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Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Very Appropriate Casting Of Doug Preston As The Fredo Corleone Wannabe
Posted by Kermit
Preston as Fredo
In the image above, from the first Godfather movie, Michael's brother Fredo watches his father Don Corleone get into a Mafioso tussle.
Fredo, after fumbling, juggling, and dropping his revolver without firing a single shot, proves himself useless and incapable of achieving the basic objective of taking care of his kindred souls.
In the same manner, as Douglas Preston fumbles about protecting the interests of his "Family" (and taking care of his own income), he shows the public that the sci-fi writer can't load his own pen with Truth - or even Believable Lies.
Whenever I see an article published by the sci-fi thriller novelist and pro-Amanda Knox "point-of-view journalist" (his own words) concerning either the murder of Meredith Kercher or the Monster of Florence case, I can't avoid being reminded of "Fredo" the bumbling brother who lets his family down.
Whoever set Douglas Preston up for his histrionic defense of Amanda Knox, or his attacks against the personal and professional integrity of Deputy Prosecutor General Giuliano Mignini, or his defense of his hapless friend Mario Spezi's curious "investigative" techniques in uncovering "dirt" on the decades old "Monster of Florence" case should have found a much better soldado than Preston.
Preston's histrionic pamphlet
Douglas Preston has recently posted an article on The Slate website, promoting a pamphlet that in the end he had to self-publish through Kindle since no one else would publish it (he had told me at the end of last year in an unsolicited email that he was hoping The New Yorker or The Atlantic would print it as an article).
I seriously thought of writing this TJMK post as a self-published Kindle article that could be downloaded for 99 cents, but I refrained from doing so for two reasons:
- 1) I wanted it to get more exposure than Preston's nickel-and-diming effort has
2) I will never want to earn any blood money off the backs of crime victims, even if it's only the grand total of 99 cents from the Kindle copy my mother buys
Preston's The Slate article and Pamphlet are basically an attempt to undermine the PMF and TJMK websites which have taken a pro-victim posture in the online discussion concerning the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007.
As such he stumbles and fumbles with the Truth in promoting his "Family" causes, with as much dexterity and morality as the low-grade Mafioso "Fredo" from The Godfather, unable to load his writer's gun properly, in a comic show of futility.
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #1: Tell Favorable, Out-of-Date news from the Past
Novelist Preston starts telling his unconvincing twisted half-truths before he even finishes the title and subtitle of The Slate promotional article:
Burn Her at the Stake - Amanda Knox was acquitted of murder. Why do so many people still hate her so much? (Source: The Slate)
That title has as much truth as Preston writing another self-promotional article today announcing to the world "I turned 21 years old" … it may be true that years ago in the past he was 21 years old, but that is hardly a current truth for readers.
While it may be the case that accused murderer Amanda Knox was acquitted of that charge in 2011, it is now an old truth, after the Supreme Court of Italy in March chastised the appeals verdict of Judge Hellman (now forcibly retired from the judiciary) and annulled that acquittal, putting her status back to the conclusion of her initial murder trial.
(Later in the article Preston makes a brief mention that she will be retried, barely associated with the headline message he sends to the world in the title to his article. Knox's current situation is the polar opposite of being acquitted; rather, she is still fully charged with murdering Meredith.)
Preston, the public wants you to start broadcasting the truth, the current, real truth, in messages that are for once free of highly misleading insinuations.
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #2: Use Weak Statistics To Support Insinuations
Preston does a number of Google searches and becomes shocked, shocked that he gets hundreds of thousands of hits with combinations like "Amanda Knox" and "pervert", or "Amanda Knox" and "slut".
Preston knows full well, as do the readers of The Slate (and the handful of persons who have read the long version of The Slate article, paying 99 cents for the 10 minute read), that you always get hundreds of thousands or millions of Google hits for just about any Google search, however shocking the search terms may be.
Preston says "The extreme viciousness of the anti-Amanda commentariage is startling".
Let's do a fast test, and do the same Google searches that Preston did, replacing "Amanda Knox" with "Hillary Clinton". Here are the results:
Here are two public figures: Knox on the left has been in the news for 6 years … she would probably be a forgotten figure, just another semi-anonymous American abroad with problems if it hadn't been thanks to the expensive corporate PR campaign that her own family has waged. That PR campaign has propelled the number of overall appearances of her name, and has pushed Internet commenters of all types to opine on her.
Hillary Clinton on the right has been in the news for 3 decades or so, as reflected in the proportionally higher number of Google hits on her name. In spite of not being accused of sexual assault and murder, she still receives a relatively high number of sexual/sexist descriptors.
Knox is not in the news because she has worked on public health reform, or because she has been a Secretary of State, or because she lived in the White House with her husband. Knox is accused of sexual assault and murder. She is also a convicted felon, having served 3 years in an Italian prison (no further appeals) for falsely accusing her boss of murdering Meredith, in Knox's presence.
Knox outdoes Hillary in percentage of hits for "bitch" and "slut", but Hillary betters her for "pervert". Who cares? In Internet, any public person can get Google hits for just about any descriptor, especially if you are accused of a sexual crime.
Let's extend our test a moment, and do an additional Google search: "Douglas Preston" "slut" –"Knox" . By eliminating references to "Knox" we eliminate any testing contamination from Amanda's Perugia murder charges and the ensuing online discussion and reporting. Preston shouldn't be surprised to learn that compared to Amanda Knox's 380,000 "slut" hits, Preston has 73,400 of his own "slut" hits. Not bad. Of course, all of these results require analysis, which is exactly what Preston doesn't provide in his pamphlet.
Here's one of Preston's "slut" Google returns, his own sci-fi novel texts:
"The town slut. She was in this cell just last month, wasn't she, on a drunk and disorderly. Like mother, like daughter. Guess the apple never falls far from the tree. Or in your case, the shit never falls far from the asshole … the murderer might be local. Maybe a devil worshiper. You fit the bill, with that fucked-up purple hair and black eye makeup. Is that what you do at night? Go out and do mumbo-jumbo? … Bitch,' Brad muttered … 'no man would ever want to screw you, you freak.'" … (Poor tormented Preston; that's from his book Still Life with Crows that he curiously dedicated to Mario Spezi.)
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #3: Tell Contrasting Stories About Personal Suffering at the Hands of An Abusive Prosecutor
In an interview in The Atlantic in 2006, well before Meredith's murder, Douglas Preston was asked about Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini:
Question: "Judge Giuliano Mignini, the public prosecutor who interrogated you, is another important player in the case. Was Mignini just doing his job? How much weight do you give to the idea that Mignini had it in for Spezi and you?"
Preston: "…. As for Mignini himself, I think he's a sincere man and an honest and incorruptible judge. I don't think that he's a bad man …. I think he was doing his job the best he could. I think in many ways he was badly misled by Giuttari, the police officer who was running the investigation."
At that point in time, the Bad Guy for Spezi and Preston had been and still was Police super-inspector Michele Giuttari. But that didn't seem to sell. They needed something to spice up their tales about the Monster of Florence, which weren't achieving whatever objective they may have set themselves. The breakthrough for Preston and Spezi came with Meredith's murder. Preston today with his Pamphlet admits to being recruited early on by the pro-Amanda Knox movement just after Meredith's murder:
"A few days after Amanda Knox was arrested for murder, I got a call from a man named Tom Wright … a well-known filmmaker … (who) knew her family … (he) begged (Spezi and me) for help …. I felt like I had to become involved." (Source: Preston's Pamphlet on Kindle)
[Image above: Thomas Wright's "famous" screenplay skills seem to rival only Preston's writing skills that we've seen.]
Preston has never admitted this early recruitment contact before. In his Afterword to the English-language version of their tale The Monster of Florence, Preston writes about a different call that he got just after Meredith's murder:
"A few days after the crime, I got a call from Niccolò Capponi … 'My dear Douglas … I bet you a bottle of '97 Chianti Classico that before the week is out someone will connect this poor girl's murder with Monster of Florence'".
Capponi, whose relation with Spezi and Preston deserves its own tome, couldn't have been more astute. The Friends of Amanda movement didn't need anyone other than Douglas Preston to crow out to the world that Mignini wasn't actually a benign, "sincere", "honest" and "incorruptible judge" (Preston's own prior words up until then). Instead, Preston rewrote his own storyboard and retroactively turned the Mignini of early 2006 into one really nasty guy:
"The police then picked me up on the streets of Florence and hauled me in before Mignini, where he interrogated me for hours, with no attorney or interpreter present. He demanded I confess to a string of crimes, including being an accessory to murder, and when I refused, he indicted me for perjury and obstruction of justice and suggested I leave the country." (Source: Preston's Pamphlet, on Kindle)
Preston has changed his tune about how his Perugian questioning in 2006 was arranged. In his earlier book from five years ago he described a different ambience that pleasant day on his way to Perugia, with a notable absence of jackboots "hauling him in", originally stating that it was actually a family-outing:
…. "The next day I drove to Perugia with Christine and our two children, passing the shores of Lake Trasimeno on the way. Perugia, a beautiful and ancient city, occupies an irregular rocky hill in the upper Tiber valley ... Christine planned to sightsee with the kids and have lunch while I was interrogated". (Source: Preston and Spezi, The Monster of Florence)
Driving down to Perugia with your wife and family contrasts with being "hauled in" after being picked up in the streets of Florence, yet Preston, it seems, adapts the truth and insinuations to the required needs and circumstances.
By the way, Mr. Preston, what murder did Prosecutor Mignini accuse you of being an accessory to? You keep repeating it, and we're still waiting to hear. What murder?
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #4: Use illogical deduction and dodgy Internet sources for your facts
Preston makes some amazing logic relationships in his pseudo-scholarly study of pro-victim Internet voices. When describing a book that the pro-Knox forces seem to find against their interests, Preston says:
"While the book included no footnotes or bibliography, it appears to have used information sourced from anonymous bloggers — identifiable as such because it was incorrect." (Source: Preston's 99 cent pamphlet)
I don't think that the reasonable public out there requires any analysis of this fatally flawed "if-then" logic. Preston-Fredo needs to go back to school, either to grade school to do basic maths, or to the Daisy Hill School of Influencing People and Spreading Convincing Propaganda.
This is an important lesson for Preston, who often relies on the daisy-chaining, circular, internal feeding of "facts" amongst pro-Knox promoters. Preston himself, like a post-modern journalistic alchemist, turns wishful opinion into "fact", using as raw material the opinion posts of "Friends of Amanda" anonymous bloggers who use various identities.
Let's take a look at three of the most active and factually flawed pro-Knox bloggers who people like Preston have helped turn into Knox-Urban-Legends, dragging along their pro-Knox fictions.
The photo below comes from a FOA-Fest last summer on Vashon Island where Amanda could thank all her limited number of close supporters for their help in springing her from prison. On the left is Bruce Fisher, or Bruce Fischer (depending on the day). One of his most hilarious affirmations which he vehemently defended until it was impossible to continue to do so, was that a box of Dixan detergent that he spotted in a photo of Sollecito's sink would explain why Sollecito's cutlery may have smelled of bleach … except that Dixan is clothes washing detergent!
The hilariousness of Fisher/Fischer's Internet postings can also take on sinister results when passed on to the hands of either an inexperienced or ethically challenged journalist or a "point-of-view" journalist. Preston refers to a post by Fischer as if it were fact when he publishes in his 99 cent Kindle pamphlet that a prominent pro-victim blogger "had a restraining order placed against him" for a non-existent harassment of a ballet dancer.
Why doesn't Preston also say that the web-site where this post was placed by Fisher/Fischer quickly removed it when it received the corresponding complaint? Why didn't Preston ask Fisher for any proof of the "restraining order"? Why didn't he cross check his facts/falsehoods?
Why should a best-selling sci-fi novelist stoop so low? Money? Anger? Envy?
Another of Preston's anonymous or multi-alias bloggers whom he has quoted or protected is Francesco ("Frank") Sfarzo / Sforca / Sforza. Take your pick of the last name as he has used them all in public documents.
"Frank's" supposed beating at the hands of a squad of goon cops beholden to Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was curiously covered by the Committee to Protect Journalists in prominent website posts and a public letter to the President of Italy, with no effort whatsoever to investigate the claims or speak with the local Italian authorities.
CPJ's reputation remains tarnished as they refuse to this day to recognize their massive screw up. Shame on Joel Simon, director of the CPJ! Is there no governance in that organization?
Should a financial contributor to CPJ such as Preston also be permitted to be a figure in the anti-Italian judicial lobbying that CPJ has consciously or unconsciously ended up participating in?
Preston's role in this laughable attempt to frame Mignini is only made all the more tragic by the fact that "Frank's" arrest in Italy (which Mignini had nothing to do with) was related to a complaint of domestic violence.
He left Italy, and – staying at Amanda's family home in Seattle for a couple of months, then travelling to Canada, Hawaii, then back to a shared residence in Seattle - racked up an impressive set of arrests and police interviews related to further domestic violence complaints during his travels.
He currently has an arrest warrant issued, and Preston has suddenly stopped talking about his and Spezi's prized asset who was supposed to be the living demonstration of the Bad Mignini.
[Image above: Preston's pet blogger "Frank" is not at all a victim of violence, but rather to the contrary, has an arrest warrant out to face charges for instigating it]
Amongst "Frank's" contribution to the "point-of-view" journalism supporting Amanda Knox has been his visit to Piazza Grimana, the square near the cottage crime-scene, where "Frank" took a photo that supposedly demonstrated that Knox and Sollecito could not have monitored the entrance to the cottage from there on the night of the crime, since you can't see the cottage gate according to "Frank".
Any person who goes to Piazza Grimana in Perugia knows perfectly well that if you step just a couple of metres to the left, you have a perfect view of the cottage gate, barely hidden in "Frank's" photo behind the corner of the house on the right.
Yet another case of the danger of Preston using pro-Knox bloggers and friends as sources of unreliable information is that of the G-Man, ex-FBI agent and ex-college security guy, Steve Moore.
In the sake of honesty, of the three pro-Knox bloggers referred to in this post (we could go on forever about the menagerie of Knox Internet personalities), Moore is the least anonymous, although it should be said that his "G-Man" aura he promotes is perhaps self-deprecating humour (think of an adult guy using a nickname like "GI Joe").
G-Man has developed an elaborate tale of how he became interested in the case and began to study detailed documentation and images to come to the forensic conclusion in his living room that the Italian investigation into Meredith Kercher's murder was flawed and that Amanda Knox was innocent. (Moore's experience before he left the FBI as far as I'm aware is escorting suspects to court, sniper training, and flying helicopters … I don't believe he has worked as a forensic specialist.)
Like in the case of Bruce Fisher/Fischer, there are semi-comical aspects to G-Man's appearances on the Internet supporting Amanda Knox. This happens when you get someone who is not a forensics specialist looking at photos and making conclusions:
Unfortunately, Steve Moore was analyzing an image that was not "Amanda and Meredith's sink"! This example of errors in G-Man's contributions to FOA finding Amanda innocent is far from being the only one.
In Preston's Pamphlet, he presents the anecdote of a pro-victim Internet commenter who made what Preston claims is a "threatening" comment concerning the quality of G-Man Steve Moore's daughter's song lyrics. In the light of honesty and telling all the truth, Preston should have stated that after Mom and Dad Moore, the next most prolific pro-Knox poster of the Moore family is their daughter, who has made posts on both pro-Knox and pro-victim sites, on Twitter and on Facebook, including posts with coarse language.
She seems to be an adult, but if she isn't, then Mom and Dad Moore should start acting like better parents, being aware of their offspring's internet activity, putting a filter on their home router and telling her to not make posts on sites that deal with a sexual assault and murder case. Nor should they allow their daughter to leave her own pages open for comments and or to post videos about the murder. And if their daughter is an adult, then Preston shouldn't insinuate to his few readers otherwise.
By the way, the "threatening" post was a return of a phrase used by a pro-Knox poster that "Steve Moore plays for keeps" after a playful criticism of the quality of lyrics written by Miss Moore.
This is a lesson to Douglas Preston: any journalist, even that special lobbyist category of "point-of-view journalist" such as himself, is only as credible as his sources.
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #5: Claim That You Have Already Made Any Needed Explanations
Preston says in his Slate article: "Like a fool I waded into the (Internet) fray, defending Amanda and myself. I attacked my attackers and countered their criticisms."
(Why does Preston have to "defend" Amanda? I thought he was now presenting himself as a journalist. Oh, I forgot, he wrote that he now considers himself a "point-of-view journalist" – his terminology - which sounds a lot like "lobbyist".)
Actually, Preston has never countered any serious criticism. I ask readers to take a fast look at the Committee to Protect Journalists' comment page concerning the CPJ's fiasco accusing Prosecutor Mignini of directing a vicious, violent attack on "Frank" the blogger by a squad of rogue police beholden to the prosecutor.
Preston went wacko when he saw the Internet world laughing out loud at the CPJ's allegations, and when he saw that the Internet provided different proofs to show that the now fugitive blogger was at best making up his story, or had other persons close to the action making it up for him.
Take a look at Preston's emotional replies to CPJ readers' comments.
[Image above: on the left we see CPJ's director Joel Simon, who accused Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini of sending a police squad to beat up "Frank" the blogger (second from left). "Frank" is a family friend of the Knox-Mellas families, taking care of much of their logistics in Perugia, setting up photo shoots, etc. "Frank" stayed at the Mellas home (Chris Mellas, second from right) for a couple of months during his arrest-ridden trip out of Italy, when his domestic violence trial started up there. On the right, Preston, the glue that links "Frank" to the CPJ.]
On the web pages of CPJ, we see that not only does Preston not reply to the contradictions and lies that the Internet world points out in his words and actions, but he also puts conditions on doing so.
The best "countering" of criticism that Preston provides online is pretty pathetic. He says that the demonstrated errors in his and the CPJ's texts "are distortions, falsehoods, and crackpot opinion presented as settled fact." Period. No explanations of why he says one thing in one place and something completely different in another. No transparency concerning his documented relationship with the CPJ. No honesty concerning the real, sad domestic violence case that "Frank" has had before him, brought on by his own family in Italy (in addition to his U.S.A. problems).
We're still waiting for any real clarifications of Preston's serious problems with the truth, the whole truth, the current truth and nothing but the truth.
I personally don't need to see more verbiage from Preston, but I would have thought that he would be concerned about the public's view of his credibility. It will probably help future "True Story" book sales if he were to clear up the confusion he causes about both the Monster of Florence case and aspects of the investigation and trials related to the murder of Meredith Kercher.
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #6: Write Any Incorrect Gibberish That Doesn't Get Error-Checked If You Think that Unknowledgeable People Will Swallow Your Errors
Preston once crowed concerning the quality of his texts:
Before publication, it was minutely vetted by no less than five attorneys in two languages in Italy, the U.K., and the United States. Since publication, it has been read by millions of people in many European languages. In all that time, and with all the millions who have read the book, not one significant error of fact came to light. Mario Spezi and I stand by every single assertion of fact in that book today just as strongly as we did when it was first published three years ago." (Source: Preston on CPJ)
I once suggested to Preston that he ask his five error-checking lawyers for his money back, after the multiple mistakes and falsehoods of The Monster of Florence came to light and it became apparent that it should be reclassified to "Fiction".
It seems that both Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox used the same error-checking lawyers in their memoirs, and that once again Preston and Spezi have employed them for their underwhelming, unknown tome in German Der Engel Mit Den Eisaugen (The Angel With Icy Eyes). No other market seems to have wanted to hear more from the Dynamic Duo of murder "point-of-view journalism". As you can expect, their book about the murder of Meredith Kercher is not about the victim, but about the star, from their point of view, Amanda Knox.
I believe that never in the history of "True Story" lobbying, has a book taken so little time to rack up so many factual errors.
[Image above: Preston and Spezi are sure bets for winning The Novelists' Error Marathon, especially given the finish line they've set for themselves. (By the way, I will state the obvious here, that this satirical image is the only photo that has been "photoshopped" in this TJMK post)]
In the Forward to their limited market book, Preston kicks off the marathon, asserting first of all that Perugia is surrounded by … the hills of Tuscany ("In der schoenen alten Stadt Perugia, umgeben von del Huegeln der Toskana"). Where's a smiley when you need one? To all readers of this post, I ask you that we keep the secret, and let Preston and Spezi figure out by themselves what's wrong with their statement. I guess the Duo were in a hurry to get the book to market.
Slightly further down the same first page, Preston falsely asserts that the Prosecutor Office ("Staatanwaltschaft"), understood to be Mignini, called a triumphant press conference where "case closed" was victoriously declared to the microphones of the Press.
Of course, neither Mignini nor any other prosecutor held such a press conference, nor was he present at any other press conferences at that time. My only explanation for this error by Preston is that he is so obsessed to assign just any supposed bad behavior to Mignini that he sees visions of the prosecutor doing wrong and turns those visions into "True Story" words.
The problem with that explanation of "visions" is that it is how Amanda Knox justified her false accusation against Patrick Lumumba for murdering Meredith, and that false accusation got her three years in the Capanne Prison Spa.
Just another 4 lines below that, Preston claims that within those immediate days after the arrests, Prosecutor Mignini put forward a scenario of Satanic sexual rites for describing the human dynamics on the night of the crime ("das eine amerikanische Studentin namens Amanda Knox mit zwei anderen Personen in den Mord verwickelt sei, den die Staatsanwalt als eine Art sexuelles-satanisches Ritual unter Drogeneinfluss bezeichnete").
Again, Preston got confused. Or, maybe he wrote exactly what he was wanting to write, even if it was wrong.
Let's not leave Mario Spezi out of the Novelists' Error Marathon. Spezi tries to keep up with Preston in the home stretch, in Chapter 1: when emphasizing how isolated he feels that Perugia is from the outside world, he describes Umbria as "the only Italian region that does not border with the sea". Spezi must have had a football scholarship at school, because it seems that he forgot about Lombardia, Piemonte, Val d'Aosta and Trentino & South Tirol. These regions account for about a quarter of Italy's population and include large cities such as Milan and Turin.
We've barely started looking at their Icy Eyes book, but we'll leave a more exhaustive review for the future.
Maybe Preston and Spezi hope that the few German readers of the book (who may have received their copies as free review copies) won't know or care. It's possible that they won't even finish the book.
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #7: Apply Your Own Words to Others in Order to Distract from the Central Issue
Preston claims in The Slate article about pro-victim Internet posters: "Almost all the nasty comments about (Knox) follow a pattern. Even though she did nothing to them, they are all demanding her punishment."
Personally, I don't "demand Knox's punishment". Preston and the rest of FOA know that by now. What the pro-victim Internet posters want is for the Italian Justice system to be left to do its job, without any outside interference by a corporate, multimillion dollar public relations campaign, or – if we get to the point where Italy asks for Knox's extradition – non-juridical or non-treaty political interventions to interrupt this normal administrative procedure.
Of course, those persons who are found guilty of sexually attacking and murdering Meredith should get the punishment that the Italian legal system foresees in such cases.
The pro-Knox camp has been outraged that Rudy Guede may be released from prison as early as 2014, insinuating that he has struck a deal to frame Knox. Any honest and informed opiner on this case would know that Rudy has only followed the well established legal and penitentiary procedures in Italy that apply to all convicts, and had Knox followed the fasttrack trial as he did, she also could have been looking at early freedom.
If the pro-Knox camp is so outraged that Guede may get free in 2014, I would suggest that they lobby that sentence reduction procedures be changed so that murder convicts serve their whole prison sentence. Somehow, I don't think that the pro-Knox camp will undertake such lobbying.
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #8: Don't be transparent or precise
Preston describes in his Pamphlet how in 2000 he moved to Italy with his family and soon after became fascinated with the Monster of Florence serial killings case and teamed up with journalist Mario Spezi to investigate the case and write a book.
"Giuliano Mignini did not like our investigation", he states as the start of a series of supposed abuses they suffered at the hands of the prosecutor.
Maybe Preston should state that after moving to Italy in 2000, he didn't meet Spezi until 2001, and up until 2004, over the course of three years, it seems he drank a lot of coffee with Spezi, drove to a couple of the decades old Monster crime sites in the country roads around Florence, spoke to the mother of one of the victims, kept a scrap book of what the real, active reporters on the case were doing … and not much more.
Only after almost four years following his arrival in Italy, does it seem that Preston's active "investigation" suddenly started and kicked into high gear in January of 2004 when Spezi's friend Francesco Calamandrei, the pharmacist of San Casciano, was drawn into the Monster of Florence investigation. Spezi woke up on the Monster case, did an interview with Calamandrei, and got it published in La Nazione within 24 hours on 23 January 2013. Without mentioning that he was a friend of Calamandrei.
It should be noted that the prosecutor who ordered this "wake-up call" for Spezi wasn't Prosecutor Mignini from Perugia, but rather Prosecutor Paolo Canessa from Florence, the central prosecutor for the Monster of Florence case.
Preston's rewriting of history and intertwining fiction and half-truths related to the Monster of Florence case and fiction and half-truths related to Meredith Kercher's murder in Perugia has brought him time and time again to present Mignini as the key figure in the Monster of Florence case:
Mignini theorised that this satanic cult consisted of powerful people – noblemen, pharmacists, journalists and freemasons – who ordered the Monster killings because they needed female body parts to use as the blasphemous wafer in their black masses. Putting himself in charge of the investigation, Mignini became so obsessed that he crossed the line of legality, wiretapping journalists and conducting illegal investigations of newspapers. (Source: The Guardian)
(It should be said that Preston really should clean up his old message, and tell readers that any and all abuse of office accusations against Mignini were thrown out: he has neither been found, nor now even been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to the Monster of Florence case - quite the opposite, the rogue Florentine prosecutor who initiated the cancelled proceedings against Mignini may have some questions to answer).
Again, Preston's own words belie his transformation of Prosecutor Mignini. Remember that before Meredith's murder, Preston's Bad Guy with satanic theories wasn't Mignini, but Police Inspector Michele Giuttari.
You can imagine that had Mignini not been the prosecutor of Meredith's murder case, but Giuttari had been involved in the police investigation into Meredith's murder, that Preston and Spezi could have saved their whole effort in demonizing Mignini, because they were already halfway there with Giuttari.
Why did Spezi and Preston suddenly get on the case and start sculpting their Monster of Florence tale in early 2004 following Calamandrei getting caught up in the police investigation? I would love to know.
Why did they apply a pre-existing Monster of Florence theory developed by English fiction writer Magdalen Nabb many years before?
Nabb was referred to as "Ethel", a Belgian writer, in the Italian version of Spezi and Preston's tale, while Nabb was still alive. Preston simply eliminated Nabb completely by the time they translated and published the tale in English, after Nabb's death. In an eerie and weird manner, some of the years-old Nabb-Spezi, Master-Apprentice conversations in the Italian version of MoF seem to be transformed into current Spezi-Preston Master-Apprentice conversations in the English version of their "True Story" tale, almost as if they took on her personality.
I guess they weren't too worried about presenting as their own, current "investigation", ideas and theories (correct or not) that had been floating around for a decade and developed by other – now unacknowledged - much better writers.
[Image above: In Preston's and Spezi's English language book The Monster of Perugia they morphed English author Magdalen Nabb's Carabinieri contacts, as well as Nabb's theories and conversations concerning the MoF into their own, with neither direct nor indirect recognition of Nabb's existence, nor her work done nearly 10 years earlier. Maybe they felt that since she had passed away, the world wouldn't notice their intellectual theft.]
Preston's Weird "Truths" and Fumbling Propaganda – Technique #9: Use corporate media as a means to legitimize false claims
The CPJ's false and unverified accusation against Mignini for supposedly sending a goon squad to beat up the Perugian blogger is exactly the sort of feed that the Friends of Amanda and the Gogerty&Marriott corporate PR campaigns needed. These groups repeated the invented injustice wherever they could within the ongoing campaign.
That's where we find a link between the PR campaign and the "mainstream" American media and showmen. If you Google "Doug Longhini" and go to the CBS News site associated with him, you're not quite sure at first glance if he's an ethical traditional journalist, a "point-of-view" journalist, a CBS producer, or an external businessman. What is clear is that it seems that most of whatever it is that he does at CBS is dedicated to Amanda Knox and, in second place, in general the crime in Perugia.
However, when you start reading some of his articles or news reports, like the one below, you realize that he's not a traditional journalist who checks his facts and tries to get all angles on a news story.
I used to be impressed with the effort that went into the 48 Hours type of investigative programs. Not any more. Describing "Frank" Sforca/Sforza/Sfarzo as an "independent journalist" when this pro-Knox blogger acted as the logistics manager for the Knox-Mellas clan in Perugia, including organizing photo shoots for the daughters, stayed with the Knox-Mellas family a couple of months in Seattle, and was the beneficiary of ongoing funding from pro-Knox circles even after he was a no-show for his latest court session last December in Seattle, is stretching the definition of "independent".
This Longhini article almost reads as if Douglas Preston had written it … I would have hoped that Longhini might have made some reference to his sources for his description of "Frank" being handcuffed and beaten, or that Longhini would have looked into the true reports of "Frank" being arrested, not on orders of Mignini, but simply because he bit a police officer who was responding to a domestic violence complaint.
Doug Preston is no stranger to Longhini's CBS 48 Hours pro-Knox shows, having appeared together with another shared acquaintance, a certain Paul Ciolino. Paul's role in the Knox CBS shows was supposed to be the implacable investigator who knows the truth that the Italian authorities want to hide.
However, Ciolino's on-screen antics for many viewers are in detriment to the argument he tries to make.
For example, what serious television detective in the world, not speaking the local language, would go calling at the door of unsuspecting murder witnesses at nighttime, vehemently exhorting them to reply to questions? Paul did:
Where does this leave the state of modern megamedia journalism in America? It has been transformed into entertainment, into a vaudeville show. The confirmation comes in Paul Ciolino's own self-advertising:
The only thing missing is Liza Minnelli singing "Cabaret" in her black stockings.
Back in America, Preston's friend Ciolino smears the good name of Signora Nara Capezzali, the elderly lady who he tried to interview under the cloak of darkness (if he really needed to interview her, couldn't he have arranged to meet her through prior arrangement, during the daytime?):
After describing Prosecutor Mignini as a "convicted felon", Paul Ciolino speaks of Signora Capezzali at the 1h42'47" mark of a Seattle University pro-Knox forum on 4 April 2011: "The crazy woman (Capezzali) who had ... I don't think she ... did she ever testify? They never did bring her in because she is crazy." (Source: Seattle University FOA panel video.) Ciolino's speech was notable if only for the almost complete absence of any truths.
In fact, yes, Signora Capezzali did testify in court in Knox's and Sollecito's murder trial, two years earlier in March 2009 (Source ABC News ). It's not necessary to add that in spite of Ciolino's vaudeville show affirmations, witness Signora Capezzali is not crazy.
My Concluding Suggestions
1. To Joel Simon, the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists:
Rather than doing false posts that are never retracted or corrected about benign regional Italian prosecutors in Italy, the CPJ should realize that there is a much, much greater, real and true threat to journalists and journalism due to the transformation of the profession in America into a concentration of commercial enterprises with links to lobbying groups, who use vaudeville-style "entertainers" to wake up murder witnesses in the dark of night and then publicly call them "crazy".
Mr. Simon, really, it's time for you to implement some governance in your organization. Here are some common sense suggestions that I humbly submit:
- 1) Don't allow your financial benefactors to be part of the cases that you take special interest in, except with independent review of your analysis and claims.
2) If you're a journalism organization, follow basic journalistic ethics by checking your facts and contrasting allegations, especially when you are making claims that seriously affect the reputations of persons.
3) When you realize that you have made a terrible mistake and have falsely accused someone of sending a goon squad to beat up someone else, then be man enough to admit it and correct your false accusation. Start now and apologise to Prosecutor Mignini for the slanderous gift you made to Amanda Knox PR campaign.
4) Take some time as a collective representative organization, to consider and reconsider whom you represent and why … are self-described "point-of-view journalists" (lobbyists) part of the body of professionals you wish to represent? Will they cause you a conflict of professional or moral interest at any point? Do you want these people giving money to your organization?
2. To Douglas Preston, an amateur crime fighter obviously out of his league.
My impression from what we've seen is that your attempts at playing in the big lobbying leagues have all ended up with pie in your face, or a "kick-me, I'm stupid" yellow Post-It on your back:
- 1) As we have seen in this post, ethical, traditional journalism gives way in your recent The Slate post and Kindle 99 cent pamphlet, to obvious and ineffective pro-Knox lobbying. In my opinion, the propagandistic shots you've fired have neither been convincing nor contain real, true facts unfettered from insinuation and half-truths and falsehoods.I
2) In prior TJMK posts, we've seen how you have told two completely different beginnings to your Monster of Florence tale, complete with quoting different persons at different times in different places. You have ended the story with a confusion of errors and falsehoods. See my posts on this here and here.
3) It seems you're famous in Italian judiciary circles for having lost control of your sphincter in your questioning in Perugia years ago. Is that one of the reasons you're so mad at Prosecutor Mignini and say just about anything about him, regardless if the message to your readers is true?
4) Like Fredo, you were always the last member of the gang to find out what was going on. Your supposed "5 year" investigation with Spezi into the Monster of Florence seems more like a rehash of old theories developed by others, done in a short period of time by Spezi only from 2004 onward (notwithstanding your scrapbook of other reporters' work), who would inform you at the last minute of his larvae studies, his TV appearances, or of his "A-Team" investigative squad comprising an ex-con and an ex-cop, who you realized existed only when their months of work had finished.
Fumbling Fredo's handlers in The Godfather realized the terrible damage he was doing to the Corleone Family's interests. Is Preston damaging the true, long-term interests of Amanda Knox?
What about his other interests, in the Monster of Florence case … is he truly aware of all of the interests in that case, beyond his own – repeatedly voiced – hope of seeing George Clooney play Preston?
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Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Seeds Of Betrayal: Sollecito Twice More Implies Evidence Against Knox Much Stronger Than Against Him
Posted by Peter Quennell
Above and below are two videos of TV interviews in the past few days which will give real weapons to the prosecution coming up.
Nobody who is innocent ever needs to lie to contradict a huge amount of evidence to the contrary. At the 2009 trial and the 2011 annulled appeal, Sollecito was kept carefully circumscribed by his own lawyers.
Giulia Bongiorno was often observed firmly making him toe a line. If she liked him, it sure never showed, and she had little response when some fairly disgusting things about him came out.
Sollceito's spontaneous interventions in court made him look whiny and guilty and never did him any good, and unlike Knox he was never game to be cross-examined by the prosecution on the stand.
But since his release, in his interviews and especially in his self-serving book, he has done his level best to convince the world "I saved Knox!!".
In both videos, he is repeating the same false claim which has already landed him in such legal trouble in Italy. It is that a desperate Knox needed his support, and he gave it (despite illegal prosecution pleas) without considering the cost to himself.
These questions and these questions and these questions are what competent interviewers could and should have asked. But of course, the silly TV interviewers on NBC Today and KOMO TV in Seattle each nod happily and just wilt.
Here are our takes on the sub-texts of Sollecito's claim to have selflessly saved Knox.
(1) That the prosecution had a weak case against RS or AK
Those tuning in after 2009 might think so, but in the first half of 2009 the prosecution's case was smooth, fast and brilliant in the extreme. They figured out a way to get Knox on the stand and to hang herself in her own words.
In contrast, the defense phase late 2009 was halting and uncertain and often with daggers drawn. It never once landed a blow. Defense counsel didnt always turn up, and there were hints that two of them (Bongiorno and Ghirga) might walk.
At the end, of course, the prosecution got a unanimous verdict and all they wanted, less a few years off the sentences for supposed kindness shown to Meredith by the killers. The trial report was praised this past March by the Supreme Court.
The evidence against Sollecito was quite overwhelming (false alibis, computer inactivity, mobile phone inactivity, a credible eye-witness, DNA in Meredith's room, and of course this on his footprint in Meredith's blood. Also read this list of lies Sollecito had already told by April 2009.
The prosecution was legally barred from offering any deals, but even in their dreams here, they had zero need.
(2) That Sollecito was loyal to Knox after 6 November 2007
It never happened, as Knox herself knows. Read this astonishing transcript here in which Sollecito's father is making quite clear what Sollecito must do. Sollecito thereafter separated himself repeatedly from Knox in court and online..
On 6 November 2007 at his witness interview Sollecito cracked fast and turned on Knox, painting her as a liar who had made things up. She then accidentally gave him quite a break, by implicating Patrick instead of him.
Knox has clearly been bothered by this disloyalty ever since. She has tried both to pull him in and to push him away.
In her cell, she pondered whether he was the real killer. She later wrote Sollecito some love letters and once rather desperately asked to meet. And then just the other day she really barked.
When Sollecito's lawyer Giulia Bongiorno for the first time EVER showed some tolerance for Amanda Knox it was 11 months into the trial and it caused many heads to be scratched.
The code throughout which Sollecito never once broke from was never "honor bound". It was to throw Knox under the bus. Reporters should confront him hard on this.
Archived in Officially involved, Raffaele Sollecito, Diversion efforts, Sollecitos, Contempt of court, Raffaele Sollecito, Public evidence, RS + AK alibis, Reporting on the case, Books on case
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The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: On Top Of Everything Else It Seems The Book Is Financially A Huge Flop
Posted by Peter Quennell
Bizarrely, Amanda Knox might have run into a bit of luck.
She will be able to point at upcoming court events to the fact that this seriously nasty and thoroughly dishonest blood-money book fooled a lot lot less book-buyers than had been hoped.
In The Week Andrea Vogt quotes confirmed publishing industry figures to show sales so far are a mere FIVE PERCENT of what was hoped. The book is not selling anywhere in Europe now.
Even in the US, Publisher's Weekly said the memoir "underwhelmed" and was "slow out of the gate". As of last Friday, it had lost 30 per cent of its sales from its debut week, falling back to No. 5 on the non-fiction hardcover bestseller list despite Knox conducting dozens of interviews in the hope of boosting sales.
It was hard not to conclude that the more the interviews, the more the sales seemed to drop. They sure sent a lot of new readers over here. Knox has yet to do even one interview that is a clear win, and a lot of offputting jubilant ego has been creeping in.
The publishers would seem to be down $1 million to $2 million or more, and Knox and her people have probably received in the publishers' advance all the royalties they are going to see.
Andrea Vogt is the first and still the only English-language reporter to describe the most serious (Bergamo) complaint. Did nobody think to take into account Knox's new legal liabilities and possible large fines and defamation awards?
Bob Barnett has sounded a bit besotted by Knox. A siren call that many have come to regret. We could accept that she needs help, but failing her in due diligence is the worst possible kind.
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Sunday, May 19, 2013
Contrary To Reported Claim By Amanda Knox There Is Zero "Wave Of Defamation Suits"
Posted by Peter Quennell
No defamation suits have begun. But actually it is WORSE. And Knox would be suicidal to leave her story unchanged.
Bob Barnett and Ted Simon and anyone else presumably trying to give Knox good advice might like to take note. Canada's National Post is reporting this:
Her book, which earned her an advance of almost $4-million, also risks inflaming Italian public opinion, offending the nation's judges and triggering a wave of new defamation actions by the police and prosecutors she accuses of framing her.
"People asked me if I would change the book and I said absolutely not … I am not going to change my story just because someone is threatening to sue me but I mean … it sucks. It sucks and it sucks."
Defamation, slander and libel refer to private, personal, civil suits against other persons who tell a malicious untruth. Knox and Sollecito are not (or not yet) facing anything like that.
Each through their unwise books and interviews has sparked a single investigation by a Chief Prosecutor (in Florence, Verona and Bergamo) into whether they are in contempt of court.
Those who would seek to undermine the due process of the Italian justice system and the proper functioning of the courts (very, very rare now) in this or the associated Monster of Florence case seem to include all of the following:
- The three regional mafias;
- A few defense lawyers and well-funded defendants;
- Politicians shielding corruption;
- In some instances the freemasons.
- Those wanting investigations like MOF/Narducci to drop dead;
- Muckraking magazines like Oggi;
- Some anti-Italy foreigners.
None of them are simply pro-Amanda. All of them have hidden agendas, and all are already under the eye of law enforcement. Fighting institutions that make the public safe can make for strange bedfellows.
It has also especially in Italy led to powerful if usually latent ways to push back.
If officers of the Italian courts are publicly accused of crimes in the media while a legal process is playing out, and the claims are malicious and untrue, this is not a civil matter (defamation, slander or libel).
It is a criminal matter (in the UK and US too) for which sentences can include long prison terms.
If the officers of the Italian court who are attacked are very senior and have an antimafia role they are REQUIRED BY LAW to request a criminal investigation by a chief prosecutor to take place.
They esentially have no further role themselves except to provide true testimony in court.
A range of measures is then available to investigating chief prosecutors, up to and including invoking the powers of the Council of Magistrates and even the President of the Italian republic.
Knox and Sollecito both seem to have point-blank accused a number of officers of the court of crimes. In Deputy Prosecutor General Mignini's case, he has been accused by both of them. The most serious:
- By Sollecito of offering an illegal deal to make him sell out on Knox. Both Mignini and Sollecito's father categorically stated that this was a criminal lie.
- By Knox of illegally interrogating her about Patrick with no defense lawyer present. But the trial record shows Mignini was not even in the room.
These seem to be about as open-and-shut as contempt of court cases can ever get. "Sollecito and Knox, did you make these false claims or not? Yes or no?"
If the answer is yes, they'll lose any criminal case in the blink of an eye. Thereafter many private or civil defamation suits can be expected.
Archived in Officially involved, Amanda Knox, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Contempt of court, Amanda Knox, Reporting on the case, Books on case
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Friday, May 17, 2013
Seeds Of Betrayal: In Interview Knox Reveals To Italy Her Considerable Irritation With Sollecito
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
For some odd reason, Amanda Knox has decided she is not loved enough in Italy.
Could it be because she is widely seen to have lied her way through trial, came across as loud, self-absorbed and callous in her 2009 testimony and court interventions, served three years for framing her her kindly employer, was reported as being just as grubby and tin-eared and sharp-elbowed as ever in prison, slimed Italy though her cohorts in much of the English-language media after her 2011 release, and has now written an illegal blood-money book which once again slams a benign Italy?
In particular it slams the justice system, one of the most popular and trusted institutions in Italy, and its officers of the court, with more proven lies and contradictions with past testimony being unearthed daily.
Apparently in Knox's mind it was all really Guede's and Sollecito's faults.
It was they who tarnished her image. Here in an interview in the current Oggi (which appears just as in contempt of court as last week's Oggi article now the subject of a criminal investigation) she sets Italians straight.
Translation here was by our main poster Miriam, who is herself in Italy - and in disgust.
Amanda Knox answers the phone with a bright voice and no signs of fatigue. Strange. She is a veteran of a promotional tour that would have knocked-out a bison. Her book "Waiting to be heard" is selling like mad [it is?] but it will not be published in Italy: our publishers have a - sound - suspect that it would set off a number of complaints for defamation, and they have decided to not publish it.
"I'm sorry" she says. "The Italians believe that I am full of hate for them, but if they had the opportunity to read my book they would discover that there is not a trace of anger in it. It hurts that so many believe that I am guilty, that I wrote the book out of arrogance, for money. It is not true." Says Knox venting her frustration.
Following the Cassazione's decision on March 26 to redo the appeal process - which had absolved Amanda and Rafaele Sollecito - the British publishers also pulled back.
"They asked me if I wanted to postpone the book launch. But it is my turn to talk now, and I do not intend to alter my story just because somebody threatens to sue me." Amanda is nothing if not pugnacious. "Compared to how I was before I came to Perugia, I am quieter, even timid. My family is disappointed: the sunny happy Amanda no longer exists."
Your personality - the way you reacted to Meredith's death - caused you many problems at the time.
"People involved in a tragedy can react in many different ways, and your behavior can be manipulated to reinforce the idea that you are the one who is guilty."
What are you referring to?
"To the infamous images taken outside of the small villa on the day Meredith's lifeless body was found. Those images were cut and obsessively repeated, so as to only show Raffaele and me kissing." The message was clear: "their friend is dead and all those two think about is kissing."
What were you feeling at that moment?
"I hadn't understood what had happened; I had not accepted the fact that Meredith had died in such a terrible way. I felt lost and sad. I was desperately trying to understand. Raffaele kissed me to console me: since I did not speak Italian yet, there was a linguistic barrier between us that prevented us from giving each other verbal support. And then, to re-enforce the strangeness of my behavior, there was the contrast of the cries of my roommate Filomena Romanelli. She is Italian, she had understood. She had seen Meredith's room, the body, the blood. Not me: I was in total confusion."
In the book, Honor Bound, Sollecito writes that your behavior that day was "embarassing"
"I don't think he was embarrassed . I can understand that he would find me "clingy". I depended on him completely; I was absolutely clingy. However, he knew how they were looking at us, while I hadn't considered at all how people might have judged us. I was simply reacting in my lost and disoriented way."
One of the PMs believes that Guede didn't act alone. Could he have had an accomplice?
"I can only base my opinion on what the prosecution brought to court."
"They found another person's DNA in Meredith's room, a person that has never been identified. A smaller amount of DNA than Rudy's. There is Guede's bloody handprint on the wall, his footprint, his DNA on Meredith's body. This evidence leads me to believe he acted alone."
John Kercher, Meredith's dad, maintains that his daughter had studied karate as a child, and that she would have fought to survive. He believes one man would not have been able to subdue her.
"Of course Meredith fought, but what could she have done against an armed man? Rudy is athletic, and is not small. Mez was minute, she maybe weighed 54 kgs, what good could have Karate done her? Even a man if faced against the likes of Guede, armed with a knife, would not have stood a chance."
How do you explain Rudy's calm countenance during the trial? Before being arrested he had told a friend - Giacomo Benedetti - on Skye that you and Raffaele had nothing to do with the murder. After being arrested he started accusing you.
"Yes, it is a strange coincidence. I do not know if he changed his story based on his own ideas or those of his lawyers or the prosecution. I only know that after his story changed, the PM began calling him "poor Rudy" to demonstrate how fragile he was, and consequently how easily manipulated by me."
When and why did you break up with Raffaele?
"When he "broke" my alibi (during a police questioning, Raffaele claimed to not remember if Amanda had left the house the night of the murder, editor's note.) It was a shock for me."
"A shock that combined with the fact that we did not communicate for a long time while in prison erased my feelings for him. In prison I had to focus on survival and put love aside."
Back in Seattle, James Terrano became your boyfriend.
"We had been together in university. While I was in prison, we wrote a lot, but just as friends. When I came back home, we began looking at each other differently."
Do you live with James?
"No. At first, I lived with a friend (Madison Paxton, who had moved to Perugia to be closer to her, editor's note) now I live alone. James is often at my place, we're very close, but we don't live together."
Did you see a psychiatrist to get over your prison experience?
"Only once, I started crying and never went back. I talk with my friends and with my family; I don't need an "external consultant." Writing the book was extremely helpful; I freed myself of all my anger and my wounds."
What will you do now?
"I took a break from university to write my book; I'm going to go back and would like to graduate next year. I would also like to write other books, if I can afford do. My financial future is very uncertain."
But everyone says the advance on the book was fantastic.
"I'll just say that I still have not been able to meet my first goal: repay my family for all expenses incurred in defending and staying close to me." (One and a half million dollars, editor's note)
People have also mentioned a movie.
"I've heard the same. I don't know how being on the set would be; perhaps not as terrible as I imagine."Is there anything you regret?
"Yes. I regret not having immediately contacted Meredith's family, of not having expressed my feelings and sorrow to them. At the beginning, perhaps, it would have been possible. It hurts to know that John Kercher believes I'm guilty, and that this belief is based on faulty information. I had hoped that once absolved, the Kerchers would have believed me. But that didn't happen.
Maybe the new trial will draw out the truth
"That is up to Rudy, but I doubt he will do it."
In May 2014, Rudy could receive the first permit allowing him to enjoy a few days out of prison.
"That's crazy. It's simply insane for them to let a guilty man loose because they refuse to admit they were wrong about me."
Yes Rudy! What about that? Why did Knox's own lawyers and the Supreme Court accept that overwhelming evidence proved three people did it?
And why did you say she did it? And why do her own parents believe she did it? How did you accomplish those tricks? Amanda says: speak up.
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Thursday, May 16, 2013
The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: A Major Contradiction Between Knox's Book And Her Trial Testimony
Posted by James Raper
Amanda Knox now faces the prospect of not one but two trials where her claims in the book will become a real minefield to the defense and a major plus for the prosecutions.
If she goes back for the trials she may or may not get up on the stand, but either way she may blow it. If she doesn't go back, she will indeed blow it in the eyes of the courts and it will be hard to escape guilty verdicts.
This post describes a particularly dangerous part of this minefield which seems quite certain to preoccupy both courts. It is about what actually happened on the 5th November 2007 when Amanda Knox was questioned at the central police station.
The police had called her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in to the station for questioning and Knox had accompanied him because she did not want to be alone. They had already eaten at the house of a friend of Sollecito's.
Knox's interrogation was not tape recorded and in that sense we have no truly independent account of what transpired. The police, including the interpreter, gave evidence at her trial, but we do not yet have transcripts for that evidence other than that of the interpreter. There are accounts in books that have been written about the case but these tend to differ in the detail. The police and the interpreter maintain that she was treated well. Apart from the evidence of the interpreter all we have is what Knox says happened, and our sources for this are transcripts of her trial evidence and what she wrote in her book. I shall deal with the evidence of the interpreter towards the end of this article.
I am going to compare what she said at trial with what she wrote in her book but also there was a letter she wrote on the 9th and a recording of a meeting with her mother on the 10th November which are relevant.. What she wrote in her book is fairly extensive and contains much dialogue. She has a prodigious memory for detail now which was almost entirely lacking before. I am going to tell you to treat what she says in her book with extreme caution because she has already been found out for, well let us say, her creative writing if not outright distortion of facts. I shall paraphrase rather than quote most of it but a few direct quotes are necessary.
Knox arrived with Sollecito at the police station at about 10.30 pm (according to John Follain). The police started to question Sollecito at 10.40 pm (Follain).
In her book Knox describes being taken from the waiting area to a formal interview room in which she had already spent some time earlier. It is unclear when that formal questioning began. Probably getting on for about 11.30pm because she also refers to some questions being asked of her in the waiting room following which she did some stretches and splits. She then describes how she was questioned about the events over a period from about the time she and Sollecito left the cottage to about 9 pm on the 1st November.
Possibly there was a short break. She describes being exhausted and confused. The interpreter, Knox says, arrived at about 12.30 am. Until then she had been conversing with the police in Italian.
Almost immediately on the questioning resuming -
"Monica Napoleoni, who had been so abrupt with me about the poop and the mop at the villa, opened the door. "Raffaele says you left his apartment on Thursday night," she said almost gleefully. "He says that you asked him to lie for you. He's taken away your alibi.""
Knox describes how she was dumfounded and devastated by this news. She cannot believe that he would say that when they had been together all night. She feels all her reserves of energy draining away. Then -
"Where did you go? Who did you text?" Ficarra asked, sneering at me.
"I don't remember texting anyone."
They grabbed my cell phone up off the desk and scrolled quickly through its history.
"You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who's Patrick?"
"My boss at Le Chic."
Stop right there.
How were the police able to name the recipient of the text? The text Patrick had sent her had already been deleted from Knox's mobile phone by Knox herself and Knox hasn't yet named Patrick. In fact she couldn't remember texting anyone.
It is of course probable that the police already had a log of her calls and possibly had already traced and identified the owner of the receiving number for her text, though the last step would have been fast work.
In her trial testimony Knox did a lot of "the police suggested this and suggestd that" though it is never crystal clear whether she is accusing the police of having suggested his name. But she is doing it here in her book and of course the Knox groupies have always maintained that it was the police who suggested his name to her.
The following extract from her trial testimony should clear things up. GCM is Judge Giancarlo Massei.
GCM: In this message, was there the name of the person it was meant for?
AK: No, it was the message I wrote to my boss. The one that said "Va bene. Ci vediamo piu tardi. Buona serata."
GCM: But it could have been a message to anyone. Could you see from the message to whom it was written?
AK: Actually, I don't know if that information is in the telephone…………………..
GCM : But they didn't literally say it was him!
AK : No. They didn't say it was him, but they said "We know who it is, we know who it is. You were with him, you met him."
GCM : Now what happened next? You, confronted with the message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?"
AK : Well, first I started to cry…....
And having implied that it was the police who suggested Patrick's name to her, she adds….. that quote again -
"You need to stop lying. You texted Patrick. Who's Patrick?"
"My boss at Le Chic."
Here she is telling the Perugian cops straight out exactly to whom the text was sent. "My boss at Le Chic".
But that does not quite gel with her trial testimony -
And they told me that I knew, and that I didn't want to tell. And that I didn't want to tell because I didn't remember or because I was a stupid liar. Then they kept on about this message, that they were literally shoving in my face saying "Look what a stupid liar you are, you don't even remember this!"
At first, I didn't even remember writing that message. But there was this interpreter next to me who kept saying "Maybe you don't remember, maybe you don't remember, but try," and other people were saying "Try, try, try to remember that you met someone, and I was there hearing "Remember, remember, remember…..
Doesn't the above quote make it clear that the police were having considerable trouble getting Knox to tell them to whom her text message was sent? It would also explain their growing frustration with her.
But perhaps the above quote relates not to whom the text was sent but, that having been ascertained, whether Knox met up with that person later? Knox has a habit of conflating the two issues. However there is also the following quote from her trial testimony -
Well there were lots of people who were asking me questions, but the person who had started talking with me was a policewoman with long hair, chestnut brown hair, but I don't know her. Then in the circle of people who were around me, certain people asked me questions, for example there was a man holding my telephone, and who was literally shoving the telephone into my face, shouting "Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?"
Then there were others, for instance this woman who was leading, was the same person who at one point was standing behind me, because they kept moving, they were really surrounding me and on top of me. I was on a chair, then the interpreter was also sitting on a chair, and everyone else was standing around me, so I didn't see who gave me the first blow because it was someone behind me, but then I turned around and saw that woman and she gave me another blow to the head.
The woman with the long hair, chestnut brown hair, Knox identifies in her book as Ficarra. Ficarra is the policewoman who started the questioning particularly, as Knox has confirmed, about the texted message. "Look at this telephone! Who is this? Who did you want to meet?" Again, surely this is to get Knox to identify the recipient of the text, not about whether she met up with him?
In the book though, it is all different.
In the book, the police having told her that the text is to someone called Patrick, Knox is a model of co-operation as, having already told them that he is her boss at Le Chic, she then gives a description of him and answers their questions as to whether he knew Meredith, whether he liked her etc. No reluctance to co-operate, no memory difficulties here.
Notwithstanding this, her book says the questions and insinuations keep raining down on her. The police insist that she had left Sollecito's to meet up with - and again the police name him - Patrick.
"Who did you meet up with? Who are you protecting? Why are you lying? Who's this person? Who's Patrick?"
Remember again, according to her trial testimony the police did not mention Patrick's name and Knox still hasn't mentioned his name. But wait, she does in the next line -
"I said "Patrick is my boss.""
So now, at any rate, the police have a positive ID from Knox regarding the text message and something to work with. Patrick - boss - Le Chic.
Knox then refers to the differing interpretations as to what "See you later" meant and denies that she had ever met up with Patrick that evening. She recalls the interpreter suggesting that she was traumatized and suffering from amnesia.
The police continue to try to draw an admission from Knox that she had met up with Patrick that evening - which again she repeatedly denies. And why shouldn't she? After all, she denies that she's suffering from amnesia, or that there is a problem with her memory. The only problem is that Sollecito had said she had gone out but that does not mean she had met with Patrick.
Knox then writes, oddly, as it is completely out of sequence considering the above -
"They pushed my cell phone, with the message to Patrick, in my face and screamed,
"You're lying. You sent a message to Patrick. Who's Patrick?"
That's when Ficarra slapped me on my head."
A couple of blows (more like cuffs) to the head (denied by the police) is mentioned in her trial testimony but more likely, if this incident ever happened, it would have been earlier when she was struggling to remember the text and to whom it had been sent. Indeed that's clear from the context of the above quotes.
And this, from her trial testimony -
Remember, remember, remember, and then there was this person behind me who—it's not that she actually really physically hurt me, but she frightened me."
In the CNN TV interview with Chris Cuomo, Knox was asked if there was anything she regretted.
Knox replied that she regretted the way this interrogation had gone, that she wished she had been aware of her rights and had stood up to the police questioning better.
Well actually, according to the account in her book, she appears to have stood up to the police questioning with a marked degree of resilience and self- certainty, and with no amnesia. There is little of her trademark "being confused".
So why the sudden collapse? And it was a sudden collapse.
Given the trial and book accounts Knox would have us think that she was frightened, that it was due to exhaustion and the persistent and bullying tone of the questioning, mixed with threats that she would spend time in prison for failing to co-operate. She also states that -
(a) she was having a bad period and was not being allowed to attend to this, and
(b) the police told her that they had "hard evidence" that she was involved in the murder.
Knox has given us a number of accounts as to what was actually happening when this occurred.
In a letter she wrote on the 9th November she says that suddenly all the police officers left the room but one, who told her she was in serious trouble and that she should name the murderer. At this point Knox says that she asked to see the texted message again and then an image of Patrick came to mind. All she could think about was Patrick and so she named him (as the murderer).
During a recorded meeting with her mother in Capanne Prison on the 10th November she relates essentially the same story.
In her book there is sort of the same story but significantly without mention of the other officers having left the room nor mention of her having asked to see the texted message again.
If the first two accounts are correct then at least the sense of oppression from the room being crowded and questions being fired at her had lifted.
Then this is from her book -
In that instant, I snapped. I truly thought I remembered having met somebody. I didn't understand what was happening to me. I didn't understand that I was about to implicate the wrong person. I didn't understand what was at stake. I didn't think I was making it up. My mind put together incoherent images. The image that came to me was Patrick's face. I gasped. I said his name. "Patrick—it's Patrick.
It's her account, of course, but this "Patrick - It's Patrick" makes no sense at this stage of it unless it's an admission not just that she had met up with Patrick but that he was at the cottage and involved in Meredith's death.
And this is from her trial testimony -
AK : Well, first I started to cry. And all the policemen, together, started saying to me, you have to tell us why, what happened? They wanted all these details that I couldn't tell them, because in the end, what happened was this: when I said the name of Patrick I suddenly started imagining a kind of scene, but always using this idea: images that didn't agree, that maybe could give some kind of explanation of the situation.
There is a clear difference between these two quotes.
The one from her book suggests that she was trying hard but that the police had virtually brought her to the verge of a mental breakdown.
Her trial testimony says something else; that a scene and an idea was forming in her mind brought on by her naming of Patrick.
In her book she states that a statement, typed up in Italian, was shoved under her nose and she was told to sign it. The statement was timed at 1.45 am. The statement was not long but would probably have taken about twenty minutes to prepare and type.
The statement according to Knox -
... I met Patrick immediately at the basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to the house together. I do not remember if Meredith was there or came shortly afterward. I have a hard time remembering those moments but Patrick had sex with Meredith, with whom he was infatuated, but I cannot remember clearly whether he threatened Meredith first. I remember confusedly that he killed her.
The fact that the statement was in Italian is not important. Knox could read Italian perfectly well. However she does insinuate in the book that the details in the statement were suggested to her and that she didn't bother to read the statement before signing.
Apart from what has been mentioned above, there are some other points and inferences to be drawn from the above analysis.
- 1. Knox's account destroys one of Sollecito's main tenets in his book Honour Bound. Sollecito maintains that he did nothing to damage Knox's alibi until he signed a statement, forced on him at 3:30 am and containing the damaging admission that Knox had gone out. But Knox makes it clear that she had heard from the Head of the Murder Squad that he had made that damaging admission, at or shortly after 12.30 am. Or is Knox is accusing Napoleoni of a bare-faced lie?
2. It is valid to ask why Knox would not want to remember to whom the text had been sent. Who can see into her mind? Perhaps Knox realized that discussion of it would confirm that if she had indeed gone out then it was not to Le Chic, where she was not required. However even if she thought that could put her in the frame it's not what an innocent person would be too worried about. Perhaps she did just have difficulty remembering?
3. If there was no fuss and she did remember and tell the police that the text was to Patrick, and the questioning then moved on to whether she met up with Patrick later that evening, what was the problem with that? She knew the fact that she hadn't could be verified by Patrick. She could have said that.
4. Knox stated in her memorial, and re-iterates it in her book, that during her interrogation the police told her that they had hard evidence that she was involved in Meredith's murder. She does not expand on what this evidence is, perhaps because the police did not actually tell her. However, wasn't she the least bit curious, particularly if she was innocent? What was she thinking it might be?
5. I can sympathise with any interviewee suffering a bad period, if that's true. However the really testy period of the interview/interrogation starts with the arrival of the interpreter, notification of Sollecito's withdrawal of her alibi and the questioning with regard to the text to Patrick, all occurring at around 12.30 am. There has to be some critical point when she concedes, whether to the police or in her own mind, that she'd met "Patrick", after which there was the questioning as to what had happened next. Say that took 20 minutes. Then there would be a break whilst the statement is prepared and typed up. So the difficult period for Knox, from about 12.30 am to that critical point, looks more like about 35 to, at the outside, 50 minutes.
6. Even if, for that period, it is true that she was subjected to repeated and bullying questions, and threats, then she held up remarkably well as I have noted from her own account. It does not explain any form of mental breakdown, let alone implicating Patrick in murder. In particular, if Knox's letter of the 9th and the recording of her meeting with her mother on the 10th are to believed, that alleged barrage of questions had stopped when she implicated Patrick. An explanation, for what it's worth, might be that she had simply ceased to care any longer despite the consequences. But why?
7. A better and more credible explanation is that an idea had indeed formed suddenly in her mind. She would use the revelation about the text to Patrick and the consequent police line of questioning to bring the questioning to an end and divert suspicion from her true involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher. She envisaged that she would be seen by the police as a helpless witness/victim, not a suspect in a murder investigation. As indeed was the case initially. She expected, I am sure, to be released, so that she could get Sollecito's story straight once again. If that had happened there would of course remain the problem of her having involved Patrick, but I dare say she thought that she could simply smooth that over - that it would not be a big deal once he had confirmed that there had been no meeting and that he had not been at the cottage, as the evidence was bound to confirm.
At the beginning I said that we also have a transcript now of the evidence of the interpreter, Anna Donnino. I will summarise the main points from her evidence but it will be apparent immediately that she contradicts much of what Knox and her supporters claim to have happened.
Donnino told the court that she had 22 years experience working as a translator for the police in Perugia. She was at home when she received a call from the police that her services were required and she arrived at the police station at just before 12.30 am, just as Knox said. She found Knox with Inspector Ficarra. There was also another police officer there whose first name was Ivano. At some stage Ficarra left the room and then returned and there was also another officer by the name of Zugarina who came in. Donnino remained with Knox at all times
The following points emerge from her testimony :-
- 1. Three police officers do not amount to the "lots of people" referred to in Knox's trial testimony, let alone the dozens and the "tag teams" of which her supporters speak.
2. She makes no mention of Napoleoni and denied that anyone had entered the room to state that Sollecito had broken Knox's alibi. (This is not to exclude that this may have happened before Donnino arrived)
3. She states that Knox was perfectly calm but there came a point when Knox was being asked how come she had not gone to work that she was shown her own text message (to Patrick). Knox had an emotional shock, put her hands to her ears and started rolling her head and saying "It's him! It's him! It's him!"
4. She denied that Knox had been maltreated or that she had been hit at all or called a liar.
5. She stated that the officer called Ivano had been particularly comforting to Knox, holding her hand occasionally.
6. She stated that prior to the 1.45 am statement being presented to Knox she was asked if she wanted a lawyer but Knox said no.
7. She stated that she had read the statement over to Knox in english and Knox herself had checked the italian original having asked for clarification of specific wording.
7. She confirmed that that she had told Knox about an accident which she'd had (a leg fracture) and that she had suffered amnesia about the accident itself. She had thought Knox was suffering something similar. She had also spoken to Knox about her own daughters because she thought it was necessary to establish a rapport and trust between the two of them.
The account in Knox's book is in some ways quite compelling but only if it is not compared against her trial testimony, let alone the Interpreter's testimony: that is, up to the point when she implicates Patrick in murder. At that point no amount of whitewash works. The Italian Supreme Court also thought so, upholding Knox's calunnia conviction, with the addition of aggravating circumstances.
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Sunday, May 12, 2013
With First Felony Complaint Against Her Book Filed, Amanda Knox's Legal Prospects Continue To Slide
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[Above: the Palace of Justice in Bergamo where Knox and Sollecito might spend some time]
Knox's public relations campaign is starting to look very, very odd.
As many of our recent posts have explained, no really GOOD lawyer in Italy would ever allow their clients to put out a provocative book while their legal process is still going on. It hasn't happened in any other Italian cases in years.
And now in this case it has happened twice.
Sollecito's book reeked of blood money, arrogance and contempt, it twisted and discounted much of the evidence, made claims which both Sollecito and others had previously contradicted, made accusations of criminal behavior against officers of the court, and separated himself from Knox.
Now guess what?
Despite the fact that Sollecito's book was promptly dispatched to the Florence and Verona chief prosecutors with stiff contempt-of-court complaints, Knox's book too reeked of blood money, arrogance and contempt, it too twisted and discounted much of the evidence, it too made claims which both Knox and others had previously contradicted, it too made accusations of criminal behavior against officers of the court, and it separated her from her co-perp.
In each case there was a shadow writer, respectively Andrew Gumbel and Linda Kulman, who seem to have tired early on of the clients, as all their hired help tends to do, and simply copied the FOA playbook into the books with no sources at all checked beyond that narrow group.
To cool-headed and informed people who really know the case, Gumbel's sources were rather a joke. PR shills Nina Burleigh and Candace Dempsey and Steve Moore? Really? And Linda Kulman seems to have fallen into the same trap.
This becomes very obvious when you watch the two "authors" at their interviews. They are both hampered and tongue-tied because for the life of them neither can remember what their shadow writers put in the books. Several interviewers have actually caught them out.
As we knew the Bergamo lawsuit against Oggi and Knox was headed down the pike, we set out what we consider to be the state of play last Friday. It still stands up, but might be embellished just a bit.
First, here is Andrea Vogt's helpful description of what's in the Bergamo complaint..
The 8-page complaint is addressed to the Prosecutor's Office in Bergamo (near Milan), where the headquarters of the magazine are located. It cites as slanderous the suggestion that Knox was illegally interrogated and maintains that there is no trial or investigation documentation supporting a number of "affirmations that were never made." Mignini insists Knox was initially heard by him as a witness with key information relevant to the murder of Meredith Kercher, not as a suspect herself.
"Knox never asked for an attorney. She wanted to talk," Mignini wrote, adding that he did not contest her statements or question her at that time, because she was making a spontaneous declaration regarding Patrick Lumumba's alleged involvement. [In other words, not about herself.]
The complaint also questions allegations of prison mistreatment and indicates specific persons and neutral institutions as having knowledge on the matter, including the Capanne prison chaplain, U.S. embassy officials, center-right politician Rocco Girlanda and secretary general of the Italy-USA Foundation Corrado Daclon, all of whom visited Knox regularly in prison.
Also contested are phrases reported by Oggi and attributed to Knox's memoir claiming he had a bizarre past that included a conviction on abuse of office charges that was pending appeal, when in fact he was fully and definitively acquitted of those charges in 2011 by a Florence court.
Italy's high court (Cassation) recently agreed with his office's request to re-open the Monster of Florence/Narducci case, the complaint notes. That decision has lent new credence to his long-running investigation of the suspicious 1985 death of a Perugian doctor who some investigators believe was involved (Italy's Cassation Court in March also ordered Mario Spezi, co-author of the Monster of Florence bestseller, to stand trial for allegedly attempting to pin the blame on another man).
While the targets of the suit are stated to be Oggi and Amanda Knox and her publishers, the REAL target appears set to be the FOA playbook as set out in Amanda Knox's book. And for that matter in Raffaele Sollecito's book.
The first complainant (there are expected to be others) Giuliano Mignini has advanced a request for a formidable slate of witnesses, which could come to include even the lawyers for Sollecito and Knox.
Won't that be fun. As they are interrogated on the stand, each witness is going to have to take a position on what crazy stuff the FOA have pushed into the books.
Did the prosecutor offer Sollecito an illegal deal or not? Did Knox get interrogated about Patrick by the prosecutor while denying her a lawyer or not? Did Knox complain to her lawyers about conditions in prison and if so why do those lawyers and so many others say she did not?
And maybe fifty more sudden-death choices like the above. Gee thanks Oggi and Amanda Knox. This could set some facts straight, in front of the whole world.
Archived in Officially involved, Amanda Knox, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Contempt of court, Amanda Knox, Public evidence, RS + AK alibis, Reporting on the case, Books on case
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(2) The Oggi Article Which Conveys To Italy Knox's Claims Of Crimes: Our Own Rebuttals
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[Umberto Brindani, editor of Oggi, a Mario Spezi ally, being sued for publishing Knox's claims in Italy]
The decision of Amanda Knox and her lawyers and publishers to FLAUNT her claims in Italy was seriously ill advised.
It has opened up a fast-track way for those many she attacks to put the real truths in front of the world. Almost nobody will be immune from being required to testify by the court, her own lawyers included.
Here are our own quick rebuttals of the claims Oggi specifically flaunted to Italy in its cooked-up review.
- Knox was NOT interrogated for days and nights. She was put under no pressure in her witness interview except by Sollecito who had just called their latest alibi "a pack of lies".
- Knox WAS officially investigated in depth, after she surprisingly "confessed" and placed herself and Patrick at the scene. Prior to that she'd been interviewed less than some others, who each had one consistent alibi.
- Far from Knox being denied a lawyer, proceedings were stopped until in a later hearing she was formally warned she needed one; she signed a confirmation in front of witnesses.
- Prosecutor Mignini who Knox accuses of telling her a lawyer would hurt her prospects when she claims she asked for one was not even in the room at that interview.
- She was not prohibited from going to the bathroom. At trial, she testified she was treated well and offered refreshments. Her lawyers confirmed this was so.
- She was not given smacks by anyone. Over a dozen witnesses testified that she was treated well, broke spontaneously, and thereafter was hard to stop talking.
- There is no evidence whatsoever that Knox was subject to "something similar to torture" and as mentioned above only Sollecito applied any pressure.
- There is nothing "suicidal" about returning to Italy to defend herself at the new appeal. She risks an international arrest warrant and extradition if she doesn't.
- There is no proof except her own claims of sexual molestations in prison; and she stands out for an extreme willingness to talk and write about sex.
- Many people have testified she was treated well in prison: her own lawyers, a member of parliament, and visitors from the US Embassy were among them.
- She may have based her account on her diaries and "prodigious memory" but the obviously false accusation against the prosecutor suggests much was made up.
- The investigators had a great deal of evidence in hand, not nothing, and they were not ever faulted for any action; they helped put on a formidable case at trial.
- "Police and Italian justice work with such incompetence, ferocity, and disdain for the truth" is contradicted by a very complete record praised by the Supreme Court.
- Mr Mignini has NO bizarre past at all. He is widely known to be careful and fair. He would not have been just promoted to first Deputy Prosecutor General otherwise.
- He was put on trial by a rogue prosecutor desperate to protect his own back from Mignini's investigations; the Supreme Court has killed the trumped up case dead.
- There was nothing "mysterious" about Knox being taken to the crime scene to see if any knives were gone, but her little dance when she arrived really was very "mysterious".
- Knox never thought she was in prison for her own protection; she had signed an agreement at the 5:00 am interview confirming she did know why she was being held.
- Monica Napoleoni did not "bluff" that Sollecito had just trashed their joint alibi; he did so, because his phone records incriminated him; he agreed to that in writing.
- There was no crescendo of "yelling and intimidations that lasts from 11 at night until 5.45". There were two relatively brief interviews and Knox did much of the talking.
- There was no legal requirement to record the interviews, no recording has "gone missing" and many officers present testified to a single "truth" about what happened.
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(1) The Oggi Article Which Conveys To Italy Knox's Claims Of Crimes Committed By Court Officials
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[Bergamo north-east of Milan, one of the prettier cities in Europe, where Oggi has its headquarters]
The popular Italian magazine Oggi was sent a review copy of Knox's book from the United States.
Oggi has been a frequent vehicle for the Knox entourage version of events, and it has carried a number of lurid pro-Knox splashes. The magazine has a history of nasty jabs at prosecution and police, who as career civil servants have few ways of explaining their side.
Oggi's blind and unchecked endorsement of the "facts' in Knox's book is already (see next post) the subject of a lawsuit which was filed Friday in Bergamo, where Oggi has its headquarters.
Knox is also expected to be investigated for contempt of court. Her book carries at least one no-contest false accusation of a crime: Knox claims the much respected Prosecutor Mignini illegally interrogated her without a lawyer and attempted to make her definitively accuse Patrick Lumumba. This is repeated below.
In fact Mr Mignini was not even there. Translation of the Oggi piece is by our main poster Catnip. Passages we know to be inaccurate are underlined.
Amanda Knox: The American girl's sensational story
Chilling. No other adjectives come to mind after having read Waiting to be Heard, finally released in the United States. An extremely detailed and very serious charge against the police and magistrates who conducted the investigation into the murder of Meredith Kercher.Immediately after the crime, Amanda recounts, and for entire days and nights, they had interrogated the American girl and placed her under pressure to make her confess to a non-existent truth, without officially investigating her, denying her the assistance of a lawyer, telling her lies, even prohibiting her from going to the bathroom and giving her smacks so as to make her sign a confession clearly extorted with something similar to torture.
And now the situation is very simple. There are only two choices: either Amanda is writing lies, and as a consequence the police officers and magistrates are going to have to sue her for defamation; or else she is telling the truth, and so they are going to have to go, not without being sanctioned by the CSM [the magistrates' governing body] and the top brass of the Police. The third possibility, which is to pretend that nothing has happened, would be shameful for the credibility of our judicial system.
Amanda Knox has written her Waiting to be Heard memoir with the sense of revulsion and of relief of someone who has escaped by a hair's breadth from a legal disaster, but has got her sums wrong. Cassation has decided that the proceedings have to be redone and the hearings should be (re)commencing in October before the Florence Court of Appeal.
In a USA Today interview, Ms Knox has not excluded the possibility of "returning to Italy to face this battle too", but it would be a suicidal decision: it's likely that the appeal will result in a conviction, and the Seattle girl will end up in the black hole from which she has already spent 1,427 days.
In this way Waiting to be Heard risks being the "film" on which Amanda's last words are recorded about the Mystery of Perugia, her definitive version.
We have read a review copy. And we were dumbfounded. Waiting to be Heard is a diary that has the frenetic pace of a thriller, written in a dry prose (behind the scenes is the hand of Linda Kulman, a journalist at the Huffington Post), even "promoted" by Michiko Kakutani, long-time literary critic at the New York Times.
The most interesting part does not concern the Raffaele Sollecito love story (which Amanda reduces it to puppy love: "With the feeling, in hindsight, I knew that he… that we were still immature, more in love with love than with each other"), and whoever goes looking for salacious details about the three Italian boys Amanda had casual sex with, one night stands, will be frustrated (Ms Knox describes those enounters with the nonchalance of an entomologist disappointed with his experiments: "We undressed, we had sex, I got dressed again with a sense of empitness").
There are no scoops about the night of the murder and even the many vicissitudes endured during the 34,248 hours spent in Capanne prison – the sexual molestations suffered under two guards, the unexpected kiss planted by a bisexual cellmate, the threats made by another two prisoners – remain on the backdrop, like colourful notations.
Because what is striking and upsetting, in the book, is the minute descriptions, based on her own diaries, on the case documents and on a prodigious memory, of how Ms Knox had been incriminated (or "nailed").
COME IN KAFKA. A Kafkian account in which the extraordinary naivety of Amanda (the word naïve, ingénue, is the one which recurs most often in the 457 pages of the book) mixes with the strepitous wickedness of the investigators decided on "following a cold and irrational trail because they had nothing better in hand".
Devour the first 14 chapters and ask yourself: is it possible that the Police and Italian justice work with such incompetence, ferocity, and disdain for the truth? You place yourself in her situation and you scare yourself: If it happened to me? You're in two minds: is it a likely accusation, or a squalid calumny, the version of Amanda?
Because in reading it you discover that in the four days following the discovery of Meredith Kercher's body (on 2 November 2007), Amanda was interrogated continuously, and without the least of procedural guarantees [=due process].
She changes status from witness to suspect without being aware of it." No one had told me my rights, no one had told me that I could remain silent", she writes. When she asked if she had the right to a lawyer, the Public Prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, had responded like this: "No, no, that will only worsen things: it would mean that you don't want to help us". Thus, the Public Prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini.
For a long period of time, Ms Knox, who at the time spoke and understood hardly any Italian at all, mistook him for the Mayor of Perugia, come to the police station to help her.
Then, with the passage of time and of the pages, the assessment changes: Mignini is a prosecutor "with a bizarre past", investigated for abuse of office (he was convicted at first instance, but Cassation annulled the verdict on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction: the case will be held in Torino – ndr) and with the hunger to fabricate "strange stories to solve his cases".
Mignini "is a madman who considers his career more important than my liberty or the truth about the killing of Meredith". On the phone, the Perugian prosecutor reacts with aplomb: "First I will read the book and then I will consider it. Certainly, if it really calls me 'mad' or worse, I think I will file suit".
BEING IN PRISON IS LIKE CAMPING Amanda goes looking. When the officers mysteriously bring her along to the crime scene inspection of the apartment below the one in which she and Meredith were living in, Ms Knox put on the shoe protectors and the white forensics gloves and called out Ta-dah! spreading her arms "as if I was at the start of a musical: I wanted to appear helpful".
When they dragged her in handcuffs into Capanne Prison, she believed what the Police would have told her, and that was they would hide her for a couple of days to protect her (from the true killer, one presumes) and for unspecified bureaucratic reasons. "In my head I was camping: 'This won't last more than a week in the mountains', I told myself," writes Amanda.
They take her money off her, and her credit cards, licence and passport, and she draws strength from repeating to herself that "surely they're not going to give me a uniform, seeing that I'm a special case and that I'll be here for only a little while".
But it's the account of the notorious interrogation that takes the breath away. Around ten in the evening on her last day of freedom, Ms Knox accompanies Raffaele to the police station (he was called in, also without a lawyer, by the Police) and is thrown into a nightmare which she populates with many faces: there is Officer Rita Ficcara, who gives her two cuffs on the head ("To help you remember," she would say); there's another officer who advises her: "If you don't help us, you'll end up in prison for 30 years"; Mignini arrives and advises her not to call a lawyer; super-policewoman Monica Napoleoni dives in and bluffs: "Sollecito has dropped your alibi: he says that on the night of the murder you had left his apartment and that you had told him to lie to 'cover you'".
And a crescendo of yelling and intimidations that lasts from 11 at night until 5.45 in the morning. Seven hours "produce" two confessions that, exactly because they are made without a defence lawyer, cannot be used in the proceedings, but forever after "stain" the image of the accused Knox: Amanda places herself at the scene of the crime and accuses Patrick Lumumba.
RAFFAELE CONFIRMS THE ACCUSATIONS An account of the horror is confirmed by Sollecito in his memoir, Honor Bound, Raffaele writes of having heard "the police yelling at Amanda and then the cries and sobs of my girl, who was yelling 'Help!' in Italian in the other room", and of having being threatened in his turn ("If you try to get up and go, I'll punch you till you'll bleed and I'll kill you. I'll leave you in a pool of blood", another officer had whispered to him).
Published lines which have passed right under the radar of the Perugian investigators: "No legal action [against the interrogators] has been notified to us," Franco Sollecito, Raffaele's dad, tell us. For having recounted the sourness of her interrogation in court, Amanda was investigated for calunnia: the trial will take place in Florence. This one, too, will be a circumstantial case: it's the word of two young people against that of the public prosecutor and the police.
The recording of the interrogation would have unveiled which side the truth stands on. But it has gone missing.
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Friday, May 10, 2013
For Multiple False Accusations Against Court Officials Knox Book Is Expected To Be Ordered Withdrawn
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[From the Dec 2008 NBC Dateline in which all interviewed concluded the two had cooked themselves]
A judicial order is understood to be imminent to require HarperCollins to withdraw the Knox book from all markets in Europe.
The exceptions are the UK or Italy because the publishers wisely tried to stay below the radar there. As for the US? The American arm of the publishers (wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corps, both based in New York), would be left with little reason to fight. The First Amendment provides no automatic right to defame.
The Knox book is not selling very well in the US, despite a media blitz, and sales are unlikely to perk up from now on. Revenues are probably far below costs. And Knox is increasingly unable to parrot what her ghost writer put in the book - Raffaele Sollecito ran into the exact same problem.
In the post below this one, one of the most serious of the false accusations is described. Lawyers are shaking their heads at the unbelievable stupidity of that inclusion. Did Robert Barnett and Ted Simon and the defense lawyers and publishers' lawyers have any real clue about events?
Let us review where things stand.
BAD PR takes a position 180 degrees opposite to the truth and almost invariably fails to apply any lipstick to the pig. GOOD PR takes a position 5 degrees from the truth and often eventually succeeds.
RS's and AK's books both took the 180 degree approach, the "dont believe your lying eyes" approach, the Wizard of Oz approach, the nuclear war approach.
This now looks like really, really bad PR and no legal common sense at all.
This may have worked in temporary small ways in the US, though the movement has still not captured any big politician or big lawyer willing to head the parade. The Departments of State and Justice, very well informed on the case prior to the book, are noticeably cold.
It only gets worse.
- In each case some money was made, but now all of that is at risk, in compensation to the victim's family and in fines by the Italian state.
- In each case it will be a legal and public opinion disaster for the two and their support teams at the pending new appeal in Florence.
- In each case, their books had the stink of blood money; that is widely despised both in Italy and in the United States and has rarely turned out to be a good thing (ask OJ).
- In each case, the very existence of the book as an attempt to rain public hostility on the court during an ongoing legal process is a contempt of the court.
- In each case, the book contained myriad small mistakes and smears as we have been showing with Sollecitos book and have now begun with Knox's. (See the links in left column.)
- In each case, the book contained one huge defamatory lie which might end up costing each of them years in prison.
In Sollecito's book it was that the prosecution tried to force on him a deal to roll over on Knox, claiming there was no "real" evidence on him - but stacks of evidence in Knox's case (gee thanks Sollecito).
In Knox's case it was this absurd lie described below that Prosecutor Mignini illegally tried to talk Knox into firmly framing Patrick Lumumba.
In Sollecito's case the book was almost instantly ripped apart on Italian national TV in the #1 crime talk show Porta a Porta with Sollecito's dad seen squirming throughout the show.
Subsequently Sollecito's own lawyer Maori had to come out publicly and renounce RS's claim to the media - it was either that, or Bongiorno and Maori would have been dead certs for prosecution themselves. They were credited with helping to write the book.
Expect the same from Knox's lawyers. In many places Knox drops them in it, and she describes Dalla Vedova in particular as performing various unethical and possibly illegal actions.
Thereafter in Sollecito's case there was a drip-drip-drip phase in the Italian media. Yummi captured it really well in this in-depth post and it is worth reading again because for Knox we will likely see it repeated for the same reasons:
Then in RS's case we had the two developments described here: (1) the complaints against him briefly going public and being widely reported, and (2) then being yanked behind the scenes by the Florence chief prosecutor, where they will be investigated for the next 3-4 months.
Even in the remote chance that the Florence appeal court declares Sollecito not guilty of Meredith's murder (and he has now stacked more evidence against him, as has Knox), for falsely accusing court officials who handle mafia cases and have special protections he could still face up to ten years.
Sollecito's lawyers and family and he himself are now all seriously off their game, and seemingly doing no more talking. Sollecito seems to be attempting to set up an escape route through Switzerland. Good luck with that.
Knox's book now places her in the same position. In fact maybe worse. Two countries have been set at loggerheads by the private practice of foreign policy here. The complaint can therefore be pushed up further, to the powerful Council of Magistrates or even the President of the Republic.
And at that point, the complaint could be shared with the US Departments of State and Justice and the FBI. If that happens no official in the US, such as a judge deciding on an extradition request, would go to bat for Knox.
Knox seems cooked. By her own hands. Or those of the exploitative bunch around her.
Archived in Officially involved, Amanda Knox, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Contempt of court, Amanda Knox, Reporting on the case, Books on case
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Thursday, May 09, 2013
The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: Knox Invents An Illegal Interrogation By Mignini That Never Took Place
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[The Perugia Central Police Station where Knox's imaginary interrogation "took place"]
It is hard to imagine a more extreme form of contempt of court than Knox falsely accusing a respected prosecutor of interrogating her without her lawyer being present.
For this alone, Knox will certainly be investigated and charged. No wonder she is "scared" of returning to Italy. Apart from fears of getting up on the stand, she has falsely accused way too many people.
1. What actually happened at Knox's witness and suspect interviews:
Here is the true account, which has many witnesses, and then her account in the book, which has none.
Before 3:00 AM on 6 November 2007 the respected senior prosecutor Giuliano Mignini had barely set eyes on Amanda Knox.
At that point in time, she had just passed through a purely voluntary witness questioning with the police, who were actually much further ahead in questioning Sollecito and Knox's flatmates and Meredith's English friends.
Mignini was on duty in the central police station that night, which is how quite by chance he came face to face with Knox that night.
Knox's latest alibi had just been collapsed in another witness interview room. Sollecito had collapsed their joint alibi almost instantly when shown phone records that proved he had just lied. He then declared their current alibi to be a pack of lies.
Told of this, Knox then floundered for a new explanation, turning finally to fingering her employer Patrick Lumumba who the police did not even know to exist until her phone record showed he did.
Police took down that statement, Knox signed it, and this at 3:00 am was the state of play.
Knox was in a waiting room and not under arrest. Mignini was required to warn Knox of her rights as a new suspect, and to warn her to do no further talking to him or anyone else around without a lawyer present.
This was especially so as Knox was inclining to babble on and on and officers were trying to calm her down. As the police had just found (and as her own lawyers later found) she can prove very difficult to stop.
This relatively brief meeting (in which Mignini made quite clear who he was, witnesses confirm) was extended to allow Knox to fine-tune her accusation of Patrick. Prior to this, Knox to Mignini was simply one of a whole lot of people who might be of interest, nothing more.
This interrogation quoted from Knox's book below is already attracting serious attention in Italy. Why? Because its just not her babbley tone, and because it never even took place.
2. Knox's invented version of the witness interview which never happened
Amanda Knox, Waiting To Be Heard, HarperCollins, Pages 90-92
[Description is of the end of Knox's voluntary witness interview with police which Mignini did not attend; the most damaging claims are in bold]
Eventually they told me the pubblico ministero would be coming in.I didn't know this translated as prosecutor, or that this was the magistrate that Rita Ficarra had been referring to a few days earlier when she said they'd have to wait to see what he said, to see if I could go to Germany.
I thought the "public minister" was the mayor or someone in a similarly high "public" position in the town and that somehow he would help me.
They said, "You need to talk to the pubblico ministero about what you remember."
I told them, "I don't feel like this is remembering. I'm really confused right now." I even told them, "I don't remember this. I can imagine this happening, and I'm not sure if it's a memory or if I'm making this up, but this is what's coming to mind and I don't know. I just don't know."
They said, "Your memories will come back. It's the truth. Just wait and your memories will come back."
The pubblico ministero came in.
Before he started questioning me, I said, "Look, I'm really confused, and I don't know what I'm remembering, and it doesn't seem right."
One of the other police officers said, "We'll work through it."
Despite the emotional sieve I'd just been squeezed through, it occurred to me that I was a witness and this was official testimony, that maybe I should have a lawyer. "Do I need a lawyer?" I asked.
He said, "No, no, that will only make it worse. It will make it seem like you don't want to help us."
It was a much more solemn, official affair than my earlier questioning had been, though the pubblico ministero was asking me the same questions as before: "What happened? What did you see?"
I said, "I didn't see anything."
"What do you mean you didn't see anything? When did you meet him?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Where did you meet him?"
"I think by the basketball court." I had imagined the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, just across the street from the University for Foreigners.
"I have an image of the basketball court in Piazza Grimana near my house."
"What was he wearing?"
"I don't know."
"Was he wearing a jacket?"
"I think so."
"What color was it?"
"I think it was brown."
"What did he do?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I'm confused!"
"Are you scared of him?"
"I guess."I felt as if I were almost in a trance. The pubblico ministero led me through the scenario, and I meekly agreed to his suggestions.
"This is what happened, right? You met him?"
"I guess so."
"Where did you meet?"
"I don't know. I guess at the basketball court."
"You went to the house?"
"I guess so."
"Was Meredith in the house?"
"I don't remember."
"Did Patrick go in there?"
"I don't know, I guess so."
"Where were you?"
"I don't know. I guess in the kitchen."
"Did you hear Meredith screaming?"
"I don't know."
"How could you not hear Meredith screaming?"
"I don't know. Maybe I covered my ears. I don't know, I don't know if I'm just imagining this. I'm trying to remember, and you're telling me I need to remember, but I don't know. This doesn't feel right."
He said, "No, remember. Remember what happened."
"I don't know."At that moment, with the pubblico ministero raining questions down on me, I covered my ears so I could drown him out.
He said, "Did you hear her scream?"
I said, "I think so."My account was written up in Italian and he said, "This is what we wrote down. Sign it."
To repeat, Mignini was not even present at the midnight interrogation of Knox by the police, and he certainly never edged her into fingering Lumumba as is being cliamed here. Knox herself did that by herself with the police.
And she did it again and again. Emphatically.
[Dalla Vedova and Ghirga: did they illegally allow Knox to commit serious felonies in the book?]
Archived in Officially involved, Amanda Knox, The prosecutors, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Contempt of court, Amanda Knox, Public evidence, RS + AK alibis, Reporting on the case, Books on case, The wider contexts, Mignini and MOF
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Friday, May 03, 2013
The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: How TV And Book Suggest Knox Is Increasingly Far From Facing Reality
Posted by SeekingUnderstanding
Amateurism run amoke is what the unprecedented and unwise Knox extravaganza is starting to look like.
Several TJMK posts below this one have already suggested that the book was rushed into print with very little fact-checking, with no restraint on damaging false accusations, and with no strategic legal considerations.
The same thing seems to have happened with the TV appearances.
Knox had a year and a quarter under wraps to prepare herself and yet her many exaggerated and over-emotional TV claims contradict many things SHE HERSELF has said previously.
She seems to have been rehearsed by handlers with little or no grasp of the extensive fact record.
And where has all this amateurism left her? Open to slow erosion of her credibility by an increasing number of commentators while considerably upping her peril in Italy.
Because many of her claims falsely accuse officers of the court, she could be further indicted for contempt of court, and she could see the five years which was lopped off her sentence by Judge Massei for "mitigating circumstances" reinstated.
Those of us with psychology credentials may not have all been expecting the same thing from Knox when she finally surfaced. But none of us expected to be confronted so forcefully with a classic case of a personality in turmoil.
My first impression after getting through to the end of the book was that it shows such serious disturbance psychologically, so much being revealed in her own words.
It wouldn't be possible to classify AK as clinically insane, the niceties of this being so precise - but an abnormal mind is clearly illustrated. So clear that it is actually sad - that she has been allowed and encouraged to do this.
The ghost writing, or/and her own expression is also painful to read in terms of quality of writing. These are the main points that have emerged for me, from a psychological perspective, after reading:
AK's grip on reality (even without drugs) is tragically lacking. It seems that she doesn't know what a 'fact' is. Every fact and event is seen through a lens of her own feeling or emotion - logical connection being absent - together with how she believes it is best to make it appear.
'Her "best truth" is this over and over again. She doesn't even understand that this is considered by normal minds to be lying. She doesn't seem to have a concept of lying.
- "their version of reality was taking over"... Does reality only come in versions?
- "something didn't feel right. it seemed made up". Does she not know?
AK continually refers to herself as "different". She is, but not for the curious or trivial things she believes. She is also obsessively concerned to be seen and classified as a "good person". This comes up over and over.
"I didnt want them to think I was a bad person". Note, not: "I didn't want to BE a bad person" but always "how will people think of me". This is a continual theme. "I couldn't believe anyone could think that of me".
It does show a dissociative and non-integrated personality, with both deep roots and serious implications. There are also indications that she is unable to 'read' people's faces /expressions with any accuracy. (Emotion recognition).
A more sinister and disturbing facet to her personality connected to the above, which comes through in every chapter, is the automatic disparagement of anyone who displeases her (which of course happens frequently - whenever, in fact, someone has a different version to 'her best truth').
Someone is then 'useless', 'betraying me', 'stupid', etc etc. These words are all said matter-of-factly…. as if they really are facts. Here are some more of these words, peppered within the text:
- 'Repellant, self-serving', 'hostile', 'insincere', 'abandoned (me)', 'uninterested', 'aggressive', 'spiteful', 'curt', 'disdainful'
- 'Old perv…lecherous', 'glared cruelly', 'idiotic', 'insidious', 'controlling', 'condescending', 'mean', 'hateful', 'ruthless'....
Note that it is not that AK finds these people to be these things, in her opinion- it is that they ARE these things.
The sub-text is: I am a good person, and they, having displeased or disagreed with me, are 'bad'. Thus the mechanism for strong, unrestrained projection is at work.
Example: "The police couldn't bear to admit they were wrong." Could she, though?
Her projections are so blatant, that I quake for her lack of self-awareness. I used to read literature as a window into self-awareness, insight, philosophical depths, and questions of morality.
Sadly this book is about as far from offering these as one could go. A PR machine missile is not a 'book' in the sense I used to know.
AK reveals a very strong inner anger, the control of which is difficult, and which it would seem she is frightened of, and frightened of revealing.
She would also seem to be based in a passive aggressive stance, which gives rise to a side seen as nice and even gentle. These two sides seem badly split.
This would be in keeping with the Envy hypothesis (I refer to Melanie Klein's 'Envy and Gratitude'). There are a few definite examples of the consuming anger which Amanda herself describes graphically.
She continually justifies it, also. Sometimes, of course, anger may be justified ('just anger') but as described here it is nearer to a rage or a tantrum when things aren't going according to how she wants them to.
This speaks of manipulation, which would be part of the same profile, and is essentially destructive and spoiling, as well as something that wells up with a will of its own.
She often exposes her state of mind in certain phrases, without realising the implications of what she is saying. This is why I think the whole thing is so sad, as she has been used (seemingly mainly for money) in this foolish venture.
For example: "In that instant I snapped." when the detective said "you know who killed Meredith." It wasn't the pressure/abuse from the police that made her snap, it was being confronted with the truth.
NOT her 'best truth,' but one that was simply unbearable to hear. There are many other examples, littered throughout the book, of some of her inner chaos:
- "This is my own fault. I caused the confusion"
- "I wanted to disappear. I didn't want to be me anymore".
- "I didn't know if I was allowed to keep my thoughts private…"
- "Like a roller coaster ride….can't get off. This is all my own fault" .
- " I was furious for putting myself in this situation".
- Rafaelle - "He didn't look at me. I wondered if he hated me". (Why should he?)
- "We want justice. But against who? We all want to know, but we all don't."
There are many others. Amanda Knox said she loved Italy and I believe her. With adjustment she could have been a lot happier there than she perhaps ever was in Seattle. Now she is in the position of demonizing Italy and its good people there, and in the worst possible way.
Italy was in fact very kind to Amanda Knox, and her treatment there was on the right lines to give her hope of enduring stability. What a pity that dirty PR and legal tricks and money grubbing may have pushed that out of sight forever.
Archived in Officially involved, Amanda Knox, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Contempt of court, Amanda Knox, Psychology and motive, On psychology, Reporting on the case, Books on case
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Thursday, May 02, 2013
The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: Good Reporters Start To Surface Amanda Knox's False Claims In Droves
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[American Ambassador to Italy David Thorne whose reports contradict Knox's prison claims]
Did ANYBODY think to check Knox's book for criminal defamations and false claims? Take this glaring "mistake" from page 248.
During the rebuttals, on December 3, each lawyer was given a half hour to counter the closing arguments made over the past two weeks. Speaking for me, Maria criticized Mignini for portraying Meredith as a saint and me as a devil
Really? Prosecutor Mignini said that? So why did the entire media corps report that it was said by Patrick Lumumba's lawyer Carlo Pacelli? As the BBC reported:
[Mr Pacelli] added: "Who is the real Amanda Knox? Is it the one we see before us here, simple water and soap, the angelic St Maria Goretti?"
"Or is she really a she-devil, a diabolical person focused on sex, drugs and alcohol, living life to the extreme and borderline - is this the Amanda Knox of 1 November 2007?"
So even Mr Pacelli didnt compare Knox to Meredith, or simply call Knox a she-devil to her face. He asked rhetorically if she was a she-devil or a saint. Not exactly unheard of in American courts.
And remember he was addressing someone who would have been quite happy to see Patrick put away for life, cost him two weeks in a cell, entangled her own mother in a cover-up, destroyed Patrick's business and reputation world-wide, still hasnt paid him money owed, and for lying about him served three years.
Prosecutor Mignini in fact never called Knox anything at all. We can find no record that he did. Again and again he has denied it. And he had no personal need to prosecute Knox, and certainly no need to frame her, despite many pages Knox devotes to trying to prove the reckless claim that he did.
Another false claim: Knox's claim that Prosecutor Mignini invented the notion of a satanic cult to explain the Monster of Florence murders, also made by Sollecito, is totally untrue.
Dozens of others had suspected and talked about a satanic cult for YEARS before he investigated one loose end in the case. And both that theory and that investigation are back on track - at the recent order of the Supreme Court.
Another false claim: Knox devotes pages to trying to make herself look good on the witness stand at the trial. But Italians who could follow in Italian in real-time ended up suspecting and despising her performance up there. Read what they saw here and here.
Inspired by such conspicuous false claims as these, various reporters have begun to dig. We posted on Knox's false claims about her prison time and the many disproofs. Italy-based reporter Andrea Vogt uncovers some more.
Knox's memoir is a vivid personal account of the difficulties of prison life in Italy, complete with claims about inappropriate behaviour by staff. But Knox herself once painted a different picture.
Other documents - including writings Knox penned in her own hand while incarcerated, case files and state department records - conjure up quite another impression of a very different Knox, one who was more sanguine about her experience.
On the attitudes of the prison staff
"The prison staff are really nice," wrote Knox in her personal prison diary, which was eventually published in Italy under the title Amanda and the Others.
"They check in to make sure I'm okay very often and are very gentle with me. I don't like the police as much, though they were nice to me in the end, but only because I had named someone for them, when I was very scared and confused."
She described Italian prisons as "pretty swell", with a library, a television in her room, a bathroom and a reading lamp. No-one had beaten her up, she wrote, and one guard gave her a pep talk when she was crying in her cell.
Unlike the heavily-edited memoir, these are phrases she handwrote herself, complete with strike-outs, flowery doodles, peace signs and Beatles lyrics.
On the positive HIV result she was given
Both accounts also refer to the devastating but erroneous news from the prison doctor that she had tested positive for HIV, although her diary presents a more relaxed person at this point. "First of all, the guy told me not to worry, it could be a mistake, they're going to take a second test next week."
We also know that it was Knox's own lawyers who leaked the HIV report and list of sex partners. Not the doctor or anyone else. No malice was intended, that is clear, despite her claims.
On her framing of her kindly employer Lumumba
[Knox] writes that she had a flashback to the interrogation, when she felt coerced into a false accusation. "I was weak and terrified that the police would carry out their threats to put me in prison for 30 years, so I broke down and spoke the words they convinced me to say. I said: 'Patrick - it was Patrick.'"
In her memoir, she describes in detail the morning that she put that accusation in writing, and says the prison guard told her to write it down fast.
Yet in a letter to her lawyers she gives no hint of being rushed or pressured. "I tried writing what I could remember for the police, because I've always been better at thinking when I was writing. They gave me time to do this. In this message I wrote about my doubts, my questions and what I knew to be true."
On her medical examination after arrest
"After my arrest, I was taken downstairs to a room where, in front of a male doctor, female nurse, and a few female police officers, I was told to strip naked and spread my legs. I was embarrassed because of my nudity, my period - I felt frustrated and helpless."
The doctor inspected, measured and photographed her private parts, she writes - "the most dehumanising, degrading experience I had ever been through".
But in the 9 November letter to her lawyers, she described a far more routine experience.
"During this time I was checked out by medics. I had my picture taken as well as more copies of my fingerprints. They took my shoes and my phone. I wanted to go home but they told me to wait. And that eventually I was to be arrested. Then I was taken here, to the prison, in the last car of three that carried Patrick, then Raffaele, then me to prison."
On her persona and mood swings in prison
She says she was often suicidal, but recollections of prison staff and other inmates differ. Flores Innocenzia de Jesus, a woman incarcerated with Amanda in 2010 described Knox as sunny and popular among the children who were in Capanne with their mothers, and recalled her avid participation in music and theatrical events. She also held a sought-after job taking orders and delivering goods to inmates from the prison dispensary.
"Most of the time when we spoke during our exercise break, the kids would call her and she would go and play with them," de Jesus told me.
And on what US officlals and her own lawyers perceived
State department cables, released through the Freedom of Information Act, show that between 2007 and 2009, three different high-level diplomats from Rome (Ambassador Ronald Spogli, Deputy Chief Elizabeth Dibble and Ambassador David Thorne) were among those reviewing Knox's case.
Embassy officials visited regularly. Records show one consular official visited Knox on 12 November, soon after her arrest. A few weeks later she wrote in her diary how the visits of embassy officials improved her experience….
In 2008 and 2009, she was visited by two embassy officials at a time, six times. Ambassador David Thorne, whose name appears at the bottom of cables in August, November and December of 2009, is the brother- in-law of US Secretary of State John Kerry (at that time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).
If the diplomats knew anything of the "harrowing prison hell" Knox was going through (as one paper put it), they are keeping those reports under wraps. Neither Kerry nor any other prominent US politician has made any public complaints. Even today, her Italian lawyers maintain she was not mistreated.
Half a dozen obvious false claims and defamations here. We estimate we will uncover well over one hundred more.
Archived in Officially involved, Amanda Knox, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Contempt of court, Amanda Knox, Reporting on the case, Fine reporting, Books on case, The wider contexts, Italian context
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Wednesday, May 01, 2013
A Welcome To New Arrivals #2: A Second Experienced Lawyer Recommends How To Zero In On The Truth
Posted by James Raper With Kermit
My legal colleague Some Alibi hammers home in the post below that the trial jury were not fools. They decided for guilt unanimously, based on many compelling evidence points.
- 1) Do you know how many hard evidence points there are? Literally hundreds. This is a very evidence-heavy case. And at trial in 2009 the prosecution did an excellent job. Between February and June, in about a dozen one-day sessions, they presented an overwhelming case and tied together all the points.
2) Do you know how many conclusive evidence points are required for a finding of guilt? Just ONE. If it is definitive enough, a single piece of evidence can decide any case. Some Alibi posted a damning footprint example the other day which BY ITSELF could have seen Sollecito convicted in any UK or US court. There are examples too for Knox.
3) Do you know how many evidence points were discredited during the trial and the anulled appeal? In fact it was NONE. A spooked defence kept well away from the alibi evidence, the cellphone evidence, the computer evidence, the mixed-blood evidence, the obvious crime-scene re-arrangement, and most eye-witness evidence.
The annulled appeal in fact focused only on two specks of DNA and one eye-witness account, and even those, as the defenses admitted, were not conclusively undermined. They didnt come close to proving two other killers had even been in the house, although the Supreme Court had already ruled (in Guede's final appeal) that Meredith had been attacked by three killers.
My colleague Kermit and I now want to present for you some Powerpoint slides which will introduce you to most of the formidable evidence in the case, in the same way the jury processed it.
Load the Powerpoint Viewer if not on your system, and click here for the slides. Hang on. This is a big file but they should load in under 60 seconds.
Finally I would point out a challenge I made for ANY lawyer who believes Knox and Sollecito are being railroaded (for which there is zero obvious reason why) to answer all the open questions Knox and Sollecito wont face.
Do you know how many spoke up? So far NONE.
Archived in Vital Must-Read Posts
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A Welcome To New Arrivals #1: An Experienced Trial Lawyer Recommends How To Zero In On the Truth
Posted by Some Alibi
[Merediths window is seen on the top floor of the house in the lower foreground]
This briefing was first posted with slightly different opening paras at the start of the annulled Hellmann appeal. New arrivals often tell us this helped them the most.
If you've come to this website because of the Amanda Knox book and interview, then welcome. Like all of us who come to this case, you have one key question: did they do it? The Knox book and interview seriously cherrypick the case, and perhaps haven't helped you at all.
On the Internet, you will find people who are passionate in their defence of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito; and you will find people who are passionate in their support of an exceptionally talented girl who died, of a fine justice system previously untainted by PR, and of the prosecution's very strong case.
My own arrival
Placing my own cards on the table here: as a twenty-plus year practising trial lawyer, I am firmly a part of that latter camp. But it wasn't always that way.
It was information – evidence – that changed my views. What became very clear to me, early on, was that very few people in the English-speaking world are aware of anywhere near all of the evidence in this case.
I had thought I had grasped the core of the case, but I had not. The case is deep and complex, and like many criminal cases, the complete facts behind it have been only sketchily reported in the media. Even less-so in the US and UK.
Huge swathes of recent developments have not been reported in English at all except here on TJMK. This post and this post for example are extremely key but all those facts can still only be read in English here.
The unanimous jury
I am sure that we all agree that no trial jury, in any murder case, given the awesome responsibility of adjudicating on (young) people's lives for a multi-decade period of imprisonment, condemns people lightly.
It should be a matter of logic that the evidence presented against the accused must have been deep and satisfied the 6 lay jurors and 2 judges on the case in 2009 for them to pronounce that huge judgement. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be the possibility of a mistrial, but clearly the evidence presented must have been substantial.
In this, we've already hit the first problem. Some supporters of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito will tell you there's no evidence against them.
This is patently silly. No jury ever convicts people and sends them to prison for 24 plus years without being quite convinced of the case against them. Miscarriages of justice do happen, but the idea that there is "no evidence" can be summarily dismissed.
The only question is whether the evidence is sufficient, true and accurate.
The voluminous evidence
So is the evidence enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt? The six lay jurors and two professional judges thought so, clearly. What you realise, when you come to the facts of the case, is that the evidence is based not around a single key event but on multiple points.
It can be astonishing to realise that the case is based not only on DNA evidence but also on cellphone evidence and computer records and further yet on multiple conflicting and contradicting versions of what happened that night from the mouths of the accused, not to mention falsely accusing an innocent man of responsibility for murder causing his incarceration.
The wealth of evidence is actually extremely unusual for a murder case. It goes way beyond the volume of evidence resulting in a death sentence in the quite similar Scott Peterson case.
The Massei Sentencing Report
What is absolutely new to the English speaking legal world is that the reasoning for the trial conviction can be read in an extremely detailed 440+ page trial report online.
This trial report is back front-and-center now in light of the Supreme Court's March decision to anull the first appeal. You can read an effective executive summary by the PMF translation team here.:
It was my privilege to play an extremely small part in that translation and summary work. People from four different continents with backgrounds in forensic science, law, academia and a host of other disciplines participated in the work.
The Knox PR campaign
If you are new to this case, you will likely be shocked how much evidence there is against the convicted parties. Amanda Knox's family have spent over $1m and involved a professional PR agency called Gogerty Marriot to suggest otherwise in the English-speaking media.
You might wonder why an innocent person needs a million dollar PR campaign on their part. Make yourself a coffee and read the conclusions at the end of Judge Massei's report. It will take you about 15 minutes. Up until you read this report, almost everything you watch, hear and read is PR spin and is quite deliberately positioned to make you believe there is no case.
When you complete it, I believe you will have a very different take. That 15 minutes could change your ideas about everything you thought you knew about the Meredith Kercher case.
A quick tour of the evidence
Consider as you read this what is your own possible explanation for each of the following:
- the DNA of Raffaele Sollecito on Meredith's bra-clasp in her locked bedroom;
- the almost-entire naked footprint of Raffaele on a bathmat that in *no way* fits that of the other male in this case – Rudy Guede;
- the fact that Raffaele's own father blew their alibi that they were together in Raffaele's flat at the time of the killing with indisputable telephone records;
- the DNA of Meredith Kercher on the knife in Raffaele's flat which Raffaele himself sought to explain as having been from accidentally "pricking" Meredith's hand in his written diary despite the fact Meredith had never been to his flat (confirmed by Amanda Knox);
- the correlation of where Meredith's phones were found to the location of Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guedes's flats;
- the computer records which show that no-one was at Raffaele's computer during the time of the murder despite him claiming he was using that computer;
- Amanda's DNA mixed with Meredith Kercher's in five different places just feet from Meredith's body;
- the utterly inexplicable computer records the morning after the murder starting at 5.32 am and including multiple file creations and interactions thereafter all during a time that Raffaele and Amanda insist they were asleep until 10.30am;
- the separate witnesses who testified on oath that Amanda and Raffaele were at the square 40 metres from the girls' cottage on the evening of the murder and the fact that Amanda was seen at a convenience store at 7.45am the next morning, again while she said she was in bed;
- the accusation of a completely innocent man by Amanda Knox;
- the fact that when Amanda Knox rang Meredith's mobile telephones, ostensibly to check on the "missing" Meredith, she did so for just three seconds - registering the call but making no effort to allow the phone to be answered in the real world
- the knife-fetish of Raffaele Sollecito and his formal disciplinary punishment for watching animal porn at his university – so far from the wholesome image portrayed;
- the fact that claimed multi-year kick-boxer Raffaele apparently couldn't break down a flimsy door to Meredith's room when he and Amanda were at the flat the morning after the murder but the first people in the flat with the police who weren't martial artists could;
- the extensive hard drug use of Sollecito as told on by Amanda Knox;
- the fact that Amanda knew details of the body and the wounds despite not being in line of sight of the body when it was discovered;
- the lies of Knox on the witness stand in July 2009 about how their drug intake that night ("one joint") is totally contradicted by Sollecito's own contemporaneous diary;
- the fact that after a late evening's questioning, Knox wrote a 2,900 word email home which painstakingly details what she said happened that evening and the morning after that looks *highly* like someone committing to memory, at 3.30 in the morning, an extensive alibi;
- the fact that both Amanda and Raffaele both said they would give up smoking dope for life in their prison diaries despite having apparently nothing to regret;
- the fact that when Rudy Guede was arrested, Raffaele Sollecito didn't celebrate the "true" perpetrator being arrested (which surely would have seen him released) but worried in his diary that a man whom he said he didn't know would "make up strange things" about him despite him just being one person in a city of over 160,000 people;
- the fact that both an occupant of the cottage and the police instantly recognised the cottage had not been burgled but had been the subject of a staged break-in where glass was *on top* of apparently disturbed clothes;
- that Knox and Sollecito both suggested each other might have committed the crime and Sollecito TO THIS DATE does not agree Knox stayed in his flat all the night in question;
- the bizarre behaviour of both of them for days after the crime;
- the fact that cellphone records show Knox did not stay in Sollecito's flat but had left the flat at a time which is completely coincidental with Guede's corroborated presence near the girl's flat earlier in the evening;
- the fact that Amanda Knox's table lamp was found in the locked room of Meredith Kercher in a position that suggested it had been used to examine for fine details of the murder scene in a clean up;
- the unbelievable series of changing stories made up by the defendants after their versions became challenged; Knox's inexplicable reaction to being shown the knife drawer at the girl's cottage where she ended up physically shaking and hitting her head.
In conclusion
This list is not exhaustive. It goes… on… and on… and on… And yet, those supporting Knox, many of them intent on making blood money, will tell you that's all made up, all coincidental.
Really? Does the weight of all that evidence sound made up to you?
If so, it must be the most over-rigged criminal case in the history of crime. Unlikely beyond all and any reasonable doubt.
Judge Massei's report explains why the jury found the defendants guilty. I truly expect you will be astonished at the amount of evidence if all you've done is watched a film or read a few press reports.
For any questions thereafter, please join us and post them on truejustice.org or perugiamuderfile.org . You'll find here a host of good people who are all working on a totally volunteer basis, in memory of the only victim of this crime.
Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher. RIP.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Although The YouTube Trailer Suggests Diane Sawyer Wimped Out And Turned All Mushy…
Posted by Peter Quennell
It could still be wrong. Trailers have been misleading before.
The interview is tonight at 10:00 on ABC. Our Main Posters Kermit and Media Watcher both have tips that could still win Diane Sawyer Pulitzer Prizes.
- Media Watcher: Diane Sawyer Interview With Amanda Knox: How To Push Back Against The False Claims And Emotion
- Kermit Powerpoint: Diane Sawyer's Very Tough Interview With Amanda Knox: ABC Kindly Shares A Sneak Preview!
Here's hoping. Even for Amanda Knox, our advice is usually the best. We'll carry some sort of report on this tomorrow.
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Sunday, April 28, 2013
The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: Could Her Book Legally Entangle These Four?
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[Image above: Curt Knox, Ted Simon, Robert Barnett, and David Marriott]
It seems probably that in every legal system on Earth, enabling or encouraging or inciting a crime may itself be a crime.
Could Amanda Knox's forthcoming book be considered a crime, or more precisely a series of crimes? We wait to see what it says, but for starters its mere existence flouts Italian law. From our 22 April post:
Italy's justice system so favors DEFENDANTS that it is perhaps the most pro-defendant system in the world. In fact many Italians feel its leniency has gone way too far. That is why there are these automatic appeals and why Knox could talk freely in court and have no cross-examination of her claims.
At the same time, officers of the Italian justice system are sheltered by huge powers hardly even needing to be invoked. The reason the law is so strong in this dimension is in part because a favored mafia tactic is to do what Sollecito and Preston and Burleigh have done in their books: slime the officers of the court.
Get that? Knox can talk her head off in court (as she did for two full days and many "spontaneous" interventions at the trial and annulled appeal) but because of a torrid history of false allegations against Italian courts, especially by the mafia and accused politicians, Italian law forbids her to do so outside in ways that misrepresent the evidence and impugn any officers of the legal system, prosecutors and prison staff counted in.
Sollecito's book published six months ago made four kinds of mistake: (1) publishing for blood money while still accused; (2) including many false claims which contradict his own case at trial and will almost certainly contradict claims Knox makes; (3) defaming numerous officers of the court in freely accusing them of crimes - falsely, as his own dad admits; and (4) maligning the entire Italian justice system, the most popular and trusted institution in Italy with heavy protections at its disposal when it wants.
The criminal investigation into Sollecito's book is under the wing of the same chief prosecutor in Florence who will oversee the re-run of the murder appeal. His investigation target is expected to be broad, and will certainly include the shadow writer and publisher and Sollecito's own legal help. At the max, because Sollecito has impugned anti-mafia prosecutors and judges, he might face close to ten years.
PLUS the mitigating circumstances Massei allowed which brought his sentence down by five years will likely be disallowed by the Florence appeal court, adding five more years if the new appeal concludes guilt.
It seems an open secret in Perugia that Knox's lawyers there have long shrugged off the US campaign and acted locally as if it really isnt there. They may or may not have attempted to forestall the book, though by now they certainly know it will make things far worse for Knox.
Sollecito's lawyers have even more reason to know this as they are already under the gun, and they are probably sitting back and watching the trainwreck with ever-growing glee.
Going forward, the prosecution is in a very sound and dominating position.
The evidence is very, very strong. The Massei Trial Report is still unscathed. The Galati Appeal and the late-March Supreme Court decision absolutely destroyed the Hellmann appeal, and heavily implied that it had been bent. And the prosecutor who has been so unfairly maligned in the US has zero legal problems of his own, after Cassation nailed a rogue prosecutor for pursuing him and put his Narducci investigation back on track, and he was promoted and is set to be the Region of Umbria's number one prosecutor very soon.
In contrast even without the albatross of the book Knox's position was very weak.
She has already served three years for criminally lying to protect herself, and that sentence is subject to no further appeal. (Talk of taking it to the European Court is a joke.) Nobody in Italy will trust her word after that. As the post below this one shows, dozens of witnesses will speak up against any false claims. Who will testify on her behalf?
Also Knox seems intent on skipping the appeal, which is itself a contempt of court. And Sollecito, who has said he will be present, showed strong tendencies in his book to sell her short. If her book and her ABC interview are not roundly chastized on Italian TV as Sollecito's was late last year, it will be a surprise. And complaints are already on their way to Florence - a prison guard she impugns in the book who earlier she herself had said meant no harm is moving forward.
Curt Knox, Ted Simon, Robert Barnett, and David Marriott may end up in the crosshairs of the anticipated investigation for enabling or encouraging or inciting the book. And if Knox is handed extra years because of their zero due diligence, she may have a malpractice case against Simon and Barnett.
We hope their fingers are crossed.
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Thursday, April 25, 2013
The Amanda Knox Trainwreck: Claims About Prison Traumas Widely Contradicted By Solid Sources
Posted by The TJMK Main Posters
[Above and at bottom: an animated Amanda Knox in red t-shirt at a prison rock concert]
"Amanda Knox's trauma in an Italian hell-hole of sin and debauchery!"
That opening remark of a preview by the National Enquirer of Amanda Knox's forthcoming book has been widely parroted in other American media reports.
Putting out new claims in the book like that is apparently considered to be worth the huge risk of extra years behind bars for contempt of court described in the post below this one.
Still, the US edition was sanitized after the annullment by the Supreme Court of the Hellmann appeal, and the UK publication of the book was canceled altogether.
So what are these remaining shock-horror claims? We intend to post commentary on them all.
Several concern Knox's time in Capanne Prison where, it should be remembered, she actually served a three year sentence for lying. This was a sentence recently ratified by the Supreme Court, for criminal lying about the involvement of Patrick Lumumba in Merediths murder.
Main prison claim 1: sex advances by staff
One of the prison claims made public names a now-retired senior prison guard who Knox now claims asked her for sex. Actually this is hardly new news. Knox made the claim but in a far weaker form in 2011.
Then as CBS reported she had in fact concluded the guard was not even serious about sex. He was seeking to understand her.
Investigative journalist and CBS News Consultant Bob Graham, reading from Amanda's letter to him: "'He was fixated on the topic of sex, with whom I'd done it, how I liked it, if I would like to do it with him. When I realized that he really wanted to talk to me about sex I would try to change the subject.'"
Correspondent Peter Van Sant: "What does this letter say to you about what she's been going through?"
Graham: "It says in a time when she was clearly traumatized by the events of the death, the murder of her flatmate, that there she was, an innocent abroad, because she was innocent, she is innocent… and here she was being pressured, further pressured in a prison system, a system that at least she should have had some degree of safety."
Graham, reading Amanda's letter: "I realize that he was testing me to see if I reacted badly, to understand me personally. He wanted to get a reaction or some information from me. I did not get the seriousness of the situation.'"
Knox's claim seems to have left Italians contemptuous. "Yet more lies." Here is a commentary on Knox's claim of sexual harrassment in Il Giornale.
Nino Materi - Monday 15/04/2013 - 15:38.
And in the end do you want to see that we will have even have to compensate Amanda Knox for the "psycho-sexual" abuse suffered in prison in Perugia? By now we have become used to everything in the ugly story of the murder of poor Meredith Kercher.
But you really need a strong stomach to get used to the idea that the girl from Seattle should even be earning millions of dollars with true-story book ("true" in a manner of saying) which rummages in the trash of the Perugia thriller. A literary destiny which associates Amanda with the other key character at the crime scene: that Raffaele Sollecito author of a another true-story book (once again "true" in a manner of saying). Sollecito's memoir is entitled Honour Bound: my Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox, while Amanda's "best-seller" is called Waiting to be Heard.
Pages in which Amanda – among other things – tries to make herself out to be an ingenuous, modest creature actually "molested" by the sexually implicit sayings of a supposedly dirty-minded prison warden. Amanda writes, or the ghost writer does, "The screw would ask me with whom I had had sex, he wanted to know how many boyfriends I had and whether I wanted to go to bed with him." The period referred to is when the American student was in the Perugia prison following the first stage sentence for the crime of Meredith's "friend".
Then, on appeal, Knox (and Sollecito) were acquitted and now Cassation has ordered a new trial for them both. Meanwhile Amanda has gone back to Seattle (from where she will obviously never return to Italy) and she is enjoying the proceeds of her new career as a writer, not to speak of being a guest of agony TV, where between tears she tells how she was persecuted in our country. And the more she cries, the more the audience hits the roof and the more Amanda's bank account grows. No talk of repaying her debt to Italian Justice…
In the 400 pages published by Harper Collins, the New York publishers which obtained the exclusive on the memoirs of Amanda after paying out about three million dollars, there is no lack of titillating details. A perfect location: the cells of Capanne Prison. Here Amanda tells about "continual requests from a prisoner to start a lesbian relationship with her". In other pages she recalls how "she was informed of being HIV positive shortly after her arrival in gaol".
Then the shock-revelation about a prison guard who is now retired. Knox accuses him of " doing nothing but talk about sex with her from the day she arrived after her arrest". In a message to a girlfriend, the girl from Seattle tells how the man in uniform accompanied her on every medical visit, twice a day, and in the evening how he would call her up to the third floor of the prison to an empty room to chat. "He was obsessed with sex, with whom I had done it, how I liked doing it, whether I wanted to do it with him," she writes in the book. "I was so surprised and scandalised by all his provocations that sometimes I wondered whether I was not misunderstanding what he was telling me. When I realized that he wanted to talk about sex I tried to change the subject."
The guard is now suing the girl for defamation after Amanda said that she had been abused during the questioning. In an interview with Bob Graham, an English journalist very close to the Knox family, the guard admitted talking about sex with Amanda, but claiming that she was the one who introduce the topic: "I talked to her a lot, but only to calm her down. I asked her how many boyfriends she had had, but it was always she had to start talking about sex."
Anyone who wants to rummage in the garbage, buy the book by all means.
Main prison claim 2: malicious sex-partner humiliation
The second main claim against a prison official concerned the preliminary results of a routine HIV test required of all prisoners and a list of sex partners. The list of sex partners was reported in the media in 2008 as if the prosecutor and prison doctor had engineered the result and then leaked it to the public.
What did we find when we looked closely into this?
Knox's own diary made quite clear that she was the one who decided to create such a list, and the list in fact seems to have been leaked by Knox forces. Back then, Knox herself exonerates the doctor and prosecutor.
Main prison claim 3: Italian prison conditions are unbearable
Italian prison conditions and treatment, Knox claims, were so bad that they made her life miserable. She says that at times she became very despondent, and even claims to have imagined doing away with herself.
However, Italian prison conditions except for occasional overcrowding are widely considered among the most humane, caring and rehabilitating in the world. Compared to US prison conditions, they are like night and day.
And this almost universal claim of every prisoner everywhere is contradicted by the media on which she and her family worked hard; by prison staff and official visitors, and even by the US Federal Government itself.
(1) Contradicted by the extensive media reporting
Occasional despondency is not all uncommon among those paying their debt to society. And there is scads of reporting that Knox had adjusted well to prison.
Here is a report by ABC News after Knox was found guilty in 2009.
Knox said that she felt "horrendous" the night that the verdict was delivered. "She said the prison guards did come in to hold her and make her feel better. She said the other prisoners were good to her," Thomas said.
The reporter said the prison is "extremely clean." Knox's cell, which she shares with another American who has been sentenced on drug charges, is small. "It had a little bathroom with a door, a bidet, a sink, a shower…. better than some of the things I've seen at summer camp or boarding school."
The women inmates are allowed to go to a hairdresser once a week.
The prison is a new facility, just opened in 2005. The women's ward has an infirmary, an entertainment room with a pool table and ping-pong table, and a library. There is also a small chapel. Outside there is a little playground for children with benches and toys because there are cells specifically for women with children. Currently there are two women in Capanne with children.
It was very widely reported over four years that Knox was given the opportunity to do all these many things rarely encountered in American prisons: Learn the guitar. Read a lot. Watch TV. Study foreign languages.
Do artwork (colored pictures of hands). Attend rock concerts where she was seen leaping up and down (images here). Attend classical concerts. Attend Christmas parties.
Knox even played a major part in the creation of a rock video with a rock group. Unfortunately for her, that video appeared to many to come close to a taunting murder confession.
And on various occasions Knox was quoted as saying prison guards were kind to her.
(2) Contradicted by the US Embassy and State Department
US Embassy staff regularly monitored Knox's treatment both during trial and thereafter. She was given chances again and again to lodge complaints with an Embassy officer.
But as we posted here in June 2010 and here in May 2011 cables from the US Rome Embassy to the State Department in Washington DC released to reporter Andrea Vogt contained ZERO complaints.
This matters incredibly because it constitutes the official take of the US Federal Government.
It will be front and center of State Department and Justice Department considerations when an arrest warrant for Knox is issued and extradition requested both of which could happen soon.
(3) Contradicted by Member of Parliament Rocco Girlanda
Mr Girlanda visited Amanda Knox in prison approximately 20 times for the specific purpose (or so he claimed) of checking her prison conditions. In fact that was the only way he could legally visit her, although oddly enough a book and a number of other pro-Knox actions emerged - even a complaint to the President about the Perugia prosecutors.
After Knox was released late in 2011 Mr Girlanda specifically praised the prison staff in this statement.
Perugia Prison Police The Example of Professionalism.
The PdL Party member of parliament Rocco Girlanda praises the officers of the Perugia prison.
"I've had the opportunity to describe to the Minister of Justice, Nitto Palma, the great professional behaviour shown by the Perugia Penitentiary Police with regards to the court case that saw Amanda Knox as protagonist, a behaviour that I had always observed during the course of my visits to the Capanne prison in the last two years." So says Rocco Girlanda, Umbrian deputy of the PdL, after the conclusion of the appeal trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
"In recent months I have had the opportunity to make dozens of visits to the prison, which also included some of the petitions presented by the senior management of the premises and my commitment in this regard, always finding, that starting from the director Bernardina Di Mario, continuing with the Penitentiary Police commander Fulvio Brillo, up to the entire personnel employed, the helpfulness, the courtesy and their professionalism which allows me to say that Perugia is a model structure on the national landscape, managed and directed in the best way and with a large dose of humanity on the part of the staff employed."
(4) Contradicted by Knox's own Italian lawyers
Knox's lawyers Mr Dalla Vedova and Mr Ghirga visited her again and again during the 2009 trial and 2010 hiatus and 2011 appeal. Knox once again had dozens of opportunities to lodge complaints with them - lawyers who could have initiated Supreme Court action in response.
When Knox was released late in 2011 Mr Dalla Vedova and Mr Ghirga were interviewed by the TV station Umbria 24:
The lawyers: "she never complained about the prison".
Amanda Knox "has never complained about the conduct/behavior of the prison police supervisor" and "she has never mentioned his name": to say so are the defenders of the American woman, lawyers Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga, commenting on what was reported by the tabloid The Sun. "
Ghirga said: "In the diary Amanda never makes the name."
Della vedova said: "We are grateful to the management staff of Capanne prison for their cooperation even given to the family's requirements. Amanda has never reported violations against her."
"She absolutely has received the correct treatment and the outmost solidarity, within compliance, especially in the prison's female section."
(5) Contradicted by prison guards and other inmates
In some interviews, the reporter Sharon Feinstein captures a view of a difficult, narcissistic, uncaring Amanda Knox which is very commonplace around Perugia. The real faults lie with Knox, in effect.
Our legal assessment
So does Amanda Knox's book contain defamatory lies which could cost her considerable additional prison time? The book is not even out yet but, based on the first hints above, she's in serious trouble.
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Monday, April 22, 2013
Lawyers Are Puzzled At Why Knox Seems So Intent On Risking Extra Prison Time
Posted by Peter Quennell
Knox doesnt need our legal advice. She has some pretty good lawyers of her own.
So what are they telling her now? The huge risks her book and interview run are all spelled out in the Italian legal code. Accused perps dont ever, ever take their case to the court of public opinion in Italy (try finding another example) because that is a very serious contempt of the court.
Italy's justice system so favors DEFENDANTS that it is perhaps the most pro-defendant system in the world. In fact many Italians feel its leniency has gone way too far. That is why there are these automatic appeals and why Knox could talk freely in court and have no cross-examination of her claims.
At the same time, officers of the Italian justice system are sheltered by huge powers hardly even needing to be invoked. The reason the law is so strong in this dimension is in part because a favored mafia tactic is to do what Sollecito and Preston and Burleigh have done in their books: slime the officers of the court.
Those powers finally now HAVE been invoked, because of the extraordinary assault on the Italian system and judges and prosecutors and police (rejected even by his dad) by Sollecito in his book.
They are perhaps the strongest and most extensive attacks on the court system Italy has even seen.
This is under confidential investigation in Florence and charges expected this summer could cost Sollecito a sentence of five years or more. His book also just about kills his chances at the new appeal, because it makes several hundred wrong claims which to the prosecution will be like shooting fish in a barrel.
The defense lawyers surely know all of this. Unless they feel their chances at appeal are so bad (which could be the case) that they require desperate long-shot measures, they will surely tell Knox the same thing.
Publishers' necks and ghost-writers' necks and ABC's necks are on the line too. HarperCollins UK seem to have been very smart in yanking the book. Their lawyers must have figured all this out.
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Friday, April 19, 2013
Tips for The Media #4: In Fact Guede Absolutely Couldnt Have Attacked Meredith Alone
Posted by Cardiol
[Bongiorno in 2011 trying to rattle an unshakable Guede claiming Knox and Sollecito did the crime]
The convicted murderer Rudy Guede to this day claims that Meredith let him into the house, so we cut him no slack for that.
But at the same time he was no drifter or serial knife carrier, he had no police record in 2007 (unlike Knox and Sollecito), and no drug dealing or breaking-and-entering has ever been either charged or proved.
In October 2008 Judge Micheli mistrusted and sharply rebuked a witness who claimed it just might have been Guede who broke into his house.
Guede seriously discounted his role on the night of Meredith's death, but some physical evidence (not a lot) proved he had played a part in the attack. Thereafter his shoeprints lead straight to the front door.
Neither Judge Micheli nor Judge Massei nor the Supreme Court believed he acted alone or had any part in the very obvious cleanup that had been carried out.
The Knox and Sollecito defenses failed miserably to prove he climbed in Filomena's window, and they never even TRIED to paint him as the lone attacker. That is why in 2011 we saw two of the most bizarre defence witnesses in recent Italian legal history, the jailbirds Alessi and Aviello, take the stand
Alessi got so nervous in claiming Guede told him Guede did it with two others that he was physically sick and had to take time off from the stand.
Aviello claimed his brother and another did it (not Guede) but then claimed the Sollecito family via Giulia Bongiorno floated bribes in his prison for false testimony.
Tellingly, although Bongiorno threatened to sue Aviello, she never has. Even more tellingly, Judge Hellmann himself initiated no investigation and simply let this serious felony claim drop dead.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of 20 reasons why Rudy Guede did not act alone, and why not one scrap of evidence has ever been found for any other two other than Knox and Sollecito themselves.
1. Included in Guede's Supreme Court's Sentencing Report was the fact that Meredith sustained 43 wounds
This fact was omitted from the Hellmann & Zanetti [H/Z] Report, for reasons that readers can only guess. This fact was also omitted from the Massei Report, probably out of humane respect for the feelings of Meredith's family.
Its inclusion in the Supreme Court's Report reflects the report's factual completeness. The PMF translation reads, in relevant part:
c) The body presented a very large number of bruising and superficial wounds – around 43 counting those caused by her falling – some due to a pointed and cutting weapon, others to strong pressure: on the limbs, the mouth, the nose, the left cheek, and some superficial grazing on the lower neck, a wound on the left hand, several superficial knife wounds or defence wounds on the palm and thumb of the right hand, bruises on the right elbow and forearm, ecchymosis on the lower limbs, on the front and inside of the left thigh, on the middle part of the right leg, and a deep knife wound which completely cut through the upper right thyroid artery fracturing the hyoid bone….
Including the number of minutes occupied by an initial verbal confrontation, the escalation of that confrontation into taunting and then the physical attack, leading to the infliction of 43 wounds, and to the fatal stabbing, how many minutes would all of this occupied?
The prosecution estimated it took fifteen.
2. Meredith had taken classes in dance and played sports (football, karate)
See the Massei Translation, p23
3. Meredith was a strong girl, both physically and in terms of temperament
See the statements by her mother and by her sister Stephanie (hearing of June 6, 2009). and description of her karate "sustained by her strong character" (Massei Translation, pp23, 164, 366, and 369).
4. Meredith must have been 'strongly restrained'
See the Massei Translation, p371; p399, in the original
5. Meredith she remained virtually motionless throughout the attack
That was in spite of Meredith's physical and personality characteristics [Massei Translation p369] [Massei Translation p370-371].
6. The defensive wounds were almost non-existent
See the report of Dr Lalli, pp. 33, 34, 35 with the relevant photos. Massei Translation p370.
7. One killer alone could not have inflicted the 43 wounds with so few defensive wounds.
8. There must necessarily have been two knives at the scene of the crime
See the Massei Translation p377.
9. A lone killer would have to use at least one hand/arm to restrain Meredith, and the other hand to hold one knife.
To use 2 knives a lone killer would have to place 1 knife down, leaving blood-stain[s] wherever it was placed, and then reach for the other knife. Even wiping the blades on the killer's clothes, using the one hand, and later scrubbing of the knives would not erase all the blood, as has already been demonstrated.
10. Two killers could divide their attacks by one killer using both hands/arms to restrain Meredith
Meanwhile the other killer used one hand/arm to restrain Meredith, and the other hand to use the various knives. Could a lone killer accomplish all that?
11. The clothes that Meredith was wearing (shoes, pants and underwear) had been removed.
See the Massei Translation p.370
"It is impossible to imagine in what way a single person could have removed the clothes that Meredith was wearing (shoes, pants and underwear), and using the violence revealed by the vaginal swab, could have caused the resulting bruises and wounds recalled above, as well as removing her sweatshirt, pulling up her shirt, forcing the bra hooks before tearing and cutting the bra." [Massei Translation p.370]
12. Meredith's sweatshirt had been pulled up and removed.
See the [Massei Translation p.370
13. Meredith's bra had been forcibly unhooked
See the Massei Translation p.370
14. Meredith's bra had been torn
See the Massei Translation p.370
15. Meredith's bra had been cut
See the Massei Translation p.370
16. Violence to Meredith was revealed by the genital swab.
See the Massei Translation p.370
17. In the H/Z Appellate Proceedings, not only did Sollecito's Lawyers not allege a lone killer
They themselves brazenly introduced false testimony to the effect that there were two other killers.
18. Even H/Z did not deny the complicity of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
Even H/Z seemed to conclude they are probably guilty, but not beyond a reasonable doubt:
… in order to return a guilty verdict, it is not sufficient that the probability of the prosecution hypothesis to be greater than that of the defence hypothesis, not even when it is considerably greater, but [rather] it is necessary that every explanation other than the prosecution hypothesis not be plausible at all, according to a criterion of reasonability. In all other cases, the acquittal of the defendant is required." [H/Z p.92]
19. Judge Micheli, in Guede's trial, found that Guede did not act alone
And that the evidence implicated Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito as accomplices of Rudy Guede in the murder of Meredith Kercher.
20. Judge Massei's court found that the evidence implicated Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
He concluded they were joint perpetrators with Rudy Guede in the murder of Meredith Kercher
Overwhelming, right? Is it really reasonable to claim as Sollecito did in his book that Guede was a lone-killer? Doesn't all this contradict the lone-killer theory beyond a reasonable doubt?
Archived in Officially involved, Rudy Guede, Supreme Court, Diversion efforts, Knox-Mellases, Sollecitos, Carpetbaggers, Public evidence, The timelines, DNA and luminol, Witness Aviello, Witness Alessi, The trials, Guede trial, The appeals, Guede appeals
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