I have no patience for bad-thing-happened-to-attractive-girl stories. They generally involve girls who disappeared without a trace, or were murdered in grotesque ways, and the media coverage in the U.S. is invariably (1) salacious, (2) outraged, and (3) prolonged beyond what any dispassionate observer would deem suitable to the importance of the story. Call me callous if you will, but tell me, honestly, what makes the death of one girl you didn't know, thousands of miles from your home, matter to you or to your family, friends or neighbors? Why should you care more for this girl than for, say, the teenaged boy who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting several blocks away?
The interest in bad-thing-happened-to-attractive-girl stories is prurient: let's not pretend otherwise.
The name "Amanda Knox" drifted into my consciousness a few times in the last couple of years, but with all the other things I've wanted to read, and without reading anything about Knox, I made a snap judgment to place her name into the bad-thing-happened-to-attractive-girl category and banished her from further consideration. It wasn't until LongReads pointed me at a Rolling Stone piece on her trial that I learned why she had been in the news in the first place.
The Rolling Stone article portrays the Italian justice system in pretty unflattering terms, and Italians in general even less positively. They come off as delusional (the police and prosecutor) and lazy (virtually no one is interested in what we consider the fundamental right to a speedy trial if it interferes with holidays). The citizens of the community in which the crime and trial occurred believe the ludicrous confession Knox was coerced into signing. It all reads like a bad movie, except that apparently, it isn't.
[UPDATE: Some have a serious beef with Rich's article: see my followup post.]
Nathaniel Rich's article is absolutely riddled with factual errors. You can read about them at the True Justice For Meredith Kercher website:
ReplyDeletehttp://truejustice.org/ee/index.php
Rich's story did strike me as over the top, but being the first (and still only) account of the matter I read, I wasn't inclined to criticize it. Too bad for me.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, this gets back to why I don't pay attention to this kind of story. Like most crimes, it's next to impossible to get at the truth via the media -- and again, it doesn't matter what I think when the case happened thousands of miles away and involves people I don't know who don't know me.