Amanda Knox On: Finding Meaning in Tragedy, Not Needing an Apology, and Refusing to Own What Other People Think

Dan Harris (0:04)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. If you're watching, you'll see that the backdrop is a little different today. I'm in what I'm semi-facetiously calling 10% Happier East, which is my wife's family's beach house in Montauk on the easternmost tip of Long Island. Anyway, let's get to the actual episode. I don't know about you, and I think this is just unavoidable. We all go through shit in our lives. And the question is, how are you going to deal with it? As my longtime friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, likes to say, don't waste your suffering.

But here's the thing, speaking personally, I often waste my suffering. I just kind of revert to rumination or regret or resignation.

So I'm really interested to talk to somebody who's had no small amount of involuntary suffering in her life, by which I mean suffering imposed on her. She is Amanda Knox. I'm sure many of you are familiar with her. I'll let her tell her story. But just in brief, she was accused of a murder she did not commit in a country in which she was not a citizen. And she has emerged with a number of deeply useful pieces of advice and nuggets of wisdom for living a better life, more resilient life. And she's got a new-ish book called FREE in which she lays a lot of this out. Amanda Knox, welcome to the show.

Amanda Knox (1:30)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Dan Harris (1:32)

In brief, for the, I imagine, very few people who are unfamiliar with your story, can you just kind of lay out the basics of it?

Amanda Knox (1:40)

Yeah, sure. And I don't blame anyone who isn't a true crime person. I certainly was not a true crime person until I became the center of a true crime scandal.

So back in 2007, I was a 20-year-old study abroad student in Perugia, Italy. I was living with three other young women, and one day a burglar broke into our home and raped and murdered one of my roommates. And very quickly, the detectives in the prosecution turned their attention on me. I was arrested within five days. They were pronouncing to the world, case closed. Here's this sex murder orgy that was orchestrated between two young women. And it really took over the public's imagination. It became international headlines, you know, within days. And it was a very prolonged trial. I was in prison for four years and on trial for eight years before I was definitively exonerated and cleared of everything. But it took over my life. And I went from being an anonymous, you know, young college student to the most vilified and hated woman on the planet there for a second.

I was, yeah, vilified and sexualized and all matter of insane narratives were put out there about me. And I had to grapple with having my not just my freedom stolen from me, but my very identity and my place in the world.

Dan Harris (3:14)

I'm sorry you went through that. It's just awful. And it's a little sort of trippy to be talking to you because I covered many of the beats of your story as a journalist. In fact, as I was watching, you've got a newish documentary up on Hulu. There's a little clip of me announcing one of the twists and turns in your story. It was kind of trippy. I didn't know that that was coming. Let's just kind of go through the story in a little bit more detail because in FREE, and in your work elsewhere, including on my friend Sam Harris' Waking Up app, where you have a resilience series, you kind of talk about what you learned along the way that you're still using in your life now as a mom and as an artist and a writer.

In prison, and as you mentioned, you spent many years there, I believe you got interested in Victor Frankl's work.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Amanda Knox (4:15)

Yeah, so prior to all of this happening to me, I didn't have a spiritual practice. I didn't have a meditation practice. And the only sort of advice or guidance that I had was actually from soccer. Like I played soccer as a kid, and so I knew what it meant to push through pain. So like I entered into this experience thinking, okay, this is really bad and really overwhelming, and I don't have control over of this. But there are adults who are going to figure it out, and I just have to hang in there, like that little kitten clinging to the branch, to like get to the end of whatever this is. It always felt like it was like a really bad dream that I was just trying to wake up from. And there was a complete shift that happened after the verdict. I was found guilty, I was sentenced to 26 years, which was longer than I'd been alive at that point. And very, very quickly, I had a full and utter existential crisis, where everything that I thought that I could count on and believe in was gone. I very quickly had this shift in thinking of, I'm not going to wait to get my life back. I have to say that it wasn't a glamorous shift, because the first part of that shift, realizing that all the adults in the room are just a bunch of kids who are also just trying to figure things out and don't have truth and justice, and all of that necessarily at the core of their ability to process things.