Amanda Knox's Gaslighting Odyssey

Amanda Knox. You know her name. You likely know her story. Recently, she sat down with me to focus on how gaslighting was a specific factor in her experience.

In 2007, the stage was set for Amanda’s most picturesque adventure yet: she was a 20-year-old college student studying abroad in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia, the green heart of Italy. Just weeks into her stay, there was nothing to suspect and no reason to assume the trauma she was about to endure against this scenic backdrop. That is, until a burglar broke into her home and brutally assaulted and murdered one of her roommates, Meredith. In the wake of Meredith’s death, Amanda’s life changed forever.

“The gaslighting started from the very beginning,” she says. Within days of the murder, Amanda was locked in a jail cell, accused of playing a part in her roommate's death. Thus began her gaslighting odyssey from 2007 to 2015, with nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she did not commit.

Without any contact with the outside world, interrogators tried to take control of Amanda’s reality. Wielding power and control, they used textbook gaslighting tactics to manipulate her version of events, including sleep deprivation by keeping her awake throughout the night. “They told me my real memories were false,” Amanda says. She was prompted to remember something differently and, if she couldn’t, they hit her. Why? To help Amanda jog her memory, they said, determined to find her guilty.

Amanda’s emotional turmoil did not remain private, however. Outside prison walls, media outlets worldwide spread the version of Amanda that interrogators were convinced existed: a murderer.

The depth of gaslighting Amanda experienced was simply paralyzing. She recalls what it was like to sit in the courtroom “as an innocent person and have a judge say to your face, you're guilty and you are going to spend the next 26 years of your life in prison because you're an evil person.” And there was nothing she could do about it. Amanda was defenseless against a justice system intent on gaslighting her into guilt.

Survival, for Amanda, meant taking each day as it came. She could not imagine how to be okay with 26 years of life spent in prison. Who could? Instead, she “broke it down to how can I be okay today? What can I do today to make life worth living regardless of the situation?”

Although acquitted and released from prison, Amanda’s prosecutor appealed and overturned her acquittal, trying her again for the same crime while she was in the United States. Thus began another four years of her life spent in unbearable limbo, this time facing extradition. Ultimately and definitively acquitted of murder in 2015, Amanda can still feel the ghost of gaslighting haunting her. “When you've been hit by lightning once, you can't help but walk through the world trembling at everything that sounds like a thunderstorm,” she says. Amanda now lives with a kind of automatic suspicion as a result of her years spent suffering from gaslighting.

Yet, Amanda’s life is evidence that there is hope beyond the trauma of manipulation and exploitation. After years of being silenced, she is ready to be heard and has since become an author, an advocate for criminal justice reform and media ethics, a wife, and a mother. In return, she is an inspiration to all those navigating the paralyzing grip of gaslighting.

After witnessing her entire life change in a blink of an eye, Amanda has undergone intense self-work, recovery, and healing—confronting what it means to take risks and to be vulnerable in pursuit of her goals. She says, “To be married and have kids, these are not just hopes and dreams, but they're risks that we're taking. We're making ourselves vulnerable over and over and over again… Because that's the stuff that makes life worth living.”

Indeed, it is.

My full podcast with Amanda Knox can be found here: Manipulation & Justice: Amanda Knox's Gaslighting Odyssey