When I first laid eyes on Amanda Knox, she was the star of an eerie pageant, surrounded by clicking cameras, wearing a pale blouse and walking into a Perugia courtroom on a summer morning in 2009. She proceeded to spend the next two days testifying in her own defense. She spoke confidently in Italian and held up under questioning, but at times she seemed a bit tone-deaf, especially on the subject of her dead roommate, at one point saying, "I am trying to get on with my life," when asked how she felt about her after the murder. I could see in those moments what the colpevolisti (those who think she is guilty) saw: the aloof and icy Foxy Knoxy who, in their eyes, has now gotten away with the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher.
Knox's appearance at Sea-Tac airport in Seattle on Oct. 4, the day after an Italian appeals court overturned her 2009 conviction, was of an entirely different tenor. Warbling and tearful, she thanked the supporters who believed in her innocence all along and half-collapsed back into her chair. Which is the real Amanda Knox?
In 10 months of reporting on the case in Italy for a book, I found that the answer seems to depend almost entirely on what passport you hold. In the U.S., Knox is the victim of a foreign judicial system gone awry. She is the Seattle girl with a penchant for doodling peace signs and hearts on letters and journals in jail, wrongly sentenced to 26 years in prison in December 2009. Her family, from suburban Seattle, got sympathy in the U.S., where television producers vied to get them on morning talk shows. But they never made their point with Italian and British people, whose response to the turn of events--judging from online commentary--has ranged from mystification to fury.
The case certainly revealed ugly stereotypes of Americans held by people abroad. Chief among them was the assumption of American racism, with the white-woman-blaming-the-black-man trope reiterated in the prosecutor's closing arguments. (Knox at one point implicated her employer, a Congolese bar owner, under pressure from the police, she says.) Others came into play as well. A Perugia feminist told me Knox reminded her of the female Army private involved in the Abu Ghraib torture pictures. There was also a whiff of class bias, as the more formal British and Italians judged the attire of the Knox family--women in shorts in summer and men in baseball caps. They did not approve.
In Britain, Kercher's homeland, Knox is the American-exchange-student version of Casey Anthony. Members of Kercher's grieving family have made it clear that they believe Knox participated in killing her, and they are upset by the appellate verdict. "For us, it feels very much like back to square one," said the victim's brother Lyle afterward. Some British observers are barely able to contain their revulsion for the exaggerations of Knox's supporters, like this one from one of her Seattle defenders, lawyer Anne Bremner: "Amanda is what she is--a pure girl scrubbed in sunshine."