‘It has been my fate to bear the infamy of Meredith Kercher’s tragic death, an infamy that belongs to her forgotten killer: Rudy Guede.’
These are the words Amanda Knox wrote this week after finding out that Guede – who has served 13 years of a 16-year sentence for the murder of Kercher – was to be let out of prison on work-release for the remainder of his sentence. He has since begun said work-release, freed from prison yesterday.
Now, Knox is asking him to ‘tell the truth’ and take full responsibility for Kercher’s murder in order to end the constant attachment her name has to a case she was proven to have no involvement in.
‘Guede holds a tremendous power to heal others harmed by his actions,’ Knox wrote on Twitter. ‘He has the power to tell the truth, to take responsibility, to stop blaming me for the rape and murder of Meredith Kercher, which a wealth of evidence shows he committed alone.
‘Were he to actually acknowledge his responsibility, it would bring closure to the Kercher family, it would end the murky speculation around this case, it would restore my wrongly damaged reputation, and that of Raffaele.’
It’s a reputation that continues to plague Knox, despite the Italian Supreme Court exonerating her and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito more than six years ago. And it’s one many of us are guilty of perpetuating. When you hear the name Meredith Kercher, how often do you think of Amanda Knox before Rudy Guede even enters your mind? How often do we discuss her death through the framework of Amanda’s trial, instead of focusing on what Rudy was convicted of?
Of course, it’s an exceptionally noteworthy case – few would be blamed for choosing to discuss the murder of a British student through the lens of Knox’s (slanderous) ‘sex-crazed’ reputation that was implied by certain media outlets at the time. A young woman’s vicious death orchestrated by her ‘sphinx’ American exchange student roommate and then-boyfriend? It’s a much more salacious story than the truth: that Kercher is one of many women who have lost their lives to the terrifying male violence that pervades society.
But the thing is, the more we associate Amanda Knox with Meredith Kercher’s murder – so closely aligned as their lives were – while barely mentioning the name or case of her actual proven killer, the longer we will allow Knox’s life to be devastated by this traumatising experience.
By making Kercher’s murder all about so-called Foxy Knoxy, we feed into the culture that allowed her to be unjustly convicted.
The memory of this case may never leave Knox’s mind, but the world can certainly allow her to curate a fulfilling life outside of it if we actually chose to focus on Rudy Guede instead. Because actually, by continuing to align Knox with Kercher’s death over Guede, we perpetuate the tabloid frenzy that contributed to Knox’s false imprisonment in the first place.
We encourage this culture - the same one that fantasises over female killers and jealous best friends led to murder – that actually has real-world implications on the way women are falsely implicated or tied to certain types of crimes. Knox’s trial is one of the most infamous cases of trial by media – and subsequent tainting of a jury and prejudicing fair court proceedings – there has ever been, and yet we feed into the culture that allows such injustice to continue by making Kercher’s murder all about the infamous ‘Foxy Knoxy’.
So while we might not want to say Rudy Guede’s name alongside Meredith Kerchers, while we might prefer to acknowledge this tragic loss of life through other means, we mustn’t fall into the trap of only saying Amanda Knox when we think of her. Let’s not let two women’s lives be devastated by the actions of one man’s violence.
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