Most years, on the anniversary of Meredith Kercher’s death, you can depend on Amanda Knox to pop back into the headlines in one way or another.
An appearance on a chat show, a pretty plea for clemency and understanding, a penitent’s gaze into the cameras, a halo brushed and gleaming.
This year, here she is again, regular as clockwork, as predictable as a bang on a dull and cracked gong. ‘Foxy Knoxy’ has crassly marked the ten-year anniversary of the killing of her former housemate Meredith by publishing a rather self-serving essay.
‘There are some people who believe I have no right to mourn Meredith,’ she writes on the Westside Seattle website, in the West Coast U.S. city she calls home. ‘They believe I had something to do with her murder — I didn’t — or that Meredith has been forgotten in the wake of my own struggle for justice — she hasn’t.’
Knox, twice found guilty of Kercher’s murder, before being finally acquitted by the Italian judiciary in 2015, recalls the things she loved about her ‘closest friend’ Meredith — a girl she knew for only 40 days before the young Briton died of stab wounds.
Quick, pass me a sliced onion and a handkerchief. This is going to get emotional.
Apparently, Amanda loved Meredith’s cute ol’ English accent, and remembers fondly how they would have espressos, eat cookies and go shopping together.
She recalls how Meredith even loaned her a pair of tights — like a big sister would.
Such a lovely portrait of a rosy friendship! Perhaps she has forgotten that in the Netflix documentary, she admitted she and Meredith were not close. And it was no secret there had been friction between them over Knox’s unpaid household bills.
But never mind that. Soon, we get down to the real nitty gritty — the terrible, terrible suffering. Amanda’s suffering that is, not Meredith’s, or Meredith’s family’s.
Indeed, Knox writes of her ‘decade of suffering’, in which her nice memories of Meredith are buried beneath ‘horrific autopsy photos and crime scene footage’.
Also to contend with were the slurs, false accusations and wrongful imprisonment, multiple trials, slanderous headlines and the shadows she just cannot shake off.
Most of all, there is her gripe that the murder of Miss Kercher is something she cannot escape because her death is ‘unfairly interlocked with my identity’. Amanda just can’t help herself, can she? It is always about her. She never stops to think about the Kerchers, whose loss is so much greater than hers.
Knox is trying to make her name as an author. If she really was a writer, she’d stop putting herself in the middle of this tragedy and write about other things.
But she appears too self-centred and tone-deaf to the continuing misery of the Kerchers to do so.
Meredith’s sister, Stephanie, has also released a statement to mark the ten-year anniversary of the murder in Perugia.
‘Those who have had to experience the tragedy and despair of having someone taken from them in such a brutal way will tell you the pain and helplessness never ceases,’ she said.
She writes of seeing her sister’s body in the morgue, how the desperate struggle Meredith had put up to live was clear by her wounds. Even now, the family remain baffled by the discrepancies. Particularly that the man now in jail — Rudy Guede — was convicted on the basis that he did not act alone.
Yet Italian police show no sign of investigating further into who else they think may have been involved.
Despite what TV detective dramas may have us believe, crimes are not always cracked. The guilty go free, the bereaved never get justice — and for the Kercher family, this is a particularly piercing agony. For them, the horror rolls on and on.
All the Kerchers want is justice — and for people to remember it was their daughter, not Knox, who was the victim in this crime.
Yet a decade on from that terrible night, Amanda Knox still tries to conflate her sense of grievance and victimhood with Meredith’s.
If she really cared about her special, tights-lending, coffee-drinking best friend, wouldn’t she do the decent thing and keep quiet?
Men are NOT the enemy
At the end of another week of tumult at Pestminster, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said the culture has to change and the stables have to be cleared out.
I agree. Wellies and muck shovels at the ready. But I also think that accusations of misconduct have to amount to something more than a clammy hand almost brushing against a trembling knee, or a clumsy text (sent by the deputy prime minister Damian Green to a female journalist) that could be misinterpreted.
Women are better than this. For years, feminists fought on our behalf so that we had a place at the table, a foothold in the rough and tumble of public life.
The fight against discrimination and sexism gave us the chance to enjoy the freedoms we have today. Now I worry that those freedoms are being charred in a crazed witch hunt where men are always the enemy, whatever they do or do not do.
I am not a victim waiting to happen, and I don’t respect any woman who is.
The case of Bex Bailey is much more serious, but equally troubling. The 25-year-old activist says that she was raped by a senior Labour Party official six years ago. She goes on to say that she was told by another party official not to report the attack because it could damage her political career.
I admire her for speaking out. But equally — and please, this is not a criticism of her or victim blaming — why would she even want to belong to a political party that demanded something so despicable, so loathsome and so retrogressive of her?
Hard to decide who were the most annoying men on Newsnight’s discussion on sexual politics this week — the right-on young dudes, or the smug, dinosaur older dudes.
Far better to switch over to Nick Ferrari’s excellent After The News show on ITV. Already this new current affairs programme is a must-see. Instead of blithering bores, Ferrari had guests who were at the heart of the story of the week — including Julia Hartley-Brewer, on whose knee Michael Fallon’s hand once alighted. Don’t waste time anywhere else.
No, I don’t suppose dog-walking pals Kay Benstead and Anne Finnie will be sharing prosecco and Hula Hoops any time soon.
Kay has been awarded £115,000 compensation after Annie’s pet Alsatian pulled her off her feet.
It happened in a London park when Annie gave the dog’s lead to Kay to hold while she went to get them both coffees.
But the big dog pulled her over and she broke her arm and hip.
Kay had to take seven months off work, on sickness pay.
A friendship in tatters, and a reminder to all of us that life is much better if you can resolve your differences without recourse to lawyers. They almost always make everything much worse. Woof!
No comments: