountable for their abuses of power.