AIBU to think an Edinburgh festival show about Meredith Kercher's murder should be stopped?

On this occasion, the court ruled her as innocent.

"Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of involvement in the murder."

From Amanda Knox's Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox

I admit I don't know all the details, but Knox is innocent, someone else was convicted and she was subject to what must have been a truly awful experience from the start.

I think it's a strange thing to make a comedy show about and I alsonthinknit's werod she wants to be in the limelight about it all, but it would hardly be surprising if her mental health was a bit off.

I also find it odd that that family seem to have no sympathy for what she went through whatsoever.

In this case the court didn't just say not guilty. They said she was innocent of the crime.

Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of involvement in the murder

You don’t know she’s innocent - courts generally rule people guilty or not guilty. Not guilty is not the same as innocent.

Whatever she did though, I don’t like Amanda Knox for the way she reacted through the trial and investigation, or how she’s profited from it afterwards - but it is her life too and she is fully entitled to do what she wants with her story.

So while she won’t get my money, and I think the show is disrespecting and tasteless, I will defend her right to do the show because that’s how free speech works, and we should protect that at all costs.

They're morally reprehensible.

A friend of DP's was the victim in a brutal attack where another person they were close to was murdered.

Every couple of years or so, they get contacted by production companies wanting to do a programme about it - they bombard DP's friend, their partner, ex partners, friends, people they went to school with, employers, offering money to give details of what they were like, what happened, what the friend did next, what they're doing now, whether they look like they're having a good time. Generally followed up with threatening them with exposure of their sex life and suggesting that perhaps they were actually involved in some way if they don't take part. I don't suppose for one moment that DP's friend would find it anything other a repeat of all the trauma of the original event, the press coverage, the continued harassment from utterly amoral production companies in the pursuit of money and maybe an award, appearances on podcasts to talk about how they 'investigated' without a single mention of the threats they made (things like 'We've found this - how would you like us sending it to your 84 year old grandmother? I hear she's not too well at the moment, shall we visit her in hospital?') if somebody had later appealed against their conviction and won to then go on tour with a comedy show about how amusing some of it was.

All for profit and entertainment.

Poor family. To go through the murder of Meredith, being told someone had killed her who was actually innocent and then the parents dying too.

It is true, her poor parents. The dad lived locally, and it was thought to be a HAR but no one actually knows and no one was held accountable, he was found very near to his house with severe injuries so it was all very strange.

My (American) high school theater group was selected to perform in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003. I went to a Catholic school. While we were in Edinburgh, several people walked out of one show that made jokes about Jesus and Christianity, because they thought the jokes were offensive. But they never maintained that their own sensibilities should dictate what was and was not performed. They just didn’t want to keep watching that particular show.

If “other people’s feelings ought to be considered” is the rule that dictates what Fringe shows should be performed, you might as well not even have a Fringe Festival, because everything is offensive to someone, somewhere.

I think that she has drawn the right boundary by refusing to joke about Meredith and making the show about the aftermath. Others might make different choices, but I don't think we can conclude that she is without compassion and hasn't reflected.

I think it is misguided of the family to try to dictate to her, though I understand that they are in pain too.

British tabloids did Amanda Knox a huge amount of damage. It's right that she should be allowed to speak up about that damage in Britain.

Going away and only speaking where the crime had less impact means doing so where the misreporting and fantasizing was less intense. We need people speaking up against this sort of tabloid nonsense here in Britain

I get all of that but just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. Other's people's feelings ought to be considered.

I think it's the siblings who are complaining, not the parents. According to wikipedia, one parent died in a hit and run and the other of covid. Not sure if that's true or not but, if it is, the siblings have been through an unbelievable amount of loss and trauma so anybody presenting any kind of 'light side' to any of it must seem unbearable. Amanda Knox has the whole of the US to perform in. I know Edinburgh Fringe is special and she is within her rights to perform there but I think she is insensitive to choose to do so.

As I recall it, the sentence was so appalingly low because the prosecution was hell-bent on its bizarre conspiracy theory, which kept it from mounting an effective strategy against Guede.

OP YABVVU. I recently listened to a longish interview Knox gave on American National Public Radio. She comes across as a thoughtful person who's using her own horrific experience to actively campaign against miscarriages of justice in general, besides dealing with her own no doubt intense trauma. I rather doubt she's getting rich on this. Even is she was, fair game - she lost years of her life, she'll always be impacted by the ludicrous accusations against her, and her family had to take on millions of dollars in debt to support her through the years of her ordeal.

I’m sorry that Meredith’s family lost their daughter but - and two close family members of mine were murdered in a very horrible way, one a toddler, so I feel qualified to say this - I cannot get my head around the Kerchers’ perpetual hatred of Amanda Knox, they are egging this all on and on by constantly objecting to her existence after being provably wrongfully convicted. I would want the actual murderer to do the time not some poor woman in the wrong place at the wrong time who by all accounts was subjected to an appalling police fit-up job that led to the poor woman being convicted by media. Meredith’s death was awful. It’s Kafkaesque what happened to Amanda and of course she needs to be able to laugh. Both things can be true. I don’t know why a family who lost their daughter can’t see what they are doing to someone else’s daughter.
The Fringe is a great place for a comedian to launch a career or take it further and this is how Amanda is coping. This whole thing smacks of blaming a woman for a man’s crimes. If people don’t like the idea of the show, then don’t buy tickets and STFU about it. But to try and cancel someone in this way without even knowing what she is going to say, just because of who she is? That’s next level shitty and those people get the ire I usually reserve for TRAs who try to cancel women speaking biological facts.

How do you feel about the movie, In the Name of the Father? About the Guilford Four, Giuseppe Conlon and the Maguire Seven. Do you think all those wrongfully convicted innocent people were indecent in cooperating with what happened to them being turned into a massively successful movie? Or do you think they should have opposed it out of respect for the bombing victims?

Amanda Knox had her life destroyed by a false, politically motivated conviction. Even on this thread you have posters insisting she's guilty for no other reason than she was accused or because she's 'strange.' Of course it's difficult for the Kerchers and they will have extremely complicated reactions to it. But Knox is still entitled to express herself because victims of miscarriages of justice speaking out might actually discourage police and the judiciary from falsely persecuting people in the future?

I do not disagree with any of that but I do feel sorry for the Kercher family.

I think that the police, and especially the prosecutor Mignini, have increased that poor family's suffering. Rudy Guede raped and murdered their daughter, and he was caught and convicted (although his sentence was pathetically low, he should have been locked up for life), and that should hopefully have given them a tiny bit of peace through all the loss and horror.

But no, that weirdo had to fabricate some bizarre, unlikely, and highly lurid motivation, drawing the world's media, making the whole thing hugely high profile, and making the family feel that justice wasn't properly served.
It's all in him - he's a filthy pervert with a really warped attitude to women and their sexuality imo.

Maybe she does feel she needs the spotlight on her and that it helps her recovery to perform? In any case, authors usually need a public persona to sell books these days.

No choices she makes about which media to use or where to appear are going to bring Meredith Kercher back. That is a sad fact and it is not her job to console the Kercher family. There would certainly be less publicity about this if people weren't objecting to her performance.

I think it's an important principle of justice that we don't try to restrict victims of miscarriages of justice from telling their stories, on any platform, in any medium.

It's not a show about Meredith Kercher's murder though, it's a show about Amanda Knox's imprisonment.

I understand that. I just find it very hard to understand why any decent human being would want to keep doing it to a family who have suffered so much.

I actually don't think it should be 'cancelled' as of course, freedom or speech, art, expression and all that.

I just feel sorry for the Kerchers and find it hard to understand why Knox can't just write (which I think she has done). A show just feels a lot more 'I need the spotlight on me.'

Amanda Knox doesn't need to ask Meredith Kercher's family's permission to speak about the injustices done to her. When you are wrongly accused of a crime, that doesn't mean you owe the victim's family your silence.

As I understand it, the show isn't about Meredith. It doesn't matter whether the two girls were friends or not. There are lots of possible motivations for making the show apart from friendship for Meredith, whether Knox feels that or not. She isn't selling it as a tribute but as a reflection on her own experience

That is all true and it all happened because her room mate was brutally murdered.

Did Knox approach the Kercher family for their blessing with this show? Clearly not as they have condemned it.

However 'fringe' and small her show is, it would still make headline news and bring the whole awful event back into the spotlight. Knox knows this.

From everything I have read, Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher were not really close friends so I don't think any of this is coming from a place of friendship, loss and love. It's coming from an addiction to the spotlight.

I don't think this should be cancelled for two reasons. First, I don't really believe in cancelling anything thats not outright illegal. Art should be allowed to be tasteless and shocking.

And secondly, I don't think this show is particularly tasteless. It's not about Meridith, it's about the experiences of the performer in the aftermath of that. She should be allowed to tell her story, whether its through prose or comedy.

Amanda Knox’ statement on her Insta is worth reading.

You don’t have to like AK (or what you think you know if her from media / SM - the media accounts being at the heart of some of what she comments about) to recognise that she was a victim of miscarriage of justice.

Comedy can be a powerful medium through which to discuss painful issues. It doesn’t automatically mean that the issue is taken lightly, or mocked, or that victims are not honoured or respected.

On what I can see about this show - and more to the point what I can’t see because none of us have seen it - I am not prepared to sign.

Yes. She has no choice about being known as the (vindicated, but some people will never accept that) murder suspect. All her life that is with her. I'd imagine that standing up in public, owning that, speaking out and making people think and laugh is therapeutic for her. Why should she lick her wounds in private if that isn't helping her?

And if part of the comedy makes people think - about police credibility and corruption, about tabloid sensationalism, about misogyny and the excesses of the true crime genre - good. Because she is hardly the only person affected by these issues. People who assume she is innocent but should still shut up seem to assume she can't have anything important to say.