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pnwmom

(108,977 posts)
4. During the trials, she was called a thousand variations of that in the press in England and Italy.
Thu Jul 30, 2015, 01:31 AM
Jul 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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