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Joe Rogan Experience #1709 - Amanda Knox

Amanda Knox spent four years in an Italian prison following a wrongful conviction for the murder of her roommate: a sentence that was ultimately overturned by the Italian Supreme Court. She is now an author, journalist, and podcaster. Knox, along with her husband Christopher Robinson, hosts the podcast "Labyrinths."

Joe RoganhostAmanda Knoxguest
Jun 27, 20243h 11mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:0015:00

    (drumming) Joe Rogan podcast,…

    1. NA

      (drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Yeah, so we started off this conversation talking about aliens, because it's, uh-

    4. AK

      Because they're everywhere.

    5. JR

      They're everywhere. This is Travis Walton. This is the guy who's got one of the more interesting cases. He, uh, was abducted, allegedly, in Arizona when he was working as a logger.

    6. AK

      Okay.

    7. JR

      And there's a bunch of witnesses that saw the craft, and he disappeared for several days and then came back and has this crazy story.

    8. AK

      Okay. Any anal probing?

    9. JR

      I don't think he had any anal probing. They, they supposedly, um, worked on him because he, he tried to approach the craft, allegedly, in his story.

    10. AK

      Okay, so this is like an E.T. scenario-

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. AK

      ... the craft is on the ground.

    13. JR

      The craft was either on the ground or hovering above the ground, I forget which, and he, he and these other loggers saw it, and he decided to run towards it. And he ran towards it and got hit with some kind of energy. The guys freaked out, the guys that he had been with freaked out and took off, drove away, and as they were driving away, they drove, like, I forget how far, and then they're like, "Fuck, we gotta go back. We gotta go... But this is crazy, what happened?" They go back and he's gone and they can't find him.

    14. AK

      Hmm.

    15. JR

      There's some evidence that the ship was there, that there was some sort of a disturbance on the ground, but Travis is gone. He disappeared for a few days and then came back and with this fantastic story.

    16. AK

      And define worked on him.

    17. JR

      Yeah, exactly.

    18. AK

      (laughs)

    19. JR

      I don't know, you know, like maybe, I guess, whatever energy was coming off the craft damaged him physically, so they did some sort of biological-

    20. AK

      Like radiation?

    21. JR

      ... repair on him, whatever it was, whether it's radiation or some sort of propulsion system that they had that had some sort of energy that comes off of it, electricity, magnetics, whatever. I don't know what it was.

    22. AK

      Hmm.

    23. JR

      I don't know if it's real. You know, it's hard, it's hard when people just tell you stories.

    24. AK

      Yeah.

    25. JR

      He didn't seem like a liar. He seemed like a very credible man that had an extraordinary experience many decades ago, but maybe he's full of shit. You know, there, therein lies the Amanda Knox case.

    26. AK

      (laughs)

    27. JR

      (laughs) Right?

    28. AK

      (laughs)

    29. JR

      Like, no one knows the truth. When you're dealing with, uh, any story where people are trying to piece together a story, it's, it's very complex, and people like to pretend that they can read people.

    30. AK

      Yes. (clears throat)

  2. 15:0030:00

    Right. Right. …

    1. AK

      have been involved." Well, she was also sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. That's usually something that men do when they're... Like, if we're talking about what women do when they're committing murder, the vast majority of the time, it's gonna be something like hitting someone with a car or poisoning. Like, if we're gonna talk about, like, base rate reality, like, what do women do when they're committing murder? The, the telltale signs are not do they cover a body with a blanket.

    2. JR

      Right. Right.

    3. AK

      It's, you know, it's usually the kind, the types of crime, like the type of methodology.

    4. JR

      But, and even then-

    5. AK

      But even then-

    6. JR

      ... in a fit of rage, a woman is capable of stabbing someone to death.

    7. AK

      Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, but the fact that, like, we're looking at it, like, if we're genuinely looking at a crime scene where there's a body, young woman, sexually assaulted, stabbed to death, tons of DNA of one dude-

    8. JR

      All over the house.

    9. AK

      All over her body, all over, like, in her bl- his fingerprints in her blood, his footprints in her blood, like, his DNA everywhere. What is the likelihood that three people were involved in that scenario, and that only his DNA was left behind? Like, that's the thing that, like, really bothers me, is my prosecutor having motivated reasoning to not, like, having this bias to not change his perspective about how there were multiple people I had to be involved. He said, "Well, Amanda must have cleaned up her DNA and left Rudi Ghez behind so she could frame him."

    10. JR

      Hilarious. Imagine you would be that good.

    11. AK

      It's impossible. Like, I-

    12. JR

      Yeah.

    13. AK

      ... I remember th- um, s- a, a detective friend of mine was like, "You would have to... You should get the Nobel Prize in, like, chemistry if you were capable of doing that," because there's no way. You, you wouldn't, you can't tell where your DNA is. Like, wha- how do you h- yeah.

    14. JR

      We talked about the Italian legal system on the podcast recently.

    15. AK

      You did.

    16. JR

      Because, yes, uh, an unrelated incident, they, um, convicted geologists for manslaughter-

    17. AK

      Oh. For the earthquake.

    18. JR

      ... because they hadn't predicted an earthquake.

    19. AK

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      It's one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard in my life.

    21. AK

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      These poor people had to literally go to court and spend an enormous portion of their life defending themselves, lost, and then had to win on appeal.

    23. AK

      Yeah.

    24. JR

      Which is-

    25. AK

      Scapegoating.

    26. JR

      ... fucking terrifying, because there's no science whatsoever that anyone can predict accurately earthqu- especially not the magnitude of the earthquake.

    27. AK

      Absolutely. Yeah, no, it's obscene, um, on multiple levels because what you're looking at is someone who's saying, "Okay, a lot of people died. This horrible tragedy happened." And usually when it's a natural disaster, we all agree that, like, sometimes fate fucking sucks. And, like, it's horrible and people die, and yeah, there were probably things that we could have done to prevent that, like having better, like, building structures that would-

    28. JR

      Right.

    29. AK

      ... would, you know, resist earthquakes better, but instead of, like, pointing the finger at l- you know, d- could we better protect ourselves from this kind of natural disaster, we're just going to point at the scientists who are supposed to know when earthquakes are gonna happen and how bad they're going to be. Like, of course not. But there is that impulse to v- to-... especially by authority, to point the finger at someone who has fewer resources and power to defend themselves and say, "I'm just gonna put this on you. You're gonna be the face."

    30. JR

      The problem is it's so dumb and so arrogant, and the idea that they did not consult with scientists to try to understand how this equipment works, try to understand like what-what's the current state of the understanding of this-the science. Like what, uh, w-what do they do to predict earthquakes? And then they charge these guys with manslaughter, which is astoundingly stupid.

  3. 30:0045:00

    It's hard for me…

    1. AK

      in there, and someone told me that there was all this blood. Um, I remember not actually knowing, like, how she had died until I went to the police office and I asked. I was, like, being questioned and one of the police officers was like... (making a choking sound) And so, like, I sort of learned over the course of that day these, the, the details of it, but I didn't fully understand, like, what had really happened. Like, as far as I knew, you know, she, she... Some-I mean, it was clear that there was a break-in. Like, the window had been broken into, one of, uh, it was Filomena's room. All of her stuff was all over the place. It wasn't clear to me what had happened though, and it wasn't on- until over the course of that whole day and piecing together what I was hearing that I understood the gravity of the situation, that she had been sexually assaulted, that she had been stabbed to death, that it was a struggle. Um, it was all, it was all like... I remember the first thought, and it's a guilty thought that I had, um, I remember thinking, "Thank God I wasn't home." Um, because that could have been me. And a part of me, like over time, felt really guilty about that thought because I thought, maybe if I was home and there had been two of us, maybe the outcome would have been different. Maybe we would have been able to fend him off together. But here's, you know, an athletic guy wielding a knife, I'm not sure that we would have. And maybe I would have been dead too. So it's kind of a thought that comes back to mind a lot when I think about this, um, and how fortuitous it was, um, that I just happened to be in this, like, brand new romance and hanging out with my new boyfriend all the time, every waking moment that I could. And that's what happened.

    2. JR

      It's hard for me to imagine the jolt of a 20-year-old life where you are overseas, going to school, involved in this new romantic relationship, and then out of nowhere-

    3. AK

      Mm-hmm.

    4. JR

      ... boom, you're a suspect in a murder.

    5. AK

      Yeah. Well, and what's interesting is I didn't know, like I didn't know that I was a suspect. It's like the boom for me was someone close to me just died, and that could have been me. And now what?

    6. JR

      And then it was all those things that piled on, they get piling on.

    7. AK

      Yeah. And then, you know, I'm in jail. I'm thinking "Oh my God, this is all just a horrible misunderstanding." Like, the, uh, I'm sure they're going to figure it out sometime (laughs) . Um, I remember, like, the first two years of my imprisonment, I was convinced that, like, it was all just a big misunderstanding and somebody would figure it out. And I was convinced, I was, I was convinced that there was no possible way that people could actually believe that I was involved. Like, the, even just, not because, uh, it's me, but because there wasn't any evidence there. Like, it was so patently obvious to me that, like, this, this idea of me, this Foxy Knoxy character that was being constructed in the courtroom, this Luciferina, like this idea of a person was obviously made up. It was so obvious to me. And yet... and, and yet.

    8. JR

      And it seemed like the Italian media just ran with it though.

    9. AK

      Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that was one of the, the big sort of regrets that my, especially my family had, was at the very beginning, um, they were advised to not speak to the media at all, because they were just going to make a field day of it. There was... you know, in the same way that there was never going to... once I was accused, there was never gonna be anything that I could do to prove my innocence (laughs) in the eyes of people. Um, my lawyers were also worried that there was nothing my family could say but that would not be twisted and, and turned into something that would just fuel, further fuel the scandal mongering. And what that meant was there was a void. There was a void in which who I was, my very identity, could be reconstruct or constructed out of total fantasy that was the only thing that was, that... the only reason why it was being constructed was to further this scandal and to sell more papers.

    10. JR

      Mm.

    11. AK

      Like, that, that was the reason why the... it wasn't the public interest of the story that kept The Sun, in, in Britain, reporting on this case. Like, they were, they were reporting, like, reporting on whether or not I ate pizza, like (laughs) the days leading up to my arrest. Like that-

    12. JR

      It's just selling papers.

    13. AK

      It's just selling papers.

    14. JR

      Is, uh, do they have... I'm not that familiar with the Italian news media, but do they have, like, sort of a tabloid nature to the way they do the news?

    15. AK

      Well, paparazzo is an Italian word.

    16. JR

      Those motherfuckers.

    17. AK

      (laughs)

    18. JR

      (laughs)

    19. AK

      And yeah, I mean, the same way that Great Britain ha- also has a really sketchy tabloid culture. There is a, um, sensationalist bent to it that's very much a result of, like, the Berlusconi era of, um, of news. So I don't know if you're very familiar with Berlusconi and how his, like, legacy shaped the way media-

    20. JR

      No, I'm not.

    21. AK

      ... works. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's, um, he's kind of like the Donald Trump of Italy, where he starts out as this m- media personality who is really, really known for just, um, like having that sort of reality show, uh, strippers in every show kind of, um, vibe, where he's just giving the people what they want and, um, you know, outrage culture. And then he turned that into a political career and then ran the country for a ridiculous... How long? Do you... (laughs) like some ridiculously long time.

    22. JR

      Like 10 years, more?

    23. AK

      More. (laughs)

    24. JR

      Really? (laughs)

    25. AK

      Yeah. (laughs)

    26. JR

      Well, that's probably what Trump wanted too, I think.

    27. AK

      Is he trying again? Do you think?

    28. JR

      Oh, yeah.

    29. AK

      Yeah?

    30. JR

      Oh, he's gonna, 100% trying.

  4. 45:001:00:00

    Mm-hmm. …

    1. JR

      needs would be met.

    2. AK

      Mm-hmm.

    3. JR

      You would have food. You would have a place to live. That's kinda it. I mean, if you're getting whatever Andrew Yang was proposing, I think it was very low. It was, like, $1,200 a month or something like that.

    4. AK

      Exactly.

    5. JR

      That's all you get. I mean, you get, like, food.

    6. AK

      Well, and that's what I was... that's what I was gonna propose is, like, I, I do agree that, like, there is absolutely genuine value in hard work. Um, what is... the other aspect of that is dignity though.

    7. JR

      Yes.

    8. AK

      Right? Like, you can work really hard and feel like a slave.

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. AK

      Like, and be, like, de- demeaned and, and feel like all of the work that you're doing and all the time and all the sacrifices you make, e- even just in terms of time... Like, I have so much respect and I understand the value of time. Like, I understand that and (laughs) -

    11. JR

      I imagine you more than many.

    12. AK

      ... and, and so, like, for someone to be told my time is worth $7, my time that I could be spending with my kids is worth $7, and I have to sacrifice time with my kids, which is priceless, so that I can get $7 so I can feed them is the most undignified shit that I... Like, it's so... like in, in a r- rich society like ours, I feel like that's kind of unacceptable. Like, we can do better than that.

    13. JR

      I agree with you. The idea though, if I was gonna play devil's advocate, I think... yeah, let me just say this right away. I think that the basic wage, the minimum wage should be much higher than $7. Um, e- e- I w- I had agreed... I agreed with the $15 minimum wage. I think it probably should be, like, 20. I mean, if you work all day you should have enough money for food.

    14. AK

      I only feel okay giving someone $20 an hour at least. (laughs)

    15. JR

      Well, it sounds like a... it sounds like a, a small amount.

    16. AK

      It is, ultimately.

    17. JR

      You work all fuckin' hour for e- and you get $20. I mean, in this day and age with the prices that things are, the cost of living, it's not a lot of money. The idea is that you're supposed to be fresh outta high school and these are the jobs you get and this is why you get, uh, you know, $13 an hour, whatever it is.

    18. AK

      Right, 'cause also, let's be real, teenagers are not the best workers.

    19. JR

      Well, also you're getting job experience and life experience, and that's the idea behind it. It's a weird idea though because (sighs) would it be better if things cost a little bit more and you paid people a little bit better? I mean, how much would a burger have to cost if you wanna pay everybody who works there 20 bucks an hour? I don't-

    20. AK

      That'd be a good question.

    21. JR

      It's-

    22. AK

      I don't actually know.

    23. JR

      Right. That was my question and s- my... the question that I, I deal with the hardest isn't even our wages, it's when I buy a phone. H- w- how much slave labor is involved in my phone?

    24. AK

      Yeah. That's real.

    25. JR

      Like, when you take it all the way down to the people that are mining the minerals that are used to make the batteries, like, it gets dark.

    26. AK

      Yeah.

    27. JR

      It gets real, real evil.

    28. AK

      Mm-hmm.

    29. JR

      You're, you're literally dealing with child-

    30. AK

      Almost like... (laughs) yeah.

  5. 1:00:001:15:00

    Yeah. It's felt like…

    1. JR

      February of 2020. Yeah.

    2. AK

      Yeah. It's felt like it's been forever already. (laughs)

    3. JR

      Yeah. I'm, I'm wrong because the whole, the Wuhan thing was September of 2019. Uh, so February of 2020, I think, is when he got it. So he got it before we even locked down, somewhere around then. Um, and he got really fucking sick.

    4. AK

      Mm-hmm.

    5. JR

      Um, I don't know where he stands in terms of, like, his, uh, antibodies, but that would be interesting to check.

    6. AK

      Yeah. I would see if he can go get tested.

    7. JR

      Jamie got sick in October of 2020 and Jamie's got mad antibodies.

    8. NA

      Oh yeah, they're very angry.

    9. AK

      (laughs)

    10. JR

      They're mad.

    11. NA

      They're very mad.

    12. JR

      He's got thick lines.

    13. AK

      How do you know? (laughs)

    14. JR

      Well, we test him all the time.

    15. NA

      We are tested every day.

    16. AK

      Okay. And it's like nothing.

    17. JR

      We test everybody. We test everybody every day.

    18. AK

      Right.

    19. JR

      Every day here, we get tested.

    20. AK

      Awesome.

    21. JR

      And Jamie gets the fucking ... He gets the gold crown.

    22. NA

      Yeah. Hey, lucky me.

    23. JR

      He's the king of antibodies. (laughs) But it's, we think that he was encounter- that he encountered, uh, the Delta variant somewhere along the line, because it seems like his antibodies got even thicker... How many months ago? About a month ago? Two months ago?

    24. AK

      Uh, what is it? September?

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. AK

      So, yeah, July.

    27. JR

      So you've been-

    28. AK

      Middle of July.

    29. JR

      ... you get tested for antibodies, what do you say? Like every three months? Two months?

    30. AK

      Uh, less than that. I mean, f- more frequent than that, yeah.

  6. 1:15:001:21:19

    It was the salacious…

    1. AK

      sort of convicted before us separately and then everything was about me and how jealous I was of Meredith and how dirty I was and how much of a slut I was and how like... and how that conflict, that girl on girl conflict was fatal and it was all bogus, it was all imagined, and yet that, that was the, that was the thing that really resonated with people. It wasn't the like incontrovertible as... Evidence in the history of this guy, like no one cared. No one cared about him.

    2. JR

      It was the salacious Satan worshiping slut aspect of it, the, the sacrificing the girl and murdering her and doing it with the two guys you're in an orgy with, like all that is like so sensational. They get caught up in that narrative and once that seed got planted-

    3. AK

      Mm-hmm.

    4. JR

      ...there's no stopping the beanstalk.

    5. AK

      No, especially when it comes at the cost of a lot of professional reputations.

    6. JR

      Right. Fuck.

    7. AK

      Yeah, like I, I, I didn't... (laughs) There was no way that I... Looking back, I wish I had known so many of the things that I know now, even just about how human beings work. Like I was 20 years old and I didn't like... I just trusted people. I had lived a pretty like sheltered life. I did not grow up in circumstances that were challenging. I grew up in middle class, like I could trust anybody. Nothing bad had ever happened to me and so it never occurred to me that like people could have really, really bad motives even when they think they're doing the right thing. Like that's the thing that really gets me when I was like sitting in my cell thinking like, "Why? Why is this happening to me?" It never occurred to me that like it's just evil people. It occurred to me that they thought I was evil and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise.

    8. JR

      (Exhales) There's a moment in the documentary where that investigator says, "If they're innocent, I hope they can forget."

    9. AK

      Yeah. Nota- notably he didn't say forgive. (laughs)

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. AK

      Um-

    12. JR

      Yeah.

    13. AK

      Yeah.

    14. JR

      Well, no. Well then he said, "If they're guilty," then, you know, he... In Italian-

    15. AK

      Divine justice blah, blah, blah.

    16. JR

      Yeah.

    17. AK

      Yeah.

    18. JR

      "You're gonna go to hell."

    19. AK

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      And they show the surface of the fucking church and...

    21. AK

      Mm-hmm.

    22. JR

      It's... But that, that is a very telling moment, that motherfucker knew you were innocent.

    23. AK

      Yeah. And I have-

    24. JR

      He knew it.

    25. AK

      I have some interesting thoughts about that, um, because for a long... For a while I tried to reach out to him, like I genuinely was like... After, after everything was over, um, after the Netflix documentary came out, um, I had this... I kept wondering about my prosecutor. I kept wondering like, "What is up with this guy? Why me? Why me?" Like for him, why me? 'Cause ultimately it really came down to him. There were a lot of people involved but like he was the one running the show. "Why me? What is up with him?" And the Netflix document- documentary definitely gave me some insight, like I remember the filmmakers showing me that exact clip and being like, "What do you think?" And I thought, "Here's a guy who really thinks he was doing the right thing, who really th- who I think at least in part, because of that, was motivated with genuine, like genuine good motivations." I think he had also bad motivations. He had every incentive to not admit fault because that says something bad about him, but I also thought that he had good motivations, that he was empathizing with Meredith's family and as a father of four daughters, he was like deeply, deeply empathizing with the experience of losing a daughter. He didn't empathize with having a daughter accused of a horrible crime but I think he had sort of written me off as a bad girl and (sighs) I, I wanted to talk to him about it because it felt like... It seemed like if he had ever actually gotten to know me, he would know that that wasn't me.... like, that whatever vision of me that he had in his mind, that wasn't me, and he never really got to know me. Like, we had only ever really encountered each other in the interrogation room and in the courtroom where he was actively trying to destroy my life.

    26. JR

      Did he interrogate you?

    27. AK

      He came in at the very end, uh, for like ... I remember, like ... I remember, I thought he was there to save me, um, actually, because the detectives told me that the Pubblico Ministero was coming and I didn't know what Pubblico Ministero meant. Um, it means prosecutor but what it sounds like it means is public minister. I thought maybe he was like the mayor, and I thought the mayor was coming in to save me, and that was not... He was just coming in to sign my arrest, uh, warrant, like, the arrest warrant to take me to prison. Um, so I reached out to him and at first, he refused to even, like, look at a message from me, 'cause he was like, "It's unprofessional. I can't do that." But then I went back to Italy. Um, I don't know if you knew that. I did go back to Italy, um, and I spoke about Trial By Media, in particular, to an Italian audience and I talked about him and how I thought that it wasn't satisfying to just portray him as a comic book villain in this story, that didn't actually answer to me why this horrible injustice had happened and I needed to see his humanity and understand his humanity in order to really understand why this had happened to me. And it was after that, that he finally answered my letter. Um, and I can't say what he said to me because I promised to keep that between us, um, but what I can say is that that sentiment that you're pointing to, um, him saying, "If they are innocent, I hope they can forget," is a sentiment that I have felt from him m- in more explicit terms, um, in our exchanges. Um, I guess that's all I can say about that. (laughs)

Episode duration: 3:11:56

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