Amanda Knox: opportunist or victim?

Amanda Knox accomplished something pretty difficult in America these days.

Last fall, she managed to disappear from swarms of journalists who were obsessed with her.

This after being acquitted on appeal in the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, who was found in their Italian apartment with her throat cut.

Now she is back, this time to pitch a book to publishers that she said will be an honest representation of the happenings surrounding that death.

Preliminary estimates put the book’s advance well within seven-figure territory.

Meanwhile, Kercher’s parents insinuate that they did not buy her acquittal.

But Knox spent four years of her prime adulthood languishing in an Italian prison while her family sustained massive debts for legal bills.

Her parents drained their retirement accounts to spend time flying back and forth to Italy to be with their daughter.

In one instance, her grandmother took out a $250,000 mortgage to assist in her defense.

So how much would you expect to be paid to spend four years of your life in prison?

I certainly would not consider even seven figures to be nearly enough.

As a rule, I refuse to make overt statements about guilt in public trials.

I do so mainly because I am about the most removed as anyone could be from trials such as Knox’s. Who am I to make a claim as to innocence or guilt for a case I know absolutely nothing about except what I see in the media?

In the end, I make no assumptions about Knox’s involvement in that crime. In a way, I choose to believe that she is innocent, just as I choose to believe that Casey Anthony did not kill her daughter or Jerry Sandusky did not molest small children.

I choose, when at all possible, to believe that people are not capable of doing the kinds of things that prosecutors like to pin on them.

But this column is not about whether Knox is guilty. It is about whether she has the right to tell her story as she sees fits and make a bit of money in the process.

Can anyone blame her for wanting to?

Think about who you were, where you were, what was important to you and who you loved — every smile, scream, laugh and tear from four years ago all the way up to this moment.

And delete them all.

Everything that has happened between then and now is gone, replaced with one giant void of apprehension, terror and loneliness spent staring at the bunk above yours.

Now grin and bear it when I hand you a bill for a million dollars and tell you to go home and live your life.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu