Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case Read Free

with bulleted points, footnotes, diagrams, and photographs, which dissected and evaluated every aspect of the case. There were analyses of the crime, the trial proceedings, the cast of characters, and the scientific evidence. There were gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations. The website opened files on people connected with the case, and it paid especial attention to Amanda’s defenders, researching their backgrounds and raising questions about their motives, honesty, and qualifications.
    The website wasn’t entirely negative. It praised the integrity, incorruptibility, and perspicacity of Italian police and prosecutors. A particular hero of the site was Giuliano Mignini. The website’s pages were garlanded with pictures of Meredith Kercher, and it featured articles about her life, condolences to her family, and expressions of mourning for the loss to the world by her death. It should be noted that Meredith Kercher was, by all accounts, a remarkable person, her death a terrible loss.
    The tone of the site was one of measured outrage. The many articles with their masses of detail created a believable alternate reality. This reality painted a picture of Amanda Knox as a sexual predator, drug addict, and killer, whose beautiful face was a mask covering sexual depravity. She was the product of a dysfunctional and possibly incestuous family. In this alternate reality, her younger sisters (one was 12) dressed provocatively and sexually, and they showed clear signs of psychopathology; if not placed in foster care they, too, might become killers. The “murderess” (the feminizing of the word was standard) was supported by a cast of “carpetbaggers” — that is, opportunistic lawyers, money-grubbing journalists (like me), glory-seeking FBI agents, corrupt judges, narcissistic criminologists and unqualified forensic scientists, all of whom were “wading in the blood of a murdered girl” for fame and money. “True Justice” detailed how Amanda’s family had hired an expensive, multi-tentacled PR firm, which had managed to mislead the national media, including the four national television networks and The New York Times . Dissenting posters at “True Justice” were banned and their opinions removed.
    A person who knew nothing of the actual facts of the case might well have found the “True Justice” website to be informative, believable, and consistent. And there were many people out there who did not know the facts. “True Justice” over time would be consulted and used as a source by some major news organizations, most notably the BBC and Newsweek/The Daily Beast .
    The online furor was not just white noise. It drove public opinion against Amanda. It influenced coverage by legitimate journalists. For example, Barbie Nadeau, a Rome-based correspondent who covered the case for The Daily Beast , wrote a book about the case, Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox . While the book included no footnotes or bibliography, it appears to have used information sourced from anonymous bloggers — identifiable as such because it was incorrect. Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of Newsweek/The Daily Beast , contributed the foreword to the book. In it, Brown wrote that “a merciless culture of sex, drugs, and alcohol” led to Amanda’s “descent into evil,” and she wondered if Amanda’s “pretty face” was perhaps only a “mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul.” To see statements like these come from pen of the editor-in-chief of Newsweek shows how deeply the noise of the blogosphere had penetrated legitimate journalism. Tina Brown was joined by other media personalities who appeared to have gotten much of their information from anti-Amanda online commentary. Ann Coulter wrote that, “Despite liberals’ desperate need for Europeans to like them, the American media have enraged the entire nation of Italy with their bald-faced lies about a heinous murder in Perugia committed by a fresh-faced American