Amanda Knox: What I Learned Meeting Other Women Villainized by the Media
In filming "The Scarlet Letter Reports," I met with women who, like me, have faced vitriolic harassment by the media and the public—and learned so much from their strength and resilience in the face of these attacks.
"The Scarlet Letter Reports" is a new series hosted by Amanda Knox that explores the gendered nature of public shaming. The series premieres this Wednesday on Facebook Watch.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/paxn8z/amanda-knox-scarlet-letter-trailer
I walked onto the set to shoot the first episode of The Scarlet Letter Reports ten years ago to the day I was arrested and redefined around the world as “Foxy Knoxy.” You’ve probably heard of her: the two-faced slut who murdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in a fit of drug- and/or jealousy-fueled rage during a sex game gone wrong. That invented monster was convicted, but it was me—the real me—who spent four years in prison and eight years on trial in Italian court making the case for my innocence. Even in freedom, Foxy Knoxy precedes me into the world—everyone I’ve met in the last decade has already met and judged her.
As a white woman, I am rare among wrongfully convicted people, the vast majority of whom are black men. And most exonerees tend to have a very different relationship with the media. I was hounded and harassed before, during, and after my release, whereas most exonerees face being forgotten or ignored by society. These individuals have all borne the burden of our criminal justice system’s failures, and by extension, our society’s shortcomings: our racism, classism, and impulse to scapegoat, vilify, and punish. Foxy Knoxy was the product of some of these shortcomings, but filtered through society’s long history of villainizing women and particularly our sexuality.
In The Scarlet Letter Reports, a new series launching this week on Broadly, I explore the gendered nature of public shaming through interviews with women who have been objectified and villainized by the media, including: Anita Sarkeesian, Amber Rose, Daisy Coleman, Brett Rossi, and Mischa Barton. Though our backgrounds and stories are different, we were all attacked as women. And, in trying to live our lives or come forward with the truth, we faced vicious campaigns against our characters—our identities distorted and crammed into prepackaged tropes, ready-made to be discounted, condemned, and rejected: the slut, the psycho, the trainwreck, the liar, the man-eater.
In the midst of shooting this series, #MeToo exploded; we saw survivors begin to hold powerful men accountable for their actions on a massive scale, and this reinforced for me the notion that my story was not just loosely connected to those of the women I was interviewing, but a direct result of the same societal forces that allowed these other women’s traumas to occur. For example, Daisy Coleman was 14 when she attempted to bring sexual assault charges against 17-year-old Matthew Barnett. At the time, Barnett wouldn't face a trial, but Daisy did. Tried by her community, Daisy was not only viciously slut-shamed and vilified, she was also denied the same protections as defendants in the courtroom—the presumption of innocence—and punished with a guilty verdict that was never actually proven.
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