Amanda Knox survived a living nightmare. 2000s power ballads helped.

This transcript was generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. Please excuse any typos or errors.

Amanda Knox  00:00

I'm still this optimistic, silly, adventurous person. I just have this deep abyss of despair that I have known always there under the surface.

Sophie Bearman  00:23

This is Life in Seven Songs from The San Francisco Standard. I'm Sophie Bearman. My guest this week is Amanda Knox. It is no exaggeration to say that Amanda has survived a living nightmare. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, 20-year-old Amanda was falsely accused, and later convicted, of the brutal murder of her roommate. After spending four years in prison, Amanda was acquitted and later exonerated of the crime.

Sophie Bearman  00:55

After her acquittal, Amanda returned home to Seattle to restart her life -- now the face of one of the most notorious cases in recent history. Many people might have chosen to disappear into anonymity, but not Amanda. She's told her story through memoirs and documentaries -- and now through a new Hulu mini series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which premiers tomorrow. 

Sophie Bearman  01:24

Today, we're hearing a different side of Amanda's story: how music was both a lifeline, pulling her through her darkest moments, and also a tether to the goofy, joyful person she was before her life was turned upside down. Amanda Knox, welcome to the show.

Amanda Knox  01:42

I'm so excited to be here.

Sophie Bearman  01:44

You are executive producer on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. After so many years of others setting the narrative, telling a story about you, how are you feeling?

Amanda Knox  01:56

Oh, man, very, very excited. It's a very, very good show. I'm really proud of it. It goes beyond just, you know, the courtroom drama. It's a very personal story. And I'm so grateful to my partners, because this experience could have been horrible, right? Like it could have been a nightmare. And instead, every single person that I've been working with, from the creator and showrunner, K.J. Steinberg, to my fellow executive producer Monica Lewinsky, everyone understood what was important to me, which is not a story of a bad thing that happened to a girl one day. The frame of this story is I go back to Italy to confront my prosecutor. But it's not me being a helpless victim of circumstance. It is me making a choice. And that was something that was really important for me and Monica, especially, is this idea that we're not defined by the traumas that happen to us. We're defined by what we do about them and how we succeed and fail at rebuilding our lives and reclaiming our narratives and redefining who we are on the world stage. You are not doomed to be limited to the worst experience of your life. That's the ultimate message of the show.

Sophie Bearman  03:16

And I'm also curious, what is your relationship to Italy at this point? How do you think about it?

Amanda Knox  03:21

Yeah, that's a great question, because I feel like I am very American-Italian now, because I grew up in a really big way in Italy, and I feel like I'm a proper Italian in the sense that I can appreciate both the romanticism of Italy and also the dark underbelly of Italy, which is the bureaucracy and the misogyny. Like there's, there's so much of Italy that is beautiful, and there's so much of Italy that is less beautiful, and I know it all very intimately. So I feel like when you have a love-hate relationship with a country, that's when you know you're a native. And that's kind of how I feel at this point in my life. I am very actively seeking out getting new good memories to counteract the bad ones that I've experienced.

Sophie Bearman  04:15

You grew up in Seattle, the eldest of four kids. What kind of kid were you? How would you describe young Amanda?

Amanda Knox  04:21

I was a good kid, like I did well in school, I had friends, I took care of my younger siblings and my younger cousins. I'm not just the oldest of four girls. I am also the oldest of all of my cousins. So I was doing all of the babysitting, all of the dog care. I was very much a very family and friend oriented person. I was on a soccer team. I was very athletic, and it was pretty easy. Like, I had a really easy childhood. I grew up in a divorced household, but like, it never felt like it was an issue. Like it was just like, 'Oh, I just have two houses, and I get to have two Christmases and two Thanksgivings.' Like, it was kind of like, 'I just have twice as much of the good stuff.' And then, of course, I also was very outdoorsy. I was like, drawing maps, fantasy maps, filling up a little backpack full of snacks to go hike in the forest that's near my house. Like that's what I was doing.

Sophie Bearman  05:15

You picked a song that's tied to your childhood. It's Hotel California performed by the Gipsy Kings. Why'd you pick this song?

Amanda Knox  05:23

It felt like it was the perfect mashup of my parents, which is kind of how I experienced them, as like this mashup at this point. Because my dad was all American. My mom was born in Germany and very European. My mom and my dad are huge Eagles fans. And then my stepdad comes along and he's half Mexican, half Greek. He introduces me to a ton of heavy metal, and also the Gipsy Kings. And the Gipsy Kings' rendition of Hotel California is just like a perfect upbeat, joyous mashup of genres and cultures just felt like the right way to express what my childhood was like.

Music  06:07

[Hotel California by Gipsy Kings plays]

Amanda Knox  06:25

To this day, like, going to a Gipsy Kings concert was the pinnacle of concert experiences because of like, the buoyancy of their music. I obviously couldn't speak Spanish before I went to Italy, but then I came home from Italy, and suddenly I could understand all of the Spanish music. I was just like, 'Wow!' I leveled up in a way that I didn't even realize, to appreciate more of my stepdad's music, especially.

Sophie Bearman  06:52

And you went to the University of Washington. At that age, what did you dream of doing, like, as a career or something else with your life plans? Did you have a sense?

Amanda Knox  07:01

Yeah, I wanted to be a translator. I had this, like, deep interest in traveling and other cultures. I thought, what an amazing thing it would be to be a bridge-builder between two people who can't otherwise communicate. That was my vision was being a translator.

Sophie Bearman  07:18

Any life plans that you had were soon derailed in a very major way when you went to Italy. And what happened was incredibly tragic. Tell me about that.

Amanda Knox  07:31

So it had been five or six weeks since I had moved to Perugia, Italy to study abroad at the Università per Stranieri. And I was living in a house with three other young women. And one night, November 1, I happened to be spending the night at my boyfriend's house. And during the night, there was a home invasion in my house. A man broke into our home, and only one of my roommates was actually there at the time, and this man raped and murdered her. And the next day, I was the first roommate to come home and discover the crime scene. I contacted the police, I contacted my other roommates. And again, I'm 20 years old. I've never had anything bad happen to me before. I'm basically just sort of running on autopilot, like just do what the adults tell me to do. So I spend the next several days in the police station, and I'm being questioned for hours and hours and hours and in Italian, in Italian with no lawyer, and very often with no translator, and that culminates in an overnight interrogation where I am coerced into implicating myself and others in this crime. You know, I immediately recant as soon as they stop yelling at me and hitting me, but by then it was too late. I was sent off to prison, and I spent the next four years in prison before I was released and acquitted of the charges.

Sophie Bearman  09:11

You shared a song that's connected to your first few months in prison. It's Dido's Thank you. So what's the story behind this song?

Amanda Knox  09:19

There were so many songs that had such a deep resonance for me, especially in this period of my life, because my life became so small. Like this, this huge case became very big, but I was just trapped in a jail cell. And for the first eight months of my imprisonment, I was in isolation. Other prisoners would go out to the yard and, you know, play cards or whatever. I was isolated. I was like in a separate space and not allowed to talk to anybody, and I was very, very lonely. And so what I did is I sang to myself. I've always loved to sing, and the rest of the prison sort of got to know me by my voice first because I was singing all these songs. And it ended up resulting in people like hearing me sing the same songs over and over, and then they would have, they would be like, 'Oh, you know, the Thank You -- like the Thank You one.' So, you know, 'Quella, quella con Thank You. Da, da, da, da.' You know. And they like -- so I wasn't allowed to talk to them, but like the singing was almost like a loophole. And so the guards would let me sing to other people, even if I wasn't allowed to talk to them. And so the number one most requested song that I sang was Thank You by Dido.

Music  10:59

[Thank You by Dido plays]

Sophie Bearman  11:04

How much did music help you, especially in isolation?

Amanda Knox  11:08

I had so much time just to myself and to my own thoughts, and I was in sort of a state of shock and denial for a long time, and songs that were familiar to me felt like they were friends in the room with me. The lyrics helped me to process the feelings that I was feeling. So, you know, even though Dido's like, talking about having a bad day where her, you know, little things are going wrong -- that helped me. Because I was having a really fucking bad day. I was having one bad day after one bad day after one bad day, and I just needed to get through it. And ultimately, I knew that my family was out there fighting for me and caring about me and loving me, and I was so grateful to them.

Sophie Bearman  12:02

You shared another song, Regina Spektor's Après Moi. How would you listen to this song? And I almost mean, like, literally, what was your access to music like in prison, I guess, as time passed? And then what about this song helped you?

Amanda Knox  12:15

So the prison I was in, you were allowed to have a Walkman CD player kind of thing, a disc player. And you could have, like, headphones like the ones that we're wearing. And we could have three CDs in our cell, like, in our possession at a time. And this one was especially helpful after I was convicted when I felt like the whole world didn't care who I was and what the truth was, and was just trying to break me. And this was the kind of power ballad song that I would listen to to sort of engage that part of myself that was, like, deeply hurt but still deeply strong.

Music  13:22

[Après Moi by Regina Spektor plays]

Amanda Knox  13:24

One other note about this is -- trigger warning -- I had suicidal ideation right after I was convicted and I was sentenced to 26 years. And part of the thing that this song, like, 'You can't break that which isn't yours.' It was me saying, like, 'Fuck you, criminal justice system, like you can't break me. I don't belong to you.' But also, 'I'm not my own. It's not my choice,' was my reminding myself that I couldn't take my own life because my own life didn't even belong to me. It belonged to the people who loved me. And so this was a song that really helped me sort of work through those feelings of like anger and and desperation when I was in a really dark place.

Sophie Bearman  14:10

And at the same time, the media has created this narrative about you. I mean, I know that you were called everything from 'Foxy Knoxy' to a 'she-devil.' What was it like to see yourself painted in ways that felt, I imagine, completely foreign to who you knew yourself to be? 

Amanda Knox  14:27

I mean, it was utterly surreal. One of the things that they called me in the courtroom was 'Luciferina.' So female Lucifer. Looking back on it now, it's almost laughable how outrageous it is. Like really? Really? But at the time, I felt like the person who was on trial was this idea of me that didn't exist. Like they just made up a person who didn't exist, and that person happened to have my name and face, but had nothing to do with me, had nothing to do with anything I ever did. And I think, like, the fact that so much of this case revolved around a story and a caricature, instead of on facts and evidence, made me feel trapped and helpless. And so again, like, listening to Après Moi, "après moi le deluge,' even. 'After me comes the flood.' There was, like, this sort of rebelliousness, like, 'You know what? This is not going to break me. And if I get out of here, you do not know what's going to hit you' kind of like vibes.

Sophie Bearman  15:35

After the break, Amanda shares the music that helped her piece her life back together when she was free. Stay with us.

Sophie Bearman  16:02

While in prison, you were appealing your conviction. What was your mindset about the future at that point? How were you sort of conceptualizing the future, having hope of getting released or not?

Amanda Knox  16:15

There was this big psychological shift for me from before the guilty verdict and after the guilty verdict. Because everything leading up to the guilty verdict, I was living in a kind of limbo where I was like, 'I'm not living my life. I'm just living somebody else's life by mistake. And when all the adults in the room finally have to make a decision, they're going to give me my life back.' And then, of course, that didn't happen. And suddenly I was faced with the reality that I couldn't count on the people that I thought I could count on, or the institutions that I thought I could count on, or even these grand ideals -- truth, justice. And so I came into a kind of conflict with my mom, where she kept resisting it -- that resistance to accepting my life as it was -- and I didn't. I started to accept that this was my life, and I should stop waiting to live my life and just live the life that I had. And I think it led to a maturity on my part, honestly. Like my, my friend, the priest in prison, said that I aged 40 years in four because of my ability to truly face the fact and accept that the life that I had was not the life that I deserved.

Sophie Bearman  17:42

You shared a song connected to that priest, Maybe Not by Cat Power.

Amanda Knox  17:47

Yes. The priest and I first connected, again, because he heard my voice before he ever really got to know me. He overheard me like everyone else, singing. And we connected over music. Because I actually do not come from a religious background. So at first I was like, 'What do me and a priest have in common? Nothing.' Well, it turned out we have so much in common, and it started with music. And so he invited me into his office to play guitar and to sing, and he invited me to sing and play guitar during mass. And eventually he taught me how to play piano. And I practiced piano but I didn't have a piano in my cell. So what I had was a drawing of a piano. It was just like a paper slip. And I would practice. I would listen to a song on my headphones, on my CD player, and then after he had taught me the chords, I would practice playing on this paper piano. And so this song is the first song that he taught me to play, and was the song that I played for him the final day that I spent in prison.

Music  19:00

[Maybe Not by Cat Power]

Amanda Knox  19:12

This song still gets me. Ooh. You know, I look back on that period of my life and I think about all of the mental gymnastics that I had to do to accept that horribly unfair circumstance. And I don't know what Cat Power was thinking about when she wrote that song, but talking about not being free in anywhere else but your mind was just, like, the perfect encapsulation of what I felt like, which was the only thing I had left, was my mind. And I had to stay free in there or I would be crushed. And, you know, I sang that song while I was awaiting the verdict for my appeal trial. And the priest, Don Saulo, he actually took a recording of me singing the song because he was sure that he was never going to hear my voice in prison again. He was sure I was going to be freed. And I didn't know, and I was like, maybe not. Maybe not. But no matter what, I'll still be free in my mind. You know? 

Sophie Bearman  20:36

Wow. So you were freed from prison. 

Amanda Knox  20:40

Hey, spoiler alert! [Laughs]

Sophie Bearman  20:44

After four years. And you returned home to Washington in 2011. What was that like?

Amanda Knox  20:51

Well, after four years of being surrounded by concrete and spending 22 out of 24 hours a day locked in a single room that you can't get out of, I was really shocked to enter into a world that was so much bigger and brighter and louder and faster than what I had become used to. Stepping out of the airplane, I was just shocked with the smell of home. Like the smell of rain and earth and pine trees, that is that Pacific Northwest smell that was so different than what I was used to in Italy. And I was really eager to go back to the life that I had before this horrible thing had happened to me. That's what I had fantasized about for so long. And it pretty quickly became apparent to me that that was not an option. You know, I was being hunted down constantly by media so I was just always under this very malicious spotlight. And so I was technically free, but I did not feel free. I felt very much trapped still within this narrative of being the girl accused of murder and being seen in the worst possible light. And on the one hand, it was incredible to be back with home and with my family, and at the same time, it was devastating to feel alienated from my own life. And I had to start from scratch in a big way.

Sophie Bearman  22:28

Your next song is one that you turn to during this time. It's Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Conchords. 

Amanda Knox  22:34

So yes. I didn't know Flight of the Conchords before prison, and this is like the most amazing way to be introduced to Flight of the Conchords. They were the one show that was not dubbed into Italian. You know, like The Simpsons were Italian, like everybody was dubbed in Italian. But for some reason, Flight of the Conchords played late at night on MTV in Italy while I was in prison. And so I got my dose of silliness, you know, at like 11pm at night. Like, turning the volume really, really low, so that -- and like, putting my ear up to the speakers that I could hear it and not wake up my cellmates. But I just like, fell in love with their absurd, very silly and whimsical sense of humor, which really spoke to the inner, whimsical, silly person that I am. And when I came across Hurt Feelings, it was almost like the Dido song where it was like, 'We all have bad days, man. We all get hurt feelings.' And I was just like, 'This is true to my heart. This is how I feel.'

Music  24:03

[Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Conchords plays]

Amanda Knox  24:07

He's got his hurt feelings. I have my hurt feelings. He has his hurt -- we all have hurt feelings. [Laughs] Made me laugh every fucking time.

Sophie Bearman  24:20

And you, you went back to this song even after you got back to the States?

Amanda Knox  24:24

Oh, heck yeah. Well, I didn't even have a Flight of the Conchords CD in prison. I just, like, heard that song once. And then once I got home, then I picked up the CD and I was like, 'This is my go-to song for whenever I'm feeling like people are not being nice to me, and are not -- like, the haters are gonna hate, and I need to pick me up.' It just pulls you right out, because it's so silly.

Sophie Bearman  24:48

Absolutely. It's so good. Your next song is Shake It Out by Florence + the Machine. What did this one do for you?

Amanda Knox  24:56

On the one hand, you know, I could always count on Flight of the Conchords to cheer me up. And this song, this was a pick me up. And it was a power ballad that was, you know, 'I'm a good person, and I'm living my best life, and I'm not gonna let the haters dump all their crap on me. I'm gonna shake it off.' Even in prison, I would do this, I would dance in ways that was just like, 'I just need to get it off me. Just like, I need to take a shower of all of this hatred that is just being, like, showered on me. I just need to, like, get it off of me.'

Music  25:28

[Shake It Off by Florence + the Machine plays]

Amanda Knox  25:47

I mean, right? The devil being the Italian justice system at that point.

Sophie Bearman  25:53

Right. Because your legal battles were actually still going on, even after you returned home. In 2013, Italy overturned your acquittal and ordered a retrial. You were convicted again before finally being exonerated definitively, once and for all by Italy's Supreme Court in 2015.

Amanda Knox  26:15

So that moment was wild because I didn't know that a full exoneration was really, truly possible. At that point, the best case scenario that I thought I was going to encounter was they were going to overturn my conviction and send it back for retrial. So I was, like, prepared for a years-long -- at the best case scenario more years-long legal battles. And in a moment, they just put it to a stop. They were just like, 'Nope. No evidence. [Speaks Italian.] She's innocent because she has factually not committed this crime.' Over. Done with. Enough. And the relief and the joy. And it was like that first moment of realizing, like, 'Oh my god, I'm not just, like, living my life with an ax over my neck. I can actually look into the future and feel proactive about my life instead of reactive to this dark, ominous presence.' So it was, it was a big deal.

Sophie Bearman  27:24

And just a few months after being exonerated, you met your future husband, Christopher.

Amanda Knox  27:29

Yes. 

Sophie Bearman  27:30

What was it like to fall in love? To open yourself up romantically to someone after all of this?

Amanda Knox  27:38

It's a great question because I felt like I was carrying a lot of baggage. And I felt like I probably couldn't have a partner in a normal relationship the way other people did because of all the baggage that I carried and because of the stigma, and I knew it was a lot. So I didn't begrudge anyone if they were overwhelmed by the idea of what it would mean to be my partner. And then I had this fabulous little meet-cute with my now husband, but back then, was just some dude who wrote a book that I reviewed for the local paper, And then I went to his book reading, and I said hello and asked him for an interview for the paper. And that interview turned into watching Star Trek and drinking scotch and taking a nice moonlit walk around. And, like, it's funny because, like, when we first first met, I came away from that encounter being like, 'Wow, weird. Like, I could totally love that guy.' But I wasn't like, 'I am going to love that guy.' I was like, 'In an alternate universe, I could totally love that guy.' And here we are today.

Sophie Bearman  28:52

Well, your last song is about where you're at today. 

Amanda Knox  28:57

Yes. 

Sophie Bearman  28:57

It's Troubles Behind by Chris Ballew.

Amanda Knox  29:00

Yeah, he's a dear friend of ours. He also happens to be the singer and songwriter of the Presidents of the United States of America. And also he's Casper Babypants, who, if you don't know, you're welcome. Because Casper Babypants is the only kids music that you can be capable to love listening to and not want to, like, kill yourself. He's so much fun and my daughter loves him and my husband has the biggest bro crush on him. And this song was one that really resonated with me.

Music  29:35

[Troubles Behind by Chris Ballew plays]

Amanda Knox  29:57

I love that song because it's like the words say one thing, but the tempo says another. I would say that it's more melancholy than my life is. But like, I think the thing that differentiates me from before this experience and me today is like, I'm still this, like, upbeat, optimistic, silly, adventurous person. I just have this deep abyss of despair that I have known that doesn't just go away. It's just always there under the surface. And so I think this song really taps into that feeling of we move on, but we carry all of us and all we have been through with us as we move on.

Sophie Bearman  30:42

Amanda, thank you so, so much for sharing your seven songs that was amazing. 

Amanda Knox  30:47

Thank you so much. What a great concept for a show. I love it.

Sophie Bearman  31:16

Life in Seven Songs is a production from The San Francisco Standard. If you want to hear from another guest who has overcome the odds and survived incarceration, check out our episode with Rahsaan 'New York' Thomas. And if you haven't already, please subscribe and like the show. It makes a big difference for us. Our senior producer is Jasmyn Morris. Our producers are Michelle Lanz -- who also mixes the show -- and Tessa Kramer. Our theme music is by Kate Davis and Zubin Hensler. Clark Miller created our show art. Our music consultant is Sarah Tembeckjian. Executive Producers are Griffin Gaffney, Jon Steinberg, and me. As always, you can find this guest's full playlist at sf.news/spotify. I am Sophie Bearman, thanks for listening and see you next week.