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.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals in Florence upheld my conviction for slander after I gave some emotional testimony. I came to Italy to show I wasn't afraid, to look the judge and jury in the eyes, and to hear the verdict from their own lips.
/thread I'd like to share with you what I told the court in Italian before they sentenced me to 3 years in prison, punishing me yet again, for the harmful actions of others, punishing me for how the police victimized me. Here is my statement (originally delivered in Italian).

After four days of questioning at the police station, I spoke with my mom on the phone. I told her I was fine, that I was helping the police, but her mom instincts were telling her something was off. She bought the first plane ticket to Italy that she could.

/Thread The cops had tapped my phone, so they knew she was coming to my aid. Soon, I wouldn't be alone and vulnerable, soon I might even have a lawyer. That was the night they decided to break me.

I'd been avoiding my friend Jens Söring for months. Whenever his emails arrived, I’d open a reply window and stare with dread at the blinking cursor. I no longer knew what to say to him, this man who'd spent 33 years in prison for a double homicide he swore he didn’t commit. /🧵 Jens had been convicted of murder in 1990. I had been convicted of murder nearly 20 years later. But the parallels between our cases were striking.

One of the most unexpected blessings of having spent time in prison, and being at the center of a such a public scandal, is that so many people have reached out to me to share their own stories. And I've learned there are so many ways to feel trapped in your own life...
/thread Some people are trapped by poverty, some by chronic illness, some by abusive family or romantic partners, some by the expectations of their community, some by their very own vision of who they are supposed to be, a vision handed down from their parents, or of their own making.

What's your favorite episode of Star Trek?

Here's mine:

TNG Season 5, Episode 24, "The Next Phase." It has everything: mindbending sci-fi plot, political intrigue, character growth, and an unmatched bromance between @levarburton and @BrentSpiner. Allow me to explain... A mishap from a Romulan science vessel causes Ensign Ro and Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge to become out of phase with the Enterprise. (Don't ask me how that works.) They become essentially like ghosts. No one can see or hear them. They think they might be dead.

Remeber this poster? It hangs in Fox Mulder's office. Now I love Fox Mulder, and the X-Files, but this is a problem. Our beliefs should be divorced from our desires. Otherwise, we end up burning witches. And yet, I find myself wanting to believe in aliens... The universe is so large that statistically, intelligent life is very likely out there somewhere. Perhaps a lot of it! But if so, where is everybody? This is, of course, the Fermi Paradox.
waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-…

16 years after my arrest, I'm still on trial in Italy, still fighting to clear my name. Meanwhile, the man who murdered my roommate is free from prison, still accusing me, and still, it seems, harming young women. Are we living in a simulation? As you might imagine, I've received a lot of interview requests to talk about these recent developments. What will my new trial focus on? Will I have to testify in Italy? (hint: yes). What do I think about Rudy Guede facing new charges of sexual assualt?

If you were to ask my family to describe me, they’d likely say that I’m a nerd, that I like to dance and sing. They’d say that I'm kind, sometimes naive, and that I go dead possum when I’m scared. What they wouldn't say is: girl gone wild, drug addled femme fatale. And yet...
/🧵 that was the image of me painted by the prosecution and the tabloid media: Foxy Knoxy, the cunning seductress. And while I saw myself so grossly misrepresented, I also got to know the other women I shared cells with in Capanne prison.

Rudy Guede, the man who killed Meredith Kercher, has just been arrested on charges of assault for allegedly beating up his 23-year-old ex-girlfriend six months after he was released from prison. Prosecutors asked for house arrest while he awaits trial. Instead, he's been given a restraining order and ankle monitor. I feel sorry for his ex-girlfriend, and hope she is getting the support she needs.

Radical Islam has always confused progressive sympathies, but the current moment is a true test for the Enlightenment values at the heart of western democracies. Freedom of speeh is under threat. Freedom of religion is in conflict with human rights.
/thread The shoutdowns and pile-ons of campus culture and social media have long been eroding our freedom of speech, not in a stricly legalistic sense, but in the practical exercise of that right, which is so foundational to democracy.

For musicians to make it big, it helps to have a big ego. Any competitive arts career is like this. You have to transcend rejection for years believing that you have something amazing to offer. That's why it's so refreshing to meet a musician who's figured out the ego trap.
/🧵 This is one of the central insights of Buddhism. The more you identify with your "self", the more you suffer. But you are not your "self." As Alan Watts put it, "You are no less than the universe." There is a non-woo woo way in which this is true.

https://twitter.com/AlanWattsDaily/status/1727555240247836784

Learn to read, Dave. I did mention Meredith. And the whole thread is about gratitude for others in my life. (somehow this is "me me me"?).

But more importantly, you've given me an opportunity to talk about being trapped in a story imposed on you by others, or by yourself...
/🧵

https://twitter.com/davidbelle_/status/1727950941817590065

I'm not sure what the term for this would be, but I'll coin one: "narrative monism," the idea that a story can have only one subject, only one theme, only one arc, only one raison d'etre. Your life is about THIS, not THAT.

When I was finally exonerated in 2015, I just wanted my old life back, to return to being an anonymous student. I soon realized that life no longer existed. I was chased by paparazzi, photographed by classmates. I didn’t know what to do but hide.

/thread I got a job working minimum wage below ground level in an antiquarian book store. I didn’t make friends. My face was in newspapers and magazines and on billboards in Times Square, but my world was so, so small. I didn’t feel like the protagonist of my own life.

The simmering debates about cancel culture are flaring up as posters of kidnapped children get ripped down & students sign statements that minimize the horrors of Oct 7. Do such actions merit cancellation? I have thoughts; I was canceled before it was cool.

/🧵 By now, we all know what cancellation looks like. It’s public exile. It’s the reduction of your complexity as a human being to a deplorable act, whether based in reality or not. In my case, I received a life-sentence in the court of public opinion as “the girl accused of murder.”

As the horror continues to unfold in the Middle East, I've refrained from commenting as I'm not an expert in either the causes nor solutions to this crisis. What I am quite good at is recognizing confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and tribal hostility.

/thread I'm seeing it everywhere across the political spectrum, from far-left to far-right. Compassion is being displaced by political point-scoring, empathy by bigotry.

I'm on trial in Italy again...and this is a good thing.

As everyone knows, on March 27th, 2015, the Court of Cassation definitively acquitted me and Raffaele Sollecito of the murder of Meredith Kercher, per non aver commesso il fatto—for not having committed the act.

/thread It was an unprecedented decision from the court, exonerating us on the grounds of factual innocence, citing stunning errors in the prosecution's case and culpable omissions. It was a clear vindication. But this final ruling also upheld my conviction for slander.