Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case

TRIAL BY FURY
Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case

By Douglas Preston

The bitch needs to die naked tasting her own blood.

Your daughter will come out of prison a hard nosed lesbian (with her sex drive)I hope you are dead before that happens I really do. Meredith Kercher is dead and you dont give a shit about her or her family. But you are the victims arent you? Rot in hell.

And Raffaele? He’s such the pervert he needs to be locked away for life. … Raffaele was perfect for Amanda infusing the sort of wicked and wonderful temptation of evilness that comes with pranks and mutual masturbation. They know nothing of love and compassion but only of spontaneous and twisted self gratification.

There are a whole lot of women who instinctively think she is a total fake, has not fooled any one of us, believes she is foul to the bone and we hope she rots in prison and dies in hell.

I hope Knox stays in jail where she is safe feom me and others like me because if she ever makes it home to Seattle she will suffer that same fate as her victim. None of you can stop me either.

On November 2, 2007, in the ancient and lovely hill town of Perugia, Italy, a British girl named Meredith Kercher was found murdered in the cottage she shared with several other students. Her half-naked body lay on the floor of the bedroom, covered by a duvet; her throat had been stabbed, and there were signs of sexual assault and robbery. It was one of the most brutal murders in Perugia in more than thirty years, and it made front-page news in Italy. Four days later, police and prosecutors held a triumphant press conference in Perugia, in which they proclaimed that they had solved the case and arrested the killers. “Case closed,” they announced. Among the three alleged killers was a twenty-year-old college student from Seattle named Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The ensuing investigation, trial, conviction, and appeal of Amanda and Raffaele lasted 1,428 days and became one of the most sensational murder trials of the new century. On October 3, 2011, an appeals court in Perugia declared them innocent. Amanda went back to her family in Seattle and Raffaele to his in Bari. On March 26, 2013, Italy’s Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a retrial on points of law as yet unspecified. The retrial may well involve more years of appeals and reviews. Amanda was arrested when she was twenty; she could be thirty by the time her case is finally resolved.

Within days of Amanda’s arrest, public opinion began lining up on either side. It eventually coalesced into two groups, the so-called “Guilters” and the “Innocentisti,” anti-Amanda and pro-Amanda bloggers. These two groups have been brawling online ever since. People sometimes note the transient, ever-changing nature of the Web, but in fact the opposite is true. The Web is a gigantic tar pit that traps and fossilizes every electron that ventures within. On March 29, 2013, as I was putting the final touches on this article, I conducted an experiment. I Googled “Amanda Knox” and got 7.1 million hits. I then tried “Amanda Knox” and “bitch,” which returned 1.7 million hits. “Amanda Knox” and “pervert” came back at 880,000 hits, and her name coupled with “slut” yielded 380,000. “Amanda Knox” and “innocent” returned 482,000. The quotations that opened this article were gathered in about fifteen minutes of surfing. There are millions of similar comments about Amanda like this, and most of them will survive in digital form for a long time — perhaps, given Web archiving efforts, close to forever. Amanda’s great-great-grandchildren may find that this ugly archive is only a few clicks away.

The extreme viciousness of the anti-Amanda commentariage is startling. There are countless statements calling for the murdering, raping, torturing, throat-cutting, frying, hanging, electrocution, burning, and rotting in hell of Amanda, along with her sisters, family, friends, and supporters. This silicon Inquisition is still there in all its glory, undiminished by time.

Which brings me to the question: why did the Knox case arouse such a furor on the Web? And this leads to an even more interesting problem: Why are there so many savage, crazy, vicious, and angry people on the Internet? The answer, which might appear obvious on the surface, is in fact anything but clear. Recent controversial research into the evolution of altruism, warfare, and punishment in human society indicates that Internet savagery may be programmed into our very genes.

* * *

I was drawn into the case by accident. Amanda’s chief prosecutor was Giuliano Mignini, a man I knew well. In 2000 I moved to Italy with my family to write a murder mystery set in Florence. We settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse in the Florentine hills. I soon learned that the picturesque olive grove outside our door had been the scene of a horrific double homicide in 1983, committed by a serial killer known only as the Monster of Florence. Between 1974 and 1985, the Monster killed young people making love in cars in the Florentine hills and performed a ritualistic mutilation to the woman’s body. He had never been identified, and the case, one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history, had never been solved. The Monster was so depraved, and so skilled at murder, that he made Jack the Ripper look like Mister Rogers. I became interested and dropped the idea of the novel to write a book about the Monster case instead. I teamed up with the Italian journalist, Mario Spezi, who had covered the Monster’s killings for the local paper from the beginning, and knew more about the case than even the police.

Giuliano Mignini did not like our investigation. It went against his theories that a Satanic cult was responsible for the Monster killings — despite clear forensic evidence that all fourteen victims had been killed by a lone individual. He launched a secret investigation of us, tapped our cellphones, and bugged Spezi’s car. He had the police seize Spezi’s computer and all our notes, research, and files on the case. The police then picked me up on the streets of Florence and hauled me in before Mignini, where he interrogated me for hours, with no attorney or interpreter present. He demanded I confess to a string of crimes, including being an accessory to murder, and when I refused, he indicted me for perjury and obstruction of justice and suggested I leave the country. Spezi fared worse, much worse. Mignini ordered him arrested and accused him of
being
a member of the Satanic sect that conducted the Monster killings. Spezi was thrown into the same prison in which Amanda Knox would later be incarcerated. Spezi remained jailed until an international uproar, led by the Committee to Protect Journalists, forced his release. Together Mario and I published bestselling book about the case,
The Monster of Florence
, which is now being made into a movie starring George Clooney. (The Italian courts dismissed all charges against us; Mignini was indicted and convicted for abuse of office, the conviction later suspended on a technicality.)

A few days after Amanda Knox was arrested for murder, I got a call from a man named Tom Wright, a former Hollywood executive and well-known filmmaker. His powerful voice, full of desperation and breaking at times, came booming down the wire. He explained that his daughter and Amanda were high school friends and schoolmates. He knew her family. It was impossible that Amanda could be a murderer. He had heard about our book and, seeing that Spezi and I had also been victims of Mignini, begged us for help.

I wasn’t sure about Amanda’s innocence at the time, but when I looked into the case, I was shocked. Mignini and the Perugian police were railroading Amanda and Raffaele for a murder they did not commit. Spezi and I later learned why she had been framed, which we detailed in a new afterword to
The Monster of Florence
, published on April 23, 2013.

I felt like I had to become involved.

My first foray into a public discussion of the case was in an interview with the journalist Candace Dempsey, who wrote a blog hosted by seattlepi.com, the website of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
newspaper. Dempsey had been the first journalist to raise questions about the case against Knox. She warned me ahead of time that I would be attacked by anti-Amanda bloggers. I confidently assured her that, as a novelist and journalist for thirty years, I was fully hardened against bad reviews and negative comments. She posted the interview on February 8, 2008, in which I told of my own experience with Mignini and said I thought Amanda and Raffaele were innocent. It was a mild interview in what I assumed to be a rather obscure corner of the Web.

Then the comments poured in. I was stunned at their ferociousness against Amanda. But what surprised me even more were the blazing personal attacks against me. The commentators had researched me on the Web and extracted personal details I had no idea were there. They threw back at me my own biography, twisted beyond recognition, along with quotes from bad reviews of my books and ugly references to my family. They claimed that my interest in Amanda was sexual. They said I was mentally ill. They said I was a racist. Dempsey deleted the offensive postings and locked her blog at night, which only aroused the bloggers more and sent them seeking other sites to vent their fury.

Like a damned fool I waded into the fray, posting in the comments section, defending myself, attacking my attackers, and countering their criticisms. I had my name on a Google alert, and the alerts began pouring in, directing me to attacks appearing elsewhere. I found myself swept up in the drama, obsessively checking the Web multiple times a day, outraged and panicked that the accusations, especially the sexual ones, would remain on the Web forever, read by my children and unborn grandchildren. I had to answer each one, get my licks in, set the record straight; but the more I fought, the more the tide of vituperation came back at me. I felt like Cuchulain trying to turn back the sea with his sword. For days I was in a frenzy.

Finally, I came to my senses. I couldn’t believe that I had gotten sucked in and become almost as crazy as they were. But it made me wonder: Who
are
these people? And why would so many people, unconnected with either the victim or the accused, with no skin in the game, devote their time and energy to seeing this girl punished — and to vilifying all those who came to her defense? One could understand the single-minded fervor of Amanda’s family and friends in defending her. And one could appreciate the passion those who thought she was innocent and sought to correct a terrible injustice. But why the white-hot zeal from apparently random people to see her
punished
? There was no equivalence between Amanda’s defenders and her persecutors. The former were engaged in normal human behavior, the latter in something that felt pathological.

When you ask Web sophisticates why people are so vicious on the Internet, you get a set of stock responses. The very question is naïve. What do you expect? The world is full of angry people who don’t have a life. The Web offers a perfect outlet where they can be anonymous, important, and powerful, and attack others without fear of retribution. The Web has given them a voice when before they had none. These are people who find meaning in their lives by connecting with similar people on the net, who seek a sense of purpose and fulfillment online that they can’t achieve in the real world. Finally, the nature of the Internet, we are told, is also to blame — it’s a place where the human id runs amok, it’s a playground for disturbed people, it’s an echo chamber for the uninformed. We are advised that Internet nastiness is white noise, best ignored. It has little effect in the real world.

While many these explanations are undoubtedly true, none go deep enough. None explain why the Web is a place where some human beings devote enormous effort to attacking strangers who have done nothing to them personally.

Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist of the Internet who writes a blog called Technosociology. She is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina. Her interests include the formation of social groups on the Internet.

Tufekci was familiar in general terms with the Amanda Knox case but not with the Internet furor. It didn’t surprise her. “At first,” she said, “It may look like an unstructured mob. But when you trace it back, there’s a place where they coalesced. There’s a community aspect to the swarming.” She explained that it is the forming of the community that makes it formidable, effective, and long lasting. These are not anonymous crazies blogging alone in the dead of night. “They’ve invested in becoming a community.” Without that community, she said, they probably wouldn’t be able to sustain their activities.

But who are these people? While we were talking, Tufekci Googled around and noted the crude, sexual nature of much of the anti-Amanda commentary — from both male and female commentators. “This mob congregating on one person so viciously,” she said, “could have a variety of motives. It might be a coalition of female-on-female competition and sexually interested males.” They may have unexamined motives for wanting to see Amanda punished. “The Internet has given these punishers sudden access to a certain kind of power, and they are not fully connected to their victims. There is a disinhibition that comes from being online. This constant refrain that the Internet is just the Internet, that it’s not real — this helps dissociate people from their actions. In people’s minds, it gets construed as unreal space where you’re not morally accountable. But of course this is nonsense. The Internet is very real. We’re social animals. It has a powerful effect in the world.” She suggested I look back in time and trace the development of the anti-Amanda blogosphere.