Amanda Knox hosts new show about people who have been shamed

Amanda Knox has been many things in the past 10 years: suspect, prisoner, exoneree, author, and advocate for the wrongfully accused. She’s now host of the new Facebook show “The Scarlet Letter Reports,” which discusses the public shaming of women, featuring guests such as actress Mischa Barton and model Amber Rose.

“I was having to go through the experience of walking into a courtroom and hearing people say terrible, untrue things about me,” Knox told KIRO Nights.

“Before all of this happened I was just a student,” she said. “And then to become this figure that for other people represented the worst in humanity, the worst in femininity. And to still represent that for people. The last 10 years I’ve been fighting for my freedom, for my identity, fighting to stay sane in the midst of it all.”

In 2007, Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted for the murder of their roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy. She spent four years in prison before the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2011. A second conviction arose in 2014, but Italy’s highest court overturned it the following year, which ruled out any further trials.

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Throughout it all, Knox remained determined to clear her name, and hopes the media and public will refrain from simply labeling people and prejudging the innocent before they’ve had a fair trial.

“I wasn’t the thug predator that we portray young black men to be,” Knox said. “I was the slut, I was the whore.”

“Anyone who’s done the smidgenest of research knows that there are coercive police interrogation techniques, there’s terrible forensics, there’s a whole onslaught of problems that leads to wrongful convictions.”

Amanda Knox: Humanity in those who’ve been shamed

She hopes that her new show will help people learn empathy in place of judgment, and reexamine their preconceived notions.

“What I learned from the Scarlet Letter Reports is that it’s not difficult to humanize someone. You just have to be in the room with them and let them be a human in front you,” Knox said. “What takes work is dissecting a person and stripping them of their humanity.”

Despite it all, she’s still haunted by that instant in the courtroom that changed her life forever.

“Hearing them give me a guilty verdict when I was sure the truth would win out. And then to have my whole life, my past and my present and my future completely redefined and taken from me. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that moment.”