Excerpt from FREE by Amanda Knox
Claustrophobia
For as long as I can remember, I’ve disliked small, enclosed spaces. When playing hide-and-seek, I hid behind things rather than in them, or better yet, in places with a vantage point—high up in tree branches, on top of the swing set. I’ve never willingly crawled into a snug spot, especially if it offered only one way out. Ever since I lost consciousness under water when I was six, I’ve had a fear of drowning—of some hostile element closing in on me from all sides. Growing up, I lived in a small, one-story house. I shared a room with my sister, Deanna. But I didn’t spend all that much time inside. Mostly, I was out in our backyard or biking around the neighborhood. We lived close to a greenbelt, and every day Mom would take us and the dogs for walks into the patch of woods where Deanna and I would run and leap, sticks for swords, playing at being Xena the warrior princess.
I was an outdoor kid, rain or shine. I took to camping like I was born in the woods. I even did some pretty vigorous backpacking during middle school: a five-day trip out on the Olympic peninsula, packing everything in and everything out, hiking at least five miles a day and pitching my own tent. At twelve, I was helping to build trails in state parks. All that felt normal in the Pacific Northwest. I knew that my home was bigger than my backyard. It didn’t occur to me not to roam, to fully immerse myself in the most compelling natural resources we had—the mountains and the forests.
In high school, I was out on the soccer pitch every single day. I especially loved those early mornings, frost on the grass, sun cresting the horizon, the adults cold, bundled, and grumbling, drinking coffee in the stands while I stretched and sprinted around the big, open field wearing just shorts and a t- shirt. It was as invigorating as a Russian ice bath. That wide-open space was synonymous with movement for me.
In college, I got into rock climbing and went on weekend trips to go bouldering. My then- boyfriend, DJ, and I did a lot of camping, even in the middle of winter. There is something magical about how quiet the world gets when it’s blanketed in snow. Deep in the woods, I loved listening to the dripping of water, the rustling of small animals, the crunch of snow under my feet as we walked through dense forest to emerge onto a precipice with a view stretching to distant peaks. Camping was so essential to me that I couldn’t imagine going to Italy without bringing my camping gear. And it took up a lot of space! I had visions of camping on the banks of Lago Trasimeno, just outside of Perugia.
By the time I arrived in Italy, I knew all this about myself. Expansiveness was a deep part of me, and it informed every aspect of my personality. I choose to face the anxiety of the unknown over the despair of the known every time. I am not the kind of person who will stay in an unhappy relationship or an unsatisfying job because I’m afraid of change. I’ll chop off twenty inches of hair that took me three years to grow just to see what I look like with a pixie cut.
So you can imagine how I reacted to being trapped in a small concrete box for four years. Or, for that matter, for hours overnight in an interrogation room.
The thing is, I didn’t know it was an interrogation room. I didn’t know I was being interrogated. It wasn’t like what you see on TV: an empty room but for a table and two chairs, a one-sided mirror across the wall, a cop slamming down a folder full of crime scene photos, You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you . . . It was just a small, cramped office; there were two desks, file cabinets, framed certificates and photos on the walls. It was a room I, and Meredith’s other roommates and friends, had already spent countless hours in over the last few days, answering questions as collaborators with the investigation.
“The pubblico ministero is here to see you,” Officer Rita Ficarra said matter-of-factly, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I was curled up in the fetal position. My head was still ringing from the buzzing of my cell phone—my mom’s attempts to contact me that Ficarra did not allow me to respond to—and the feel of Ficarra’s hand slapping me as she shouted, “Remember! Remember!” The interrogation had gone on and on into the early hours of the morning, as a rotating cast of officers twice my age had badgered me with the same questions in a language I barely understood, refusing my answers again and again, until I started doubting my own sanity, and I began to believe them when they said that I was so traumatized by something I’d witnessed that I’d blacked it out. Threatened with thirty years in prison, I leapt out the only window they offered me, unsure how high up I was or where I might land. It didn’t feel like a choice. I had to escape that cage of circular questioning. I signed the statements they typed up implicating myself and others—my boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and my boss, Patrick Lumumba. “You need to talk to the pubblico ministero about what you remember,” Ficarra said.
“Pubblico ministero” . . . it was a deceptively easy term to translate—“public minister”— but what did that mean? I thought back to a call I’d received from a representative at the UW, my hometown university, a day or so after the news of Meredith’s murder broke. She’d expressed her condolences and said something about local government officials being there to assist me—with what, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps this was what she had meant. I guessed the pubblico ministero was someone like the mayor, come to my rescue. Would he let me out of this tiny room?
Ficarra started clearing her seat and desk. While she shuffled papers around, I tried again: “I’m really confused right now. I don’t feel like this is remembering . . .”
She didn’t even look up. “Pazienza. Your memories will come back.”
Then the pubblico ministero, my rescuer, appeared in the doorway. He struck me as an old-man version of my stepdad, on the heavier side, with a round face that sat like a scoop of ice cream on his suit collar. He had a brusque, businesslike demeanor; he didn’t so much greet me as acknowledge my presence as he sat down behind Ficarra’s desk. But he was calm, and after being screamed at all night, I actually felt hopeful that, together, we’d be able to straighten everything out.
His name, he reminded me, was Dr. Giuliano Mignini. Apparently, we had already met outside my house on one of the days previous. But I didn’t remember him, had no recollection of ever seeing his face, which only made me doubt myself further. He wanted to hear what I had to say, he said.
Relieved, I launched into desperate rambling. My mom was on her way to Perugia and trying to contact me. I was trying to help, really, but I was scared and confused after a nightmare of a night. He glanced at the statement I’d signed earlier. “You’re scared of this . . . Mr. Lumumba?”
“I don’t know? I’m just . . . scared . . . and confused.”
His brow furrowed, and he began walking me through the vague and confused scenario represented in the document and asked for further details. Every time I tried to explain that I didn’t know if those fuzzy and disconnected images were memories or things I’d imagined, he pushed back. “What do you mean you don’t know? You must have heard something. Why are you hitting your head? Why are you crying?” I could muster only meek, self- deprecating complaints about being hit and yelled at. I felt his impatience, his incredulity, and my heart sank. Even he, the mayor, or whoever he was, couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe me. Talking to him was like knocking on a stone wall, hoping it would open. Defeated, I gave up a second time. I agreed to his suggestions. I signed his paperwork. I would do what they said until I could see my mom again. It would only be a few hours until she arrived in Perugia. We would get a hotel room, and we would get some rest, and then she would help me straighten everything out.
I dissociated. It was like playing hide-and-seek with myself; I was safe drifting above and at a distance, merely observing as they took me into another room and told me to strip naked. A male doctor minutely examined my neck, my hands, my genitals and pointed out details for a photographer, reassuring me that they were only looking for signs of sexual violence. They snapped metal cuffs around my wrists, reassuring me that it was merely a formality, and ushered me down the stairs and out into the parking lot.
“Where are we going?” I asked finally.
“You are being taken to a holding place for your own protection,” a male police officer said. “It will only be for a few days.”
It was early morning in Casa Circondariale Capanne. I was escorted by a man and a woman wearing military uniforms. The man was like a half-melted candle; his back was hunched, the skin on his face drooped, and he flickered warm to cold, eager to indifferent. The woman reminded me of a vampire—pale, with perfectly styled hair dyed blood red. Downstairs, after my handcuffs had been removed, the man introduced himself as Vice Commandante Argirò, and as if to affirm his own importance, he insisted that I was to ask for the vice commandante, and only the vice commandante, should I need to talk. (“Vice Commandante”— Vice Commander— but what did that mean?) The woman simply introduced herself as Agente.
Our footsteps echoed over the cement floors of a long hallway lined on either side with doors unlike any I had ever seen: they were solid sheets of metal with no handles, just a hole where the handle should be, and a small viewing window closed with a shutter. It was quiet; I assumed that the rooms behind these doors were empty. When we reached the last door at the end of the hallway, Agente turned a large metal key in the lock, and used the key as a handle to open it, revealing another door, this one made of steel bars—again, no handle. Agente used the same key to open this door as well.
Inside, there was a steel bed frame painted pumpkin orange, a green foam mattress, and a coarse wool blanket. Vice Commandante Argirò led me inside and pointed to a boxy object mounted six feet up on the wall wrapped in a black garbage bag and duct tape. “Don’t touch!” he barked, “and don’t speak to anyone.” This last part confused me; there was no one else here. And it was like he was admonishing me, like he, too, was mad at me.
As I searched his and Agente’s faces for some indication of my status—was I a guest, under their protection, or a pest, under their boot?—Vice Commandante Argirò marched out of the room, and Agente closed and locked both doors behind them.
The quiet and the cold closed in on me. I thought about my mom, how she probably thought I was dead. I started to panic, hyperventilating. This was all a big mistake. This was all my fault. And what was this room? Why were there bars? But then I reminded myself what they had promised: They were keeping me here for my own protection. It would only be for a few days. I cried myself to sleep.
It was not “a few days.” It was 1,428 days, and if it were up to the police and prosecution, including one Dr. Giuliano Mignini, I never would have left.
The next morning, still cold, still numb, lying on my bunk, my gaze averted from the locked door, I heard knocking. It was soft but firm, unobtrusive and unmistakable, as if to say, “I’m here! I hope that’s all right . . .” From the very beginning he was different. He knocked.
I turned and rose from the bed obediently. The outer metal door opened on a man with a squarish, stubbly face, his brown eyes almost hidden behind self-transitioning rectangular glasses. He wore a fleece pullover with a zippered collar, a casual blazer, slacks, and sneakers. Compared to the crisp lines and perfectly plucked eyebrows of so many of the cops and prison officials, his relaxed style felt almost . . . Pacific Northwest.
Even so, I approached warily. I think he interpreted this as shyness, but I wasn’t shy, and I never have been. It wasn’t shyness that kept my head bowed and my body recoiled, that had me communicating in muted gestures and muttered words.
I realized who—or what—he was by the small silver cross pinned to the collar of his blazer.
“Hello,” he said, his voice like honey mixed with sand. “Do you understand Italian?”
I understood that sentence at least. I nodded.
“I’m Don Saulo,” he said. “I’m a priest. I’m here to help. Would you like to talk?”
I shook my head apologetically. “I’m not religious.”
This is what I’d told the nun who had come by earlier that morning in her starched gray habit. She’d told me that I was no better than an animal without God.
But the priest merely chuckled, which surprised me. “How about I ask the agente to bring you down to my office in a little bit? We can talk about whatever you want.”
I thought about the invitations to talk I’d been offered by the police, by the pubblico ministero, by Vice Commandante Argirò, and how none of them ever felt like a choice. “Okay,” I said.
He nodded goodbye and gently pushed the outer door partially closed, not to shut me in, but out of politeness.
A while later, Agente opened the barred door and gestured for me to step outside. She followed close behind as I walked down the deserted hallway, now bright from light streaming through the window at the far end. I could feel the eyes of invisible women peering out from their own partially closed doors.
Through a barred gate, down the stairs, through another barred gate, into another hallway. Don Saulo’s office was narrow, with a low couch on the left and a tall cabinet on the right. Past these, the old priest sat at his desk facing the door, the sunlight haloing him from the window at the far end of the room. He looked up as I entered, thanked Agente, who closed the door behind me, and gestured for me to sit in the chair across from him. I obeyed.
I don’t remember how he broke the ice. By asking me how I was doing? All I know is that I found myself gushing desperation. “There’s been a mistake. I didn’t do it. I shouldn’t be here. No one believes me. No one believes me!”
He reached across the table and patted my hand, saying something along the lines of “You’re here for a reason.” He meant it in the “God is looking out for you” kind of way, but I couldn’t help hearing it as “Well, you must have done something,” and I silently castigated myself for my stupidity.
I tried to explain: “I’m innocent, but they yelled at me, and I got confused. Now the police are mad at me. They won’t listen. They don’t believe me. . . . Do you believe me?” I was rambling, unraveling. It’s not that I needed him of all people to believe me; I just needed someone to believe me.
He covered my hand with his own, protectively, and chose his next words carefully. “I believe you are . . . sincere,” he said. Again, he meant to be kind. He didn’t know me, he didn’t know what happened; what else could he say? But still, I couldn’t help hearing it as “I believe you want to be innocent.” I was crushed. Slowly, dejectedly, I withdrew my hand and held it in my lap.
I had nothing to say; no—there was nothing I could say. His kindness rolled off me like rain off a stone statue in a deserted piazza.
It took me a while to realize that the room I was kept in was in fact a cell, my cell, that the outer metal door was called a “blindo,” and to learn that “Agente” meant “guard.” Eventually, I would come to consider the red-haired woman who locked me in that first night and all the other guards as one many-faced Agente. Even their interchangeability was a kind of box that no message or plea could penetrate. Even the priest was separated from me by the infinite distance of divinity. It seemed there was no one in this place I could reach. I was trapped not only by the walls of my cell and by the barrier of language, but by the indifference of those who kept me here.
Someone—the police? the warden?—ordered that I be kept in isolation for the duration of the investigation, so for my first eight months of prison I had no access to common areas. I was not, however, in solitary confinement. For the first several weeks, I shared a cell with one other woman. Scabs covered her body from her incessant and compulsive scratching. I don’t know how long she’d been locked up. When Agente moved me in with her, she reassured me that she was a veteran of sorts I could only imagine what traumas she’d endured. Whatever they were, they left her irritable and erratic. Navigating her mood swings meant staying small and quiet—yet another way I felt trapped.
In my life before prison, I’d had the invisible luxury of spending time in places that radiated freedom—the woods, the wide-open soccer pitch, the family trips each summer to Lake Roosevelt in Eastern Washington. I gravitated to those places. It didn’t feel like a choice. Now, walled off from that open world, freedom felt like an impossibility.
I took every chance I could to leave my cell, pacing circles in the small courtyard adjacent to the chapel reserved for me alone. I did jumping jacks, I jogged, I skipped. Even when it was pouring rain, I circled that courtyard like a dog at a fence line, feeling the blood pump through my body, calming me.
And I sang. I sang the Beatles, Dido, the Eagles. I sang Christmas songs, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I sang every song I knew by heart. It was enough to feel the vibrations in my body and to hear my voice echo down the hallways and out beyond the prison walls, a small sliver of me riding the wind.
As the days passed, I learned that how free I felt in any given moment was as much about my physical reality as my point of view—literally. If my view was the locked door, I started hyperventilating. If my view was the old stone tower on the hillside a few kilometers from the prison, or the tiny bunnies frolicking in the grass below, that changed everything. That choice was always available to me. And when I chose not to stare at the many things boxing me in, I became free to discover possibilities within that concrete box that I never could have anticipated. I began to sketch the contours of a small circumscribed life, a life I never would have chosen for myself, but a life worth living.
Excerpt from FREE by Amanda Knox. Available wherever books are sold.
Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit—and became a notorious tabloid story in the process. Though she was exonerated, it’s taken more than a decade for her to reclaim her identity and truly feel free.
Free recounts how Knox survived prison, the mistakes she made, the misadventures she had reintegrating into society, and culminates in the untold story of her return to Italy—and the extraordinary relationship she’s built with the man who sent her to prison. It is the gripping saga of what happens when you become the definition of notorious, but have quietly returned to the matters of a normal life—seeking a life partner, finding a job, or even just going out in public.
In harrowing (and sometimes hilarious) detail, Amanda tells the story of her personal growth and hard-fought wisdom, recasting her public reckoning as a private reflection on the search for meaning and purpose that will speak to everyone persevering through hardship.