Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox by Raffaele Sollecito
Authors: Raffaele Sollecito
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sounding evasive.
“I can’t . . . I can’t . . . ,” I mumbled at one point.
“Yes, no—or I can’t remember,” she admonished. “Those are your three options.”
“I can’t remember exactly. ”
The judge was clearly annoyed. “Listen, sometimes you remember things very well, and other times, when you are challenged, you say you don’t remember. I would invite you to be more precise because you need to understand that, with all these contradictions inthe face of objective facts like the prints near Meredith’s bed, you’re not in the best situation.”
Not in the best situation? I was in the worst situation imaginable—being falsely accused of murder. If I wasn’t handling the questions well, it was because I was out of my depth in every way imaginable. As the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” Amanda and I had been in a kind of lovers’ cocoon all week, and our days and nights blended together in my mind. The shock of Meredith’s murder didn’t alter that, and may even have made it more difficult to sort everything out once our mundane daily routine was held up to the scrutiny of a criminal investigation. Had we had any prior knowledge of the murder, I imagine we would have had our stories straight and practiced responses at the ready. The judge, though, was not interested in understanding why I was having such a hard time, nor was she interested in cutting me any other kind of slack.
I could have been a lot smarter, of course, but the judge and the prosecution had all the tools to catch me out, and I was blindsided by their assertions of “objective fact” that were anything but. My game plan had been to dissociate myself from Amanda and thus deprive them of the argument that I was covering for her because I was in love with her. Accordingly, I told the court I never wanted to see her again. But they didn’t let up on me, not for a minute, and only exploited the wedge they had so successfully driven between the two of us.
In his court filings, Mignini described us as unscrupulous, cynical, troubling characters who should not be allowed to walk free pending trial. Amanda, he said, had dragged me into a criminal conspiracy, while I was a person with “particularly sinister habits”who had very possibly supplied the knife that killed Meredith. This wasn’t evidence-based prosecution; it was character assassination by any means.
Matteini’s final questions were about a blog I had written after my Erasmus year in Germany in which I talked about the joys of experiencing new things abroad, and my sadness that the experience was now over. This seemed easy enough to tackle. She asked what I’d meant when I said, “You can only hope that you’ll experience even stronger emotions in future to take you by surprise all over again.”
I said I was referring to experiences that help a young person grow and mature, in contrast to “doing exactly the same things and spending time with the same people every day,” which I said made life flat and pointless.
What kinds of experiences did I have in mind? the judge persisted.
“Well, for example, being with a woman,” I answered. “At the time I was in the Erasmus program I’d never experienced the pleasure of sex. That’s one thing I meant when I wrote that.”
I thought my answer was innocuous enough. Nobody could fault its honesty. Who could have guessed I was, in fact, providing Matteini with the one thing she felt she lacked: a motive for me to have murdered Meredith Kercher?
* * *
Matteini swallowed the prosecution’s story whole. The break-in was staged after the fact, she asserted—just as Mignini had. The murderer or murderers must therefore have got into the house with a set of keys, and Amanda was the only keyholder without a solid alibi for the night in question. Patrick Lumumba had the hots forMeredith, Matteini
“I can’t . . . I can’t . . . ,” I mumbled at one point.
“Yes, no—or I can’t remember,” she admonished. “Those are your three options.”
“I can’t remember exactly. ”
The judge was clearly annoyed. “Listen, sometimes you remember things very well, and other times, when you are challenged, you say you don’t remember. I would invite you to be more precise because you need to understand that, with all these contradictions inthe face of objective facts like the prints near Meredith’s bed, you’re not in the best situation.”
Not in the best situation? I was in the worst situation imaginable—being falsely accused of murder. If I wasn’t handling the questions well, it was because I was out of my depth in every way imaginable. As the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” Amanda and I had been in a kind of lovers’ cocoon all week, and our days and nights blended together in my mind. The shock of Meredith’s murder didn’t alter that, and may even have made it more difficult to sort everything out once our mundane daily routine was held up to the scrutiny of a criminal investigation. Had we had any prior knowledge of the murder, I imagine we would have had our stories straight and practiced responses at the ready. The judge, though, was not interested in understanding why I was having such a hard time, nor was she interested in cutting me any other kind of slack.
I could have been a lot smarter, of course, but the judge and the prosecution had all the tools to catch me out, and I was blindsided by their assertions of “objective fact” that were anything but. My game plan had been to dissociate myself from Amanda and thus deprive them of the argument that I was covering for her because I was in love with her. Accordingly, I told the court I never wanted to see her again. But they didn’t let up on me, not for a minute, and only exploited the wedge they had so successfully driven between the two of us.
In his court filings, Mignini described us as unscrupulous, cynical, troubling characters who should not be allowed to walk free pending trial. Amanda, he said, had dragged me into a criminal conspiracy, while I was a person with “particularly sinister habits”who had very possibly supplied the knife that killed Meredith. This wasn’t evidence-based prosecution; it was character assassination by any means.
Matteini’s final questions were about a blog I had written after my Erasmus year in Germany in which I talked about the joys of experiencing new things abroad, and my sadness that the experience was now over. This seemed easy enough to tackle. She asked what I’d meant when I said, “You can only hope that you’ll experience even stronger emotions in future to take you by surprise all over again.”
I said I was referring to experiences that help a young person grow and mature, in contrast to “doing exactly the same things and spending time with the same people every day,” which I said made life flat and pointless.
What kinds of experiences did I have in mind? the judge persisted.
“Well, for example, being with a woman,” I answered. “At the time I was in the Erasmus program I’d never experienced the pleasure of sex. That’s one thing I meant when I wrote that.”
I thought my answer was innocuous enough. Nobody could fault its honesty. Who could have guessed I was, in fact, providing Matteini with the one thing she felt she lacked: a motive for me to have murdered Meredith Kercher?
* * *
Matteini swallowed the prosecution’s story whole. The break-in was staged after the fact, she asserted—just as Mignini had. The murderer or murderers must therefore have got into the house with a set of keys, and Amanda was the only keyholder without a solid alibi for the night in question. Patrick Lumumba had the hots forMeredith, Matteini
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