Susan Marie Kovalinski is a Writer, publicist, and blogger who once felt that Amanda Knox was guilty. In fact she felt strongly enough about Amanda's guilt to blog about it. Susan recently came across the analysis of Ron Hendry on InjusticeinPerugia.org which led Susan to believe she had made a terrible mistake.
Letting Go of the Mysterious Amanda Knox
by Susan Marie Kovalinsky
Like many Americans, I was initially superficially intrigued by the Knox case; with the interest increasing in depth and scope, as further details and history came to light by way of mainstream media.
In
the beginning, I merely heard news reports - sporadically from 2008
on - on cable news networks, about the young University of
Washington co-ed who had been studying abroad, and was now caught in
the web of an Italian murder investigation involving her British
room-mate.
But then, I found my way to a blog which catapulted me into a state of well-nigh obsession.
The
name of the blog does not matter, although many will probably be
familiar with it, and guess its identity. In any case, it was run by a
very intelligent woman with a proclivity for eloquent psychological
analysis.
The facts were laid out regarding the law enforcement investigation
conducted by the officials in Perugia. The idea that these facts might
be merely interpretation, and subjective, had never occurred to me.
Thus it was that I found myself in possession of certain presuppositions:
- That the crime scene was staged
- That evidence pointed to several perpetrators
- That Knox and Sollecito had failed to call the police, and had lied to the postal police about having done so
- That Knox and Sollecito had been surprised in the act of cleaning up the crime scene by the postal police
- That Knox and Sollecito had no alibis, and had behaved strangely, and had lied to the police
In
any case, from here one had only one thread to follow, one train of
reflection in which question upon question piled up: Why? Why this
young American student, why under these conditions, what had opened
the floodgates of such rage, such sexual fury in a seemingly innocuous
and wholesome girl?
From what shadows does Amanda emerge, in what way is she cipher and
symbol of her generation, a child of divorce, perhaps with some
neglect or abuse having been white -washed within a milieu of suburban
middle class hypocrisy ----and I am afraid to say, that within this
purview, Amanda became a mystery to me, almost a fetish: And my
interest deepened until she was an obsession.
Certainly,
I researched her obsessively; I blogged about her, I posted pictures
of her, some of which I photoshopped, adding shadows, or converting to
sepia or black and white. Like a love-sick youth, I waxed poetic on
the little girl lost, the archetypal American girl, who perhaps
over-identified with her male counterparts and their Generation X (or
Y?) sexuality, and through some osmosis or synthesis of cultural and
personal catalysts, became the author of this most dastardly deed.
I
felt Amanda was my shadow self, the girl I might have become if fate
had been slightly less kind, Providence a hair less watchful.
And then I read the Ron Hendry analysis.
I hadn't meant to. An accidental Google trawl had led me to the fateful investigative analysis.
At
first, I was only taken aback. But as I read further, the denial
mechanism was less quick to spring into action; by the third read, it
had shut down altogether. My mysterious Amanda was fading. Had she
ever been real, ever been more than my own projection, perhaps of a
self that came perilously close to actualization, at least in
retrospect? In any event: She simply failed to withstand this last
analysis: In the face of the Hendry report she went hurtling down into
nothing.
My mysterious Amanda, replaced by one merely falsely accused.
