I have always believed that Amanda Knox and her boyfriend, Rafaelle Sollecito, were the people at the hands of Meredith Kercher’s murder in 2007. However, after watching the documentary and seeing the physical embodiment of The Daily Mail within Nick Pisa, I felt as though my bias towards Amanda Knox may have something to do with a certain newspaper establishment that rhymes with The Currant Bun being readily available in my household.
The documentary makes for uncomfortable viewing, not least because it seems to forget that the real victim was Meredith Kercher who was murdered. It plays on Knox (or Foxy Knoxy as Pisa coined) being the ultimate victim of injustice. By the end of the documentary I’d been given enough reasonable doubt to see this as a media-fuelled, woman-blaming, poorly evidenced case. Yet, I still felt uncomfortable watching Knox – is it because the media have lead me to believe that she was to blame for so long, or was it because she shows no emotions regarding her roommate’s murder?
‘The documentary makes for uncomfortable viewing, not least because it seems to forget that the real victim was Meredith Kercher who was murdered. It plays on Knox being the ultimate victim of injustice. By the end of the documentary I’d been given enough reasonable doubt to see it was a poorly evidenced case. Yet, I still felt uncomfortable.’
Nick Pisa is not shown in a favourable light throughout: in one disturbing segment, he likens getting his front-page story to having great sex. He also searches through Amanda Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito’s Myspace pages to find pictures of them looking threatening. This incidentally, is where he found Amanda’s handle as Foxy Knoxy, and decided to portray her as be a sex-crazed maniac – despite the fact that most young people will have used a slightly suggestive internet handle at some point, especially when the internet was relatively fresh.
The prosecutor Giuliano Mignini is also condemned by this film. It appears he had so much international pressure to find a culprit, that he chose Knox and then shaped the evidence to fit her. Knox, when she was sentenced, got given more time than either of the two men, consequently solidifying the modern day ‘witch-hunt’ scenario.
Knox ultimately still placed doubt in my mind throughout this documentary; I still felt like she knew something. But this is yet another case where we will simply never know.
Rianna Julian
(Image courtesy of Netflix)