Amanda Knox Goes on Trial
According to the electronic edition of the Independent we get in our inboxes each morning, Seattle's most famous exchange student has finally gotten to trial in Perugia, Italy. Amanda Knox, the UW student accused of taking part in the sado-sexual murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007, has been an obsession of the British and Italian (and Seattle, to a lesser degree) media, as the article attests to:
Despite being behind bars the whole time, the vivacious, sexually adventurous, guitar-playing student from Seattle has become a minor celebrity in Italy, ranked in a poll in December as one of Italy's "women of the year". Her Christmas activities in jail were minutely reported - nuns taught her how to dance and she watched Kung Fu Panda - as was her poignant plea to her family for thermal underwear, warm socks and flannel sheets. When she played a walk-on part in a video shot in the prison, in which she recited Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, the issue of whether or not the video should be screened at a film festival became a national controversy (in the end, it was not). Her diaries have been leaked to the press and are minutely scrutinised for evidence of sexual deviancy. It is all prurient and intrusive but by no means irrelevant. For the question of Ms Knox's sexual appetites, and how far she will go to gratify them, go to the heart of this disturbing case.
Now, we're by no means professional ombudsmen, but really, it's "by no means irrelevant"? Call us naive Americans, but we would have supposed it was relevant to the investigators responsible for trying to determine her innocence or guilt; when it comes to all the rest of us, it is actually just "prurient and intrusive." We admit, the idea that UW students are randy psycho killers makes for a good story (horror movie? porno?), but that said, we tend to think it somewhat unlikely that Knox is some thrill-kill cultist, and whatever her culpability, at some point Knox will get to rejoin the general public. And if she's innocent, of course, her "sexual appetites" are hardly relevant. Hard as it is to say, we're actually starting to feel bad for Seattle's unofficial ambassador to the world.
