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pnwmom

(108,973 posts)
4. During the trials, she was called a thousand variations of that in the press in England and Italy.
Thu Jul 30, 2015, 01:31 AM
Jul 2015

And the prosecutor called her a "Luciferina," among other things, and offered different theories of the crime. The first was that she was part of a post-Halloween orgy that led to the Meredith's murder.

And they "knew" that because she kept a vibrator in the bathroom, and she "smelled like sex."

Watch the video. Many of the slurs used against her are in there.

The Guardian was one of the few papers in Great Britain that didn't join in on the witch hunt. This is what they had to say in 2011.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/27/amanda-knox-witch-hunts-italian-court

Astonishingly, exactly that accusation has been made in an Italian court this week by a lawyer called Carlo Pacelli. He used the occasion of an appeal by the American student Amanda Knox against her conviction for the murder of a British student to call her an "enchanting witch" and attack her in terms that would be instantly recognisable to a mediaeval witch-finder.

The idea that women are natural liars has a long pedigree. The key document in this centuries-long tradition is the notorious witch-hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches, which was commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII. The book was written by two Dominican monks and published in 1486. It unleashed a flood of irrational beliefs about women's "dual" nature. "A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep," the authors warned. They also claimed that "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable".

It's not difficult to see these myths lurking behind Pacelli's description of Knox: "She was a diabolical, satantic, demonic she-devil. She was muddy on the outside and dirty on the inside. She has two souls, the clean one you see before you and the other." The lawyer's claim that she was motivated by "lust" could have come straight from the Malleus, which insists that women are more "carnal" than men.

You might imagine that the crime for which Knox and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted in 2007 was unpleasant enough without dragging in a lot of medieval mumbo-jumbo. Knox's flatmate, a Leeds University student called Meredith Kercher, was found in her bedroom in a pool of blood after Knox and Sollecito took part in what the prosecution described as a drug-fuelled sex game that turned violent. Knox is serving a 26-year sentence for the murder of Kercher, while Sollecito got 25 years.

ismnotwasm

(41,975 posts)
5. That was excellent
Thu Jul 30, 2015, 08:48 AM
Jul 2015

The whole thing was a attempt to turn a tragedy into some sort of sick porn story using Knox as a unwilling "star" it made me sick.

KitSileya

(4,035 posts)
6. Thanks for the explanation.
Thu Jul 30, 2015, 12:08 PM
Jul 2015

The Knox case was an archetypical example of men blaming their idea of women's sexuality rather than factual, proven-by-the-evidence homocidal urges of a man. Ugly, and just another confirmation of how misogynistic Italian culture actually is.

pnwmom

(108,973 posts)
7. It was bizarre. They settled on her as the chief murderess only a few days after the murder --
Thu Jul 30, 2015, 05:07 PM
Jul 2015

before they had the results of the tests of any of the physical evidence. They announced "case closed" and paraded them through town. Afterwards, the results came back from the fingerprints, DNA, etc, and it all pointed to a known burglar, who had a history of breaking in with a rock and carrying a knife.

But by then they had already blamed Amanda (and her boyfriend and her boss). The boss turned out to have an unimpeachable alibi, so they simply swapped in Rudy Guede, the burglar, into the boss's place in the orgy. It didn't matter to them that Guede had never even met Amanda's boyfriend, had only met her in passing at a party, that he didn't speak English, and she had only had a college term of Italian. Or that there wasn't a single piece of evidence that placed Amanda in the murder room -- and a mountain of evidence connected with Guede, the burglar. And Guede admitted being there -- he claimed that he had consensual sex with her and some stranger murdered her and then ran out.

But they were so attached to their juicy Amanda-the-diabolical-female-leading-a-murderous-orgy story that they just couldn't give it up.

 

Alfalfa

(161 posts)
9. The known burglar who was also an aquaintance of Knox
Sun Aug 2, 2015, 06:54 PM
Aug 2015

He wasn't just some random guy they picked up.

 

Alfalfa

(161 posts)
8. According to everyone who used to know her back in Seattle
Sun Aug 2, 2015, 06:53 PM
Aug 2015

She was a bit of a wild child, to put it mildly.

 

LanternWaste

(37,748 posts)
10. How precisely, are unsupported allegations of her childhood directly relevant to the case?
Mon Aug 3, 2015, 03:43 PM
Aug 2015

How precisely, are unsupported allegations of her childhood directly relevant to the case?

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