In the aftermath of the repeat first-grade convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for Meredith Kercher’s murder, Americans might consider cultural aspects that have tainted this case from its sorry, manipulated and blunder-ridden beginnings. Here is a cultural perspective, from the vantage point of a decades-long relationship with Italy and Italians, and living there with and among Italians of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds.
When the murder of Meredith Kercher occurred I was appalled by the salacious, irresponsible media coverage and the incompetent progression of the investigation. Inefficiency, bureaucratic chaos and professional lethargy are rife in many sectors of Italian society. Italians even have a word for a characteristic of their culture that they don’t deny – casino, pronounced “cazeeno”. Casino means a mess, an alarming and even laughable hodge-podge, an embarrassment, a functional failure……
Self-serving agendas reportedly frequently lead investigations among US police departments and prosecution teams, and this is no less the case in Italy. But other concerns particular to the Italian mind-set intensify those tendencies there, so that it is certainly feasible that Knox, having stuck around after the murder to “help” the investigation – instead of getting out of Dodge like most of Kercher’s other non-Italian friends – was exploited as an easy target. Being Meredith’s house-mate she was an obvious first suspect, and by making herself accessible in the murder’s aftermath she set herself up to fall foul culturally and linguistically of a system already riddled with sloppiness and corruption. Knox’s description of how the police brow-beat her psychologically, lied to her and manipulated what she said is plausible, and reflects some of the worst aspects of Italian culture.
Italian police are nonchalantly corrupt and abusive. Setting people up appears to be a casual sport. The police can legally stop you when you are driving and check you out with no “just cause”. They stand by the side of the road and wave people down at random. These routine checks are an accepted part of life. But the boring job of flagging down people on the off chance of catching the odd drunk, drug peddler, fugitive or illegal immigrant tempts officers into trying to spice things up. A favourite ploy is to stop someone for ostensibly using their cell phone while driving. Authority-fearing Italians are intimidated by such an accusation because it is a bluff that can pay off – chances are, someone really was just on their phone even if the officer didn’t see them, perhaps even legally pulled over in a lay-by just before exiting. If someone receives a call and takes advantage of the frequency of lay-bys on Italian highways just before the exit an officer can easily manipulate the time of a citation by a few minutes to make it seem as if the phone chat just occurred in their sight. A little persuasive remuneration can change a police officer’s mind about pursuing a citation from which one has little to defend oneself.
The amount of brazen corruption in Italy at the most innocuous and daily level is quite astounding. It is impossible to hire any professional, even primary care family doctors, without being asked unashamedly if you would like to make it fiscally more worth your while, so they can work in nero – under the table. It is common to find that a professional you trusted turned things to their advantage – to your gross disadvantage, and by the time you find out, they have covered their tracks so that you have nothing to go on except the pit in your stomach.
Don’t bother asking by-standing Italians to verify your claims. They shout and insult a lot in personal confrontations, but when you ask them to put themselves on the line and expose themselves as whistle-blowers, risking hostility from elements in their community, suddenly lips are sealed. Italians trust no-one, and with good reason. Conscience is very deep when it concerns the welfare of one’s mother and children, but how one’s unscrupulous acts negatively affect anyone else is of no concern. Individualism and insularity are even stronger in Italy than they are in the US. You look after your own – the rest are irrelevant. Ask any native Italian and they will agree. The Italian way is to mouth off in the piazza and in the dentist’s waiting room about personal collisions with injustice, but to keep mum anywhere where it would actually make waves or where one’s involvement would interfere with daily routines.
Paramount is maintaining la bella figura, respectable and face-saving appearances, and enhancing importance and status with florid terms and verbosity. Characteristic of Italian documents and public statements is pompous verbal diarrhea and sycophantic referencing. Anyone with an undergraduate degree can call themselves dottore ordotoressa and these self-references and addresses are trotted out regularly in order to impress, simper respect or suggest intellectual prowess. It can take some time before visitors are relieved of the impression that so many people in Italy have Ph.Ds.
In any unpleasantness one must save face, shove one’s grubby mitts discretely into one’s pockets and avoid getting one’s hands muckier with other people’s business. Frauds and injustices go unchallenged because Italians don’t want anything to prevent their getting home in time for cena (dinner), or that identifies them as trouble-makers. You can be punched in the face and flung down by a deranged drunk in a bus full of evening commuters in a hurry to get home for that sacred aforementioned meal, and no-one, and I mean no-one will lift a finger to help you up, challenge the attacker or ask the bus driver to stop so police can be called. Italy is rampant with sociopathic, sleazy exploitation and indifference. Think Silvio Berlusconi. He is not an anomaly.
Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor bestowed the honour of “solving” the Meredith Kercher case probably saw Knox as a chance to establish una bella figura, helped by purple-prosed morbid media that make HLN and Nancy Grace look like amateurs. Don’t forget that Mignini was stained by decades of shambles around il Mostro di Firenze, the “Monster of Florence” who killed couples in Tuscany from the late 60’s to the mid 80’s. As a result of the wild machinations of Signor Mignini and his obsessive bloodlust several people were dubiously indicted and convicted of these crimes, but grave doubt and ridicule later thrown on their convictions. One cannot overstate the extent to which the desire to present una bella figura permeates Italian society, from showing up smiling at church on Sunday with your husband and kids even though you know full well he is screwing your hairdresser, to manufacturing a convenient high-profile resolution of a crime, to distract from your past debacles…… Oh yes, quite likely.
And how marketable that a pretty girl should put herself right in the way of the freight train. Even more so than in the US, Italians are concerned with looks. Advertising and television shows are still populated with “sexy” girls behaving alluringly in a way that would cause outrage and screams of offensive representation in Northern Europe or the US. Portraying women as sex objects to sell merchandise or ratings does not arouse significant debate or raise many eye-brows. Otherwise intelligent Italian women will watch such garbage and not be perturbed. Amanda Knox’s looks, the lurid and convoluted theory about a sexually debauched escapade gone wrong – these were perfect fodder for a nation always hungry for a platform on which to yell substitute go-nowhere grievances, a nation acculturated to reducing women to erotic currency, and they served as an excellent vehicle through which a prosecutor with a tarnished reputation might regain some much-needed kudos.
Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks is a traditional Italian way of seeing if your antipasto is cooked.
Knox’s being American was not insignificant. In northern Italy, from where much of Italy’s international reputation for gastronomy, fashion and wine is derived, there is a pervasive disdain and suspicion about ideas brought in by stranieri, foreigners. A sense of superiority applies to everything from food, clothing and personal hygiene to religious beliefs, family and societal values. Superficially, Italians give lip service to being fascinated by foreign culture, particularly American. Privately they are often looking at outsiders with a puzzo sotto il naso – a bad smell under the nose. Amanda Knox was ripe fruit for being the source of a veritable stench from which the Italian public could recoil in hypocritical horror – so much more palatable to revile a foreigner’s evil visage than to turn the mirror to one’s own festering pustules. Rudy Guede, the Ivory Coast national to whom all the viable evidence pointed, could have been enough, but the added twist of a photogenic American supposedly motivated by a crazed and perverted desire for group sex was irresistible. Sollecito was an unfortunate but dispensable native casualty in the mix, and no doubt many Italians concluded that he had been led astray by Amanda’s disgusting foreign habits.
The suspicion of foreigners tendency was rampant in the decades of speculation around the Mostro di Firenze, Mignini’s notoriously failed case. It was a well-known, publicly disseminated and accepted presumption that the murderer who committed horrifying mutilations of the couples he/she murdered was probably of Anglo-Saxon origin. He/She was compared to Jack the Ripper. This didn’t stop Mignini indicting an unconvincing string of miserable Italian men in a show of paltry success. Given that most of these convictions were subsequently overturned and Mignini’s face slathered with rather too much slithery albumen, is it a stretch to conclude that perhaps Knox represented for him that elusive “Anglo-Saxon” butcher that he couldn’t pin down on that other case, and that had therefore been the bane of his career?? What beautiful and timely compensation, with a tasty savour of revenge to complete the cooked up dish……
When Meredith Kercher was murdered, Amanda Knox had been in Italy for about six weeks. Her knowledge of Italian was minimal. Even a native Italian would have been psychologically stressed into saying, being interpreted as saying and signing all sorts of things they didn’t mean under the kind of long interrogation and threatening treatment she alleges occurred. There are many ways that attempting to translate directly from English to Italian, as Knox with her crude knowledge of Italian at that time did, can lead to saying something very different from what is intended. Accusers protest that there was an interpreter, but Anna Donnino was not an official interpreter. She was a police officer who happened to speak some English but, apart from the obvious conflict of interests, she was probably unfamiliar with the misleading nuances across the two languages. Italians are among the worst English speakers in Europe, and even those teaching or translating English are not necessarily reliable. When there is an investigative incentive to “understand” what someone is saying in a particular way, “translation” becomes complete distortion. Knox gives a classic example – the one that set off the whole false accusation of Patrick Lumumba, her boss at the bar where she worked. The night Kercher was murdered Knox had texted him a bad translation of the generic no-fixed-date “See ya later” after hearing that she didn’t have to work that evening, not realising that in Italian it means you will definitely see that person later that day or evening. The police ran a mile with this one, bulldozing her into “admitting” to having been at the flat with Lumumba and to having heard the murder. The fact that the two “spontaneous declarations” that resulted were inadmissible in court is moot because they set the tone of suspicion against her and triggered the defamation suit against her with regard to what they contained about Patrick Lumumba. Without these two “declarations” her vague, confused and indirect references in English in a later voluntary statement would have had little substance.
People frequently give false confessions, or statements that are then paraphrased by transcribers into “confessions”. Knox says she began to question her own memory and sanity under the exhausting, confusing and sometimes physically threatening circumstances of the police interrogation. She claims to have been slapped at least once by one of the officers. What she signed was in a language with which she only had basic competence, and the “translation” read back to her by a law enforcement officer posing as “interpreter” was probably imbued with mistakes and “investigative” license.
Amanda Knox’s description of how she responded to the police interrogations reeks of naïve compliance and submission. Her accusers took advantage of that. For any person familiar with the real Italy – not the one on tourist websites or in your sister-in-law’s vacation snap-shots – Knox’s account in her book, Waiting to Be Heard, of how she became a pawn in a game of point-scoring, face-saving, media hype and the public hunger for anything against which they could shout their outrage yet not be called on to act, is very believable. Her demeanour and obvious traumatic damage as a result of what she has endured appear to be genuine and sadly, permanent. Even if she manages to escape extradition, or if this second conviction is overturned on appeal, she is scarred for life. Legal incompetence, cultural and linguistic corruption and the international media have made sure of that.