Amanda Knox on resilience after trauma

'And you may ask yourself - how did I get here?'

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Last week my partner and I visited Perugia, a beautiful medieval town which is famous for three things. First, it has one of oldest universities in the world. Second, it produces delicious chocolates. Third, this was where Amanda Knox was living when she was arrested and sentenced to 26 years, supposedly for helping to rape and murder her flat-mate, Meredith Kercher, when she was a 20-year-old foreign student.

I listened to an interview of Knox by Sam Harris – she has made a series on resilience for Harris’ Waking Up app. She offers useful tips for recovery from any trauma, including the trauma of a very bad psychedelic trip.

You probably know some of the facts. Amanda had been in Perugia for a few weeks. She was living in a flat with three other young women, including English student Meredith Kercher. She had just met a new boy – Rafaelle Sollecito. They’d been together for a week. On the night of November 1 2007, Amanda stayed over at his place, then came home the next day, and found her apartment had been broken into. She called Raffaele, he came over, and saw there’d been a break-in. Meredith’s room was locked. They called the police, who broke down the door and found Meredith’s body – she had been raped, and stabbed multiple times.

Amanda and Raffaele were taken in for interviews. Amanda didn’t speak very good Italian but she was very keen to help. The police kept telling her she was their most important witness. She was interviewed for 54 hours over five days. What she didn’t realize was that, almost immediately, the local police and the chief prosecutor of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, decided she was the culprit.

This was down to first impressions and implicit biases. Giuliano Mignini had seen Amanda and Raffaele share a kiss outside the house. Why were they kissing, he asked himself. Was this an appropriate way to act outside a murder scene? The body had been covered by a blanket – surely a male murderer wouldn’t cover the body, Mignini reasoned, only a woman would do that.

The cops found a text from Amanda to the owner of a Perugian bar where she worked, Patrick Lumumba. He said ‘you don’t need to come in to work this eve’. She replied ‘ok sure, see you later’. The cops took this to mean ‘see you later tonight’ – ie Amanda had met up with him, she hadn’t spent the night at Raffaele’s house, she was lying to the cops.

The cops insisted Lumumba was involved in the murder. They insisted Amanda had amnesia, she’d been involved in an awful event, and it was crucial that she remember what happened. One cop hit her over the head and shouted ‘remember!’ at her. Bewildered and frightened after five days of questioning, sleep-deprived, desperate to help, and doubting her own sanity, Amanda said she sort of pictured Patrick in his black coat, and sort of remembered Meredith screaming.

The Perugia police immediately arrested Patrick, Amanda and Raffaele and announced to the world media that the case was solved. But countless people came forward to say they’d been with Patrick in his bar all that night. He was released after a few days. So why did Amanda lie? Clearly because she was under duress, but tto the police and media it showed her devious, duplicitous nature.

Meanwhile, there was abundant DNA evidence of another person at the crime scene – a local convicted burglar called Rudy Guede. His handprint was in Meredith’s blood, his DNA was inside her. He’d even taken a shit in the toilet. Rudy had fled Italy and was hiding out in Germany. A friend Skyped him for the police, and Rudy admitted he was in the house with Meredith but claimed he didn’t kill her. He also said Amanda had nothing to do with it and wasn’t there.

Rudy was arrested. He took a plea deal and got his sentenced shortened. He said Amanda had been there, after all. He supported the story that the local police and prosecutor had first took hold of and were now doubling down on.

Mignini, the chief prosecutor, was a fervent Catholic and a fantasist. He once arrested 20 people based on his conspiracy theory that a Satanic-Masonic sex cult was behind a local death (it wasn’t). He let his imagination carry him away once again on the Kercher case.

This was his theory. Amanda – who had no history of violence – persuaded a boy she had just met a week before, also with no history of violence, and a local burglar she didn’t know, to rape her housemate and hold her down while she brutally stabbed her to death. Why? Because she was offended that Meredith judged her for having a threesome (despite there being no evidence of any relationship between her and Rudy Guede). Mignini painted the scene for the court, imagining what Amanda had said: ‘"You acted the goody-goody so much, now we are going to show you. Now you're going to be forced to have sex!"

It was absurd. But the media loved the story: Foxy Knoxy, the beautiful psychopath with a taste for violent sex games. It was straight out of Basic Instinct. And together, the media and local prosecutor painted a lurid picture. Didn’t Amanda act weirdly? Didn’t she have a vibrator? Didn’t she order pizza the day after the murder? She was clearly a cold sex-crazed bitch.

The trial of Amanda and Raffaele took place a year and a half after they were arrested. Amanda assumed she would be found innocent and released. She was still trying to be this plucky American gal in the court-room.  She didn’t realize the world now saw her as an evil psychopath.

She and Raffaele were convicted – he got 25 years, she got 26. The crucial evidence was a knife found in Raffaele’s kitchen which had Amanda’s DNA on the handle and Meredith’s DNA on the blade.

Amanda’s imprisonment undermined everything she believed about the world and expected from her life. And the nightmare continued. The prison warden made her come to his office for questioning every night – he told her she had AIDS, and also told her to have sex with him (she didn’t). He told her to write a diary and recount all her sexual partners – she did, she was still trying to be the good girl - and then he released it to the prosecution and media. Amanda considered suicide.

After four years, they appealed. The evidence was re-examined by external experts in Rome. They found massive errors in the case. The crime scene had been chaotically policed, and they found it very likely that DNA evidence had been contaminated. There was no DNA evidence of Amanda in Meredith’s room, and no reliable DNA evidence of Raffaele. Meanwhile there was abundant DNA from Rudy Guede, a local criminal who admitted he’d been there.

The obvious story was the true story. This was a break-in gone wrong.  Amanda and Raffaele were released. They were then found guilty again in a second trial in Perugia - by this point the reputation of the Perugia police and justice system was under global scrutiny and they were desperate to prove themselves right - but the Italian Supreme Court intervened and quashed the verdict.

Even when Amanda was freed and returned to the US, the nightmare continued. She was harassed by paparazzi, by fellow students, by strangers in the street and on the internet. Everyone had an idea of her – Foxy Knoxy, the sex-crazed psychopath. It was too good a story to let go. In fact, many people still believe it, despite the lack of any evidence.

Coping with trauma

Amanda went through something bewilderingly awful but her story is also a classic human tale of a traumatic event that comes out of nowhere. It could be a car accident, a sudden life-changing illness, a betrayal, the death of a loved one, a violent crime, or a very bad trip.

Suddenly a person’s life derails from where they expect it to go. They feel: ‘Whose life is this? What timeline am I on? Is there another version of me living their best life somewhere? Because this version of my life is impossible to accept. My life feels strange to me, unreal. How do I get back to who I was before?’

And yet we can find moral growth even in traumatic circumstances.

What helped Amanda through? Stoicism and Buddhism – the same things that helped me through post-psychedelic PTSD. Here are four basic ideas she says helped her:

1)        Choose your perspective

We all carry around stories about ourselves. Sometimes traumatic events occur which rupture that narrative and leave us bewildered. Amanda felt at the mercy of events, totally helpless. She didn’t believe in God, so couldn’t tell herself this was all part of God’s plan.

But she didn’t sink under the whirlpool of fortune because she discovered the Stoic idea that, even under the most extreme circumstances, we have the power to choose our response. As Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl put it:

Everything can be taken from a person except the last of the human freedoms – the freedom to choose our response in any situation.

She told herself she could see this as the brutal and meaningless destruction of her life. Or she could see the tragedy as an opportunity for moral growth. That attitude shift let her move from helpless victim to moral agent. It saved her life. She says she now sometimes imagines, when things go wrong, that ‘the Stoic Gods’ are setting her a challenge. As Epictetus wrote:

Difficulty shows what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.

2)        Cultivate a wise and compassionate inner voice

When traumatic events happen to us, we sometimes make it worse by the self-critical story we wrap around it. ‘How could I have been so stupid? Why am I such a useless failure?’ The Buddha called this the second wound – the first is the event, the second is the story we tell ourselves about it.

When she suddenly found herself in prison facing a 26-year stretch, Amanda blamed herself. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I ask for an interpreter or a lawyer in the interrogation? Why did I give in to the coercive interrogation? How could I have let down my family like this?

It took her a long time to realize it wasn’t her fault. She was a 20-year-old, far from home and way out of her depth as any adolescent would be. Yes she’d made some mistakes but that’s human, we all do.

Gradually, she learned to cultivate more compassionate and encouraging self-talk. She would imagine her five-year-old self sitting in the cell opposite her, and she would talk to her and try to encourage her.

It is so, so important in life to try and make friends with your mind, to learn to be conscious and kind in how you talk to yourself. Our minds are incredibly powerful but we don’t always know how to be friends with the mind, so it’s like living with a tiger and constantly getting mauled. Learning to be on good terms with our mind begins with noticing when we’re bullying ourselves, and instead cultivating conscious, compassionate self-talk.

3)        You are not your reputation

Amanda was swamped with outlandish stories about her. And she also had her own stories about what she expected her life to be like. She learned to practice mindfulness meditation, and to rest in a space where all these stories don’t intrude so much. We can cultivate an awareness before stories, labels and language.

It’s easy to get lost in the circus mirror of others’ stories about us – Amanda was, in fact, one of the first victims of social media shaming. But we can learn to let go of stories and realize there is something in us beyond all such stories. And that includes the story of who you used to be, who you should be. Let it all go, even if it’s just for five minutes a day. Rest in the space before stories.

4)        Cultivate compassion for others

Amanda has every reason to hate humanity, journalists, Italians, and especially the Perugia police and the buffoon fantasist prosecutor Mignini. But she has managed not to become bitter and instead to see them as victims of very human biases – the need to be right, above all, and to prove the stories we have fixated on. Even in prison, she cultivated compassion for others, writing letters for other prisoners. Today, she works to help other victims of wrongful convictions, and apparently has even managed to be friendly with Mignini on Whats App. He told the Telegraph in 2022: ‘She was defamed by the British tabloids and presented like a Circe but really she is a normal girl from the West’. Aha…

Amanda went through something worse than most of us will ever have to go through. Most people still think she’s guilty, despite any evidence, because that’s the story that went around the world. But she survived the storm and came out with her moral agency stronger. We can too – the tools she used are available to all of us.

If you want to find out more about Stoicism, check out my first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, or watch my TEDX talk about how Stoicism helped me recover from post-psychedelic PTSD.

After the paywall, my five top links for this week. What next for US psychedelic legislation, a serious adverse event goes unreported by MAPS, an ayahuasca church in the US is found liable for the death of worshipper, more on IFS and demons, and the ubiquity of altered states.