Amanda Knox appeared live on Irish TV on Saturday night on the "Ray D'Arcy Show". Before she came on, a clip was shown from the Netflix film, 'Amanda Knox', wherein she states ominously, 'I am either a psychopath in sheep's clothing, or I am YOU.'
Knox adopts a feminine image for the show
Knox, 30, came on the show at about 10:50. She was wearing a full-length dress in a pale blue fabric print with a faint white pattern and a high neck. Her shoes were stacked laced-up beige open-toe boot-style sandals.
Her hair had been curled and set to tumble down her shoulders and back.
She had on thick foundation and make-up with a pale blusher.
She describes herself as the 'little sister' of the cottage
Her facial expression on her opening introduction was a stricken one. She had a raised forehead with frown lines, often associated with anxiety. She pointed out that Meredith was one year older than her and that she was ‘the little sister’ of the cottage. Several times her voice became tremulous.
D'Arcy asked her how she had met ex-co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito. Knox went into delighted 'girly' mode, bubbling about falling in love and his buying her perfume as he would an Italian woman. These lines and flirtatious demeanour are identical to that in the Netflix film. Knox became faux giggly and asked D’Arcy, have you never had an experience like that, where you "just fall in love?"
D’Arcy looked at Knox raptly.
His interview contained plenty of hard questions. Knox characteristically answered the tougher ones by taking a gulp and looking downwards.
Knox becomes emotional whilst describing why she accused Patrick Lumumba of the crime
D'Arcy seemed to hit a raw nerve when he asked her why she told police Patrick had murdered and raped Meredith.
Knox became more and more emotional as she launched into her oft-repeated 'script' of how she had been questioned for hours and hours, hit and screamed at. She claimed she named him because the police suggested it to her. However, in her original court testimony, she confirmed she was the one who brought up Patrick's name first.
'The media misrepresented me...'
Knox' main message was that the ‘media misrepresented' her with their use of the photo of the pair kissing outside the cottage’ immediately after the body was found. She claimed she knew Meredith was dead when Filomena shouted, ‘A Foot!’
The press and the prosecution 'did what they do to all women' claimed Knox, by dwelling on her sexuality and being abusive about her. At this, Knox' face screwed up with imaginary contempt. However, at the time of the trial, she told the prosecutor, Mignini and the courts she didn’t know the dead person was Meredith until the police told her at the Questura.
Knox was visited regularly by a representative from the US Embassy who reported no ill-treatment at the time.
In court, during her testimony, she confirmed she had been treated well.
'They told me I had HIV'
Knox told D'Arcy that doctors told her she was 'infected with HIV' She said a prison officer kept visiting her and asking her for s*x. She claimed that she was forced to write a list of every man she had ever slept with, which she jotted down in her prison journal. She claims the police then confiscated her prison diary and the prosecutor released its content to the press.
What her Prison Diary says in her own hand is that the prison doctor informed her that it was probably a 'false positive' result and not to worry. There is evidence that it was the defence who released the diary to the press, as they allegedly did the confidential autopsy pictures to an Italian TV channel.
'Come Out You Black and Tans'
Knox said she had lots of letters from Irish people when she was in prison, who understood her treatment by the authorities and some had sent her Irish rebel music. Knox sang a few lines of the Wolfetones, ‘Come out you Black and Tans, Come out and fight me like a man’.
D’Arcy remarked, ‘That is the oddest thing I have ever heard'.
It is a pro-IRA song, with the Black and Tans referring to a division in the British Army.
Knox told the audience she is now concentrating on journalism and Innocence Projects. She said she was unusual, in that most 'wrongly convicted' in the USA were black and deprived. She told D'Arcy, they see her as their little girl.
Knox' links to Peter Pringle in Ireland
Knox may well be staying with a friend in her innocence project circuit, Peter Pringle, who recently resettled in Connemara with his wife ex-death row prisoner Sunny Jacobs. He is awaiting a decision by the Irish courts as to whether his application for compensation for almost sixteen years' imprisonment for an INLA-linked murder of two policemen - for which he was acquitted in 2002 as an 'unsafe verdict' - is out of time. The other issue is whether it will allow Pringle access to police DNA results which identified a hair in one of the robbery cars as his.
Peter Pringle has invited various 'Innocence' campaigners to stay with him, including Steve Avery, currently fighting his conviction for the murder of Theresa Hallbach.
It would explain Amanda Knox' presence in Ireland if she came at this couple's invitation, having made firm friends with them after appearing together on K5 News in May last year, as Ireland is a long way to travel from Knox home city of Seattle in the USA.
