Emma Cowing: A time and a place to do the decent thing

THE noise was unmistakable. Above the words of the Italian judge and the whirr of the cameras, there came, as Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s appeal was upheld, the sound of loud whoops of joy.

As Knox’s family celebrated, Meredith Kercher’s parents sat silent and composed just a few feet away. Whether they considered that the American family celebrating news of their daughter’s freedom as if they had just seen the winning touchdown at a football game was a tad insensitive, we shall never know.

A few minutes later Knox’s sister, Deanna, made a passionate and emotional statement outside the court, thanking her sister’s defence team. She did not once refer to Meredith Kercher. It was in sharp contrast to the one made by Francesco Sollecito, Raffaele’s father, in which he said that “we will remember her with affection.”

I do not particularly like Amanda Knox. I’m not keen on her family either, who have launched a brow-beating campaign that has done its best to portray Italian justice as some backwards hillbilly system stuck in the 19th century. But I thoroughly believe that yesterday’s verdict by the court in Perugia was the right one. Knox may be dislikeable. She may have lied through her teeth when she accused her boss Patrick Lumumba of Kercher’s murder, and she may have behaved inappropriately in the days following her former flatmate’s death – the story about her turning cartwheels in the police station springs inevitably to mind – but none of these things make her a murderer. Instead, it seems she – along with Sollecito – has been the victim of an enormous miscarriage of justice, wrongly accused in a poorly run investigation influenced by half-truths, speculation, and evidence that had been tampered with. Meanwhile, running alongside that, a media-led image of Knox as a “she-devil” and a sexually promiscuous woman has ballooned.

The sexism that Knox has been subject to since her arrest four years ago is breathtaking. From the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini - who has ruthlessly pursued Knox from the start after making the over-arching decision that she must have killed Kercher because the girl’s body had been covered by a duvet and “only a woman would have covered her up after killing her”, to the relentless use of the Foxy Knoxy moniker, Knox has been persecuted simply for being a woman.

Yesterday, that bellwether of social opinions – Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff, contained an ill-judged segment entitled “Foxy Knoxy: Would Ya?” Trailing it on the website the programme asked – “She’s entirely innocent. She’s also undeniably fit and loves wild sex. Or did. So if you were a guy who’d met her in a bar and she invited you back to hers, would you go?” The Foxy Knoxy tag, it seems, is going nowhere.

There has been an immense amount of speculation as to what Knox will do when she arrives back in America.

There is undoubtedly much jockeying for position from the American television channels over who will speak to her first. Knox, it is said, wants to write a book about her experiences. There is talk, too, that she wants to start an Amnesty International style organisation in order to help others who have been wrongly imprisoned abroad.

But if anyone knows how a person can be wrongly portrayed by the media it is Knox. If anyone knows how a person can be villified by public opinion, it must surely be the woman who has been compared to everyone from Jessica Rabbit to Myra Hindley. The lure of the money must be tempting. But surely she must know that the feeding hand will also continue to bite.

In my view the decent thing – and the only thing – for Knox to do, is to disappear. To slip quietly out of public life, never give an interview, and allow the world to forget her name.

She has been given a second chance at life, and she should grab it with both hands, from behind closed doors.

In short, she should act with dignity. Something the family of Meredith Kercher – a name the world should never be allowed to forget – have done all along.