Sam Leith: It’s Amanda Knox’s right to tell her side of the story

By publishing her memoir, Knox is taking ownership of her story and is refusing to fit the roles that others impose on her
Amanda Knox
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30 April 2013
WEST END FINAL

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Is it seemly that Amanda Knox should make millions of dollars out of her memoir Waiting To Be Heard? Meredith Kercher lies dead. Is this not a cash-in; an insult to her memory? Well, she won’t be the first person to have made money out of Kercher’s death. A lot of lawyers have been compensated, a lot of newspapers sold, a lot of “friends” paid off and a lot of books have come out: such sober contributions to the historical record as Death in Perugia, The Fatal Gift of Beauty, Trial by Fury, Angel Face, Darkness Descending and The Monster of Perugia.

Reader, both you and I will have strong intuitions about the question of Knox’s innocence — as well as such important questions as whether she has kinda cold eyes, and whether she seems a bit slutty. Perhaps we even feel our instincts in the matter to be superior to any conclusions an Italian court of law might reach.

But here’s the deal. If — as the criminal process tells us — she is innocent, she is the victim of a very serious miscarriage of justice and a media monstering of appalling proportions. She’s spent four years in a foreign jail while the world has felt free to speculate on every aspect of her life and personality. If this had happened to you, might you not feel entitled to put your own side?

Might you not, too, think that if everyone else who makes money off the back of your predicament (most of whom spent four months in a cuttings library rather than four years in jail) does so with unblemished conscience, you could hold your head up while you bank the cheque?

Even with this grudgingly acknowledged, some of us will feel uneasy about the book. Why pander to the prurient by talking about sex and drugs, we’ll wonder: isn’t that tacky? At this point Miss Knox would be entitled to explode. A bit [expletive redacted] tacky? You eat up every topspun, intrusive, half-fabricated innuendo about my life. You feed an industry that made me into an object to be hated and perved over. And now you pass judgment on my bad taste? [Expletive redacted] you. It’s my turn.

To take ownership of her story is to refuse to fit the roles that others impose on her. Demanding she exchange one misogynistic paradigm (cold-hearted sex killer) for another (passive, noble wronged innocent) is to demand she serve our bullying, sentimental purposes. If she feeds the same beast that wronged her by publishing her book, that is no more than a recognition of reality. And it is her prerogative.

UKIP keeps its maverick side

Leaked emails from senior UKIP strategists suggest that leading the party is “like herding cats” and that establishing coherent policies is more or less impossible. “My experience thus far,” says MEP Godfrey Bloom, “is that as soon as more than two people get in a room, progress stops. Even where we have experts of our own, they disagree.”

Tee hee. This is, obviously, the occupational hazard of trying to put a political party together out of scrappy, indomitable mavericks who don’t have much truck with political correctness, say what they really think rather than what spin doctors tell them to say, and won’t toe some central office party line. It endears UKIP to me more than ever, as well as reassuring me that they will never, ever get elected. The gap in our politics left by the death of Screaming Lord Sutch is worthily filled.

Offshore, a murky world

An admirable investigation by the Sunday Times discovers that major charities are being used by offshore trusts to shelter millions of pounds from the tax authorities. By naming charities as beneficiaries of trusts in the Cook Islands and British Virgin Islands — even though the charities have no idea and never get any money — the real beneficiaries avoid scrutiny.

I am an innocent in matters of international financial law, so forgive me for this naive question: is it not fraud if you claim in written filings that the beneficiary of an offshore trust is, for example, the Red Cross while the real beneficiary is you?

If it is, the problem seems to solve itself: a number of people should go to jail, and a back-payment bonanza to deserving causes should be on the way. If lying in financial filings is not considered fraud in the British Virgin Islands, or is not prosecuted as such, why is our government recognising any financial set-up based there?

Such treats await us when we go to the Globe

To the Globe, to see Roger Allam’s Prospero in The Tempest. Good manners forbid my pre-empting the review the Standard will publish this week but I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say that I loved it and that Allam speaks the verse superbly. Two things struck me. One: with what application and with what success they mined this strange play for its humour. Two: that you only really notice if you’re sitting in the Globe Theatre for three hours quite how many helicopters overfly central London every day.

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