Why so much attention to the Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito case

[Trish Randall]

Anthony, I didn't ever mention anyone being paid. I was referring to organized effort to get a point of view out to the media/public.

Bill Williams, Apology accepted. I shouldn't have posted based on memory of what I'd read a year ago, without checking to make sure I was factually correct. (But, a year ago, I did read the whole Massei report, in English). Yes, I read the Hellman report (in translation - my Italian is far too rusty to trust for such deep reading).

I didn't ever say $1 million campaign. I never mentioned money.

I do know the judge turned himself in.

 

[Meed]

Good post which attracted no reply despite being both interesting and on topic.

Thanks. I probably should have said something about whether I think Amanda Knox is a whore or not and how I would rate her attractiveness in order to draw more interest.

What got my interest was the amount of raw material available
online and what sustains it now, TBH, is the battle (now turning into a rout) with the pro-guilt crowd. That, plus the fact the case is not over and there remain some appeals to be heard in March (and maybe further proceedings after that of one kind or another).

Oh yes. Having "battled" issues such as 9/11 truth, global warming and so on, I can easily see how the existence of opposing factions would keep the topic active.

 

[Trish Randall]

Actually it is quite likely to "go the way" Knox, Sollecito (note the spelling, please) want. If you think otherwise, you're setting yourself up for a very big disappointment.

Sorry about the spelling - being an Italian-American who took Italian in HS & college, it's embarrassing.

It could go the way you expect. We will see.

 

[Baylor]

It's kind of a low blow to bring Travis into this.

Good post which attracted no reply despite being both interesting and on topic.

 

[Meed]

Good post which attracted no reply despite being both interesting and on topic.

Total PWNAGE!

 

[Trish Randall]

Oh, one other thing I thought i might not have made clear - the Knox/Mellas PR machine I referred to was in answer to the original question of "why so much attention?". Amanda's family has done a very successful job of getting media attention to the case, and specifically to their claim of her innocence.

I consider that a separate question from guilt/innocence

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Katic Couric interview

Oh, one other thing I thought i might not have made clear - the Knox/Mellas PR machine I referred to was in answer to the original question of "why so much attention?". Amanda's family has done a very successful job of getting media attention to the case, and specifically to their claim of her innocence.

I consider that a separate question from guilt/innocence

Did you see Raffaele Sollecito's interview with Katie Couric? If so, do you feel that it supports your beliefs or stands in contradiction to them? Same question with respect to Barbie Nadeau's Newsweek/Daily Beast columns (I provided a link to one of them upthread).

 

[Trish Randall]

Did you see Raffaele Sollecito's interview with Katie Couric? If so, do you feel that it supports your beliefs or stands in contradiction to them? Same question with respect to Barbie Nadeau's Newsweek/Daily Beast columns.

I didn't see it. I will watch it & get back to you. (Right now, I need to stop messaging & get some work done..)

 

[Rolfe]

I have seen some absolutely horrendous news items portraying Amanda Knox as a vicious, sex-obsessed monster. I'm not sure this alleged PR machine was as successful as is being suggested.

Rolfe.

 

[Bill Williams]

Anthony, I didn't ever mention anyone being paid. I was referring to organized effort to get a point of view out to the media/public.

Bill Williams, Apology accepted. I shouldn't have posted based on memory of what I'd read a year ago, without checking to make sure I was factually correct. (But, a year ago, I did read the whole Massei report, in English). Yes, I read the Hellman report (in translation - my Italian is far too rusty to trust for such deep reading).

I didn't ever say $1 million campaign. I never mentioned money.

I do know the judge turned himself in.

Thank you for the "apology accepted".

I have done way, way too much posting in the last two months on this. However, in answer to why is that there has been way, way too much attention to this one case (as the title of this thread suggests, it is narrowly defined. Meaning, that this thread acknowledges that it is not trying to cover the "Rudy Guede case", or even the larger - perhaps more important - case of an English family who is dealing with the loss of a true innocent in all this, five years later they still have not received a proper answer from Italy as to what happened.)

I came to this 14 months ago a complete open book on this. Truly it mattered not one whit back then who did what. What attracted me initially, perhaps, was that there WAS so much attention paid to this - particularly in the tabloid world.

And as you witnessed, I have now (after all this posting!) become rather short-tempered with what I now regard as the obvious. Sollecito and Knox had nothing to do with what the Kerchers so profoundly morn.

Mentions of "PR campaigns" with or without dollar figures attached have become code -for me - for, "The only reason people believe in innocence is that they've surrendered their own decision/reasoning making skills." I don't know you, but have had enough experience with others who simply use that phrase as a way to discount an innocence point of view, even before the particulars of that view are offered.

As mentioned upthread - if this had been a propaganda attempt, then one must explain two things:

1) why an obvious media heavyweight like Katie Couric would not buy into it?
2) why Raffaele Sollecito fared so well under Couric's questioning?​

Piers Morgan on CNN is another one - him coming from the UK tabloid world himself, although obviously a reputable journalist in his own right. The few times he's mentioned "Amanda Knox" he's admitted to being quite agnostic about the whole thing. If I remember correctly he said, "It's hard to imagine the conspiracy which would have had to have happened among the law enforcement in Perugia."

But the point being is that there was no "PR campaign," there was simply an organized effort by Gogerty-Marriott of Seattle to help the Knox/Mellas's deal with the constant demand from the world's media for their time. It was not the family taking a position of theirs to the world, it was the world with frequent requests for their story.....

Ok... I've ranted on about that enough.

For me, reading the Massei report, I read it through the lens of, "what is Massei demonstrating here beyond a reasonable doubt?" Incredibly, Massei's reasonings for guilt include 39 probablies, each one which could or could not have happened, but each one had to have happened for guilt to be a remote chance.

Did Knox transport a knife? Well there's no way to know for sure... but Massei invents a reason why she might have carried that knife, with no evidence at all to even suggest that she did carry the knife that night. Yet this becomes one of the crimes she's convicted of in Dec 2009, in addition to murder.

It's not just that this knife is a "probably" or "might have", there's copious reason to suspect that this knife did not do anything but lay in a drawer that night. It matches no forensics at the scene - there's no reason really for Knox to carry it - in fact, it is so large she would probably have injured herself in carrying it - and Raffaele was already carrying a knife!!!!

In fact, this knife is subtly conceded to not ave been used, when the prosecution concocts another "probably" in saying that two knives were used. The point being, take away the knife from the drawer and the crime is still doable with what the prosecution concedes is an unfound knife. Add the knife from the drawer back in, and all the problems up-text come into play; so why even bother with THAT knife.

Ok - I'm really ranting now.

I'm not asking this of you, but what I do ask of folk who stubbornly maintain guilt for the two students is that they provide a comprehensive theory of the crime, which is not based on "maybes" or outright "improbabilities."

Back to the point of this whole thread. The reason why so much attention is paid to the Knox/Sollecito case (as oppsed to the case against Rudy, or the larger more horrific act of the taking of an innocent) is because one side claims to know that someone is guilty, but refuses to supply a convincing, comprehensive reason why they think that.

It's mainly that they "feel" it. And feelings tend to grab more attention.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

blogosphere versus mainstream press redux

Anthony, I didn't ever mention anyone being paid. I was referring to organized effort to get a point of view out to the media/public.

Well, actually, you did say "paid PR campaign" in comment #260. I am willing to accept that you did not mean that bloggers, for example, were paid and to leave it at that. But there are several things I don't understand. What evidence is there that any real or imagined PR campaign had any influence on public opinion? Or putting it another way, in what way does this explanation fail: that bloggers such as Bruce Fisher (among many others) simply took on the case because it struck them as an injustice, and they laid out the facts of the case, which changed people's minds?

The site that was "Injustice in Perugia" is now "Injustice Anywhere," a change which suggests to me that many of the people who got interested in this case are staying interested in our CJ system. Nor is this case the first time that bloggers have gone counter to the conventional wisdom of mainstream media with respect to a wrongful accusation, as I have pointed out many times. In my more optimistic moments, I think that people like Bruce Fisher have figured out that they can participate in the dissemination of knowledge, not just be consumers of what the mainstream media serves up. Charlie Wilkes used the JREFF forum to disseminate many of the facts of the case. Perhaps these are some of the reasons we saw more than a thousand pages.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Oh, one other thing I thought i might not have made clear - the Knox/Mellas PR machine I referred to was in answer to the original question of "why so much attention?". Amanda's family has done a very successful job of getting media attention to the case, and specifically to their claim of her innocence.

Amanda's family hired a PR consultant (David Marriott) to screen media requests and help them deal with reporters.

But the family also had the services of many unpaid volunteers, including me. We worked with the media and with experts who reviewed the case. Our goal was to help the public understand the truth.

I was among the first to get involved, early in 2008. I have no professional qualifications, but I am interested in crime stories and I have read extensively about wrongful convictions in the US.

Looking back, I think it was Debbie Nathan's article about Kelly Michaels in the Village Voice, way back in the 1980s, that got me started. I also read Nathan's book, Satan's Silence (available as a Kindle download for the dirt-cheap price of $3.03).

I also read Victims of Justice by Thomas Frisbee and Randy Garrett, about the Nicarico case. I actually went to a library and read through Eric Zorn's reporting in the Chicago Tribune.

I also followed the ritual abuse mess in Wenatchee, WA in the 1990s. I read Kathryn Lyon's book, Witch Hunt.

I was well-informed because of all this reading, and I could see, early on, that Amanda's case had the hallmarks of wrongful prosecution. The official story didn't make sense, and the one suspect who was obviously guilty seemed to have no connection to Amanda and Raffaele.

Then I stumbled upon Candace Dempsey's blog and read her interview with Doug Preston. Preston articulated all of the conclusions I had reached on my own.

Next, I came across an active discussion of the case on Steve Huff's crime blog, and I was appalled to see that EVERYONE thought Amanda was guilty! These were the people who went on to form PMF(s). I began to debate them, and they were as intransigent then as they are now.

My comments got the attention of Chris Mellas, who was following the discussion. We traded a few emails, and after awhile he invited me to come down to Seattle to meet him and Edda, as well as two men whose daughters know Amanda (Tom Wright and Mike Heavey) who were also committed to helping her.

That was in August 2008. I suppose that was the first meeting of FOA. It was clear that Edda, in particular, was grateful that somebody outside of her family could see the case for what it was.

I wasn't doing anything with my life, so I rolled up my sleeves and got busy. I developed the FOA website, and later I became an archivist, someone reporters could turn to for specific information, photos or other material that was part of the police dossier handed over in discovery. I made myself an expert on the facts of the case. It was a fascinating project.

Until the guilty verdict in December 2009, I was one of few people on the Internet who were advocating for Amanda and Raffaele. Most people thought they were guilty. Interestingly, after they were convicted, supporters came out of the woodwork. Many of them are smart, well-educated people. We formed a group on Facebook and began to develop and carry out projects. Bruce Fischer developed the Injustice in Perugia website. Steve Moore, a former FBI agent, worked very effectively with the media. Some of the smartest people here on JREF also got interested in the case and became supporters.

In 2010, I traveled to Perugia and hung out with Chris for about 10 days. I met Amanda in prison.

The highlight, of course, was October 3, 2011. We booked a suite at a downtown hotel in Seattle to hold an all-night vigil ahead of the court decision, and we invited the media. And they came - there must have been 60 reporters.

We had a group of middle-aged mothers, holding hands, twisting tissues around their fingers, and passing chocolate bon bons around as they watched the hearing, with a phalanx of TV cameras trained on them.

I am not a PR guy, but I have done a little media work, and I felt like a pro that night. It was perfect.

This past summer the supporters got together and had a wonderful party. People came from all over the country, and a few came from Europe.

So, there you have it - the real story of the "PR machine," from my perspective at least.

I consider that a separate question from guilt/innocence

Except none of us would have gotten involved had she not been innocent.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Except none of us would have gotten involved had she not been innocent.

At the risk of a derail, do you really know how that reads, and did you intend it that way ?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

not understanding your point

Except none of us would have gotten involved had she not been innocent.

At the risk of a derail, do you really know how that reads, and did you intend it that way ?

Can you clarify what you mean? I am baffled.

 

[Rolfe]

Me too.

Rolfe.

 

[Matthew Best]

Me three.

 

[Baylor]

ask the person who said it

nm

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Can you clarify what you mean? I am baffled.

How did one come by the notion she was innocent, before they became involved and examined the evidence ?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

How did one come by the notion she was innocent, before they became involved and examined the evidence ?

You're conflating "examining the evidence" and "getting involved", which doesn't seem to me to be either an obvious interpretation of what was written or a logical one.

Wouldn't it make a bit more sense to assume that people first examined the evidence and concluded Knox and Sollecito were probably innocent, and then decided to get involved? Hence " none of us would have gotten involved had she not been innocent", because nobody here is in the habit of going in to bat for people without first examining the evidence and deciding that there is a good case for their innocence.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

gradual process

How did one come by the notion she was innocent, before they became involved and examined the evidence ?

For me the process was gradual. One of the first things I read about the case was the blog entry at Simple Justice that I linked upthread. Not long after I joined the discussion here, I became aware of the Johnson-Hampikian letter. These articles helped to convince me that there was not much that pointed strongly toward guilt, and my familiarity with other cases helped convince me early on that the prosecution was blowing smoke. Putting it another way, I thought that the prosecution's case was nowhere near what it should have been to convict on the standard of reasonable doubt. That was about the time I got more seriously involved. Only much later did I have enough information to be satisfied in my own mind that it was close to impossible for them to be involved, but I don't feel that this threshold needs to be crossed for one to take action.