Knox tells how inmate tried to seduce her
Amanda Knox, who was convicted but then acquitted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, has written a detailed account of how a lesbian inmate tried to seduce her during her years behind bars.
The idea of straight women in prison resorting to lesbian relationships “brings out the horny teenage boy in many of us”, but sexual bonds were often a reflection of a desperate yearning for companionship in a brutal environment, Knox wrote.
She was incarcerated in Capanne prison in Umbria, Italy, between 2007 and 2011 after being initially found guilty by the Italian judicial system of killing and sexually assaulting Kercher, her flatmate, who was from Surrey.
Knox revealed for the first time that while serving her sentence she was befriended by a female inmate, a small-time drug dealer, who tried to initiate a sexual relationship with her.
The woman, whom Knox calls “Leny”, initially seemed happy to be friends as a way of guarding against the loneliness of prison, but after a while tried to persuade the young American to become sexually intimate.
“She’d think I was playing hard to get. One day, Leny kissed me,” Knox wrote in an essay entitled What Romance in Prison Actually Looks Like for the website Broadly, part of Vice News.
“I gritted my teeth and half-smiled, wavering between embarrassment and anger. It was bad enough that the prison institution took ownership of my body — that I was caged and stripsearched on a regular basis and had already been sexually harassed by male guards.”
Knox broke off the friendship, telling Leny that “we couldn’t be friends anymore”.
Knox offers a fascinating insight into her time in jail, about which she has said little in the past.
She was extremely reserved with other inmates.
“I didn’t really have friends in prison,” she wrote.
Regarded as something of a celebrity because of the huge media attention that the Kercher murder case garnered, she was resented by other prisoners.
Since being released from prison and returning to her home town of Seattle, Knox has written occasional articles for the West Seattle Herald.
Kercher, 21, was murdered in the house she shared with Knox and two young Italian women in Perugia in November 2007, just after Halloween.
Rudy Guede, a local drifter who was born in Ivory Coast but grew up in Perugia, is the only person to have been definitively convicted of the murder and is serving a 16-year jail sentence.