Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I wish I'd known about this topic when it was on-going.  Just found it
today.

I'm one of the American "journalists" to be accused of slander by the
prosecutor, Mignini.  As a result, I can never return to Italy.

Thanks, Candace, for an interesting discussion here.
  

    
Wow.  For what article, if I may ask, Joe?
  

    
I never wrote an article.  I wrote an email.  I had no idea what I was
getting into.

In 2009 I did a book promotion tour in Italy and made friends with an
Italian journalist.  After I returned to the states, he'd send me an
occasional email asking puffball questions such as "What's the one book
you'd want on a desert island?"  I'd whip off an answer; he'd combine
it with similar answers from other writers, and he'd write an article
for an Italian newspaper or magazine.  He got an easy article; I got a
little publicity.  I didn't think much about it.

One day he asked me to comment on any Italian legal case of my
choosing.  The only Italian legal case I was even aware of was the
Amanda Knox case.  So I casually let fly with my opinion of Mignini.  I
called him an "intellectual bully" among other things.  I compared his
persecution of an American college student to the persecution of black
people in the USA.

Then I forgot about it.

A few weeks later I was contacted by CBS News asking why I was being
indicted in Italy.  I said I have no idea, but I'll get back to you.

The journalist had printed my email, translated but unfiltered.  He,
like me, was amazed at the firestorm it created.  Naive on my part,
unprofessional on his part.

Doug Preston is leading the fight to get our names cleared.  I doubt
if he'll succeed.  Meanwhile, I just stay the hell out of Italy, which
isn't difficult since I'm not a world traveler.  The book tour was my
one and only visit to Europe.

I get amazing hate mail from Italy and England, both.  There's a posse
of Amanda-haters who run an organized bullying campaign on the
internet.
  

    
Sorry to hear about your troubles.  Interesting to hear about the
organized Amanda-haters.
  

    
I shouldn't credit them with too much organization.  There are a
couple of anti-Amanda bloggers who know how to pull their strings.
  

    
Based on my reading about the case - which admittedly has mostly
consisted of following it in the British papers - she may or may not be
an angel, but they didn't come close to proving that she killed
anyone.  Sounds to me like she probably didn't.
  

    
And, as of today, she is a free woman.

From The CNN Breaking News email I received:
"An Italian jury has overturned American student Amanda Knox's murder
conviction in the 2007 death of her British college roommate Meredith
Kercher.

Knox, who will now be freed, was led from the courtroom in tears.

Knox's co-defendant, Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, also
had his conviction for murder overturned.

Kercher was found semi-naked with her throat slashed in a villa she
and Knox shared in the central Italian university town of Perugia.

Knox and Sollecito's appeal focused largely on DNA evidence found on a
knife and on a bra clasp belonging to the victim. Prosecutors and
police said Kercher's genetic material was on the blade and Knox's was
on the handle, and that Kercher's bra clasp found at the crime scene
had Sollecito's DNA.

Defense lawyers and independent experts argued strenuously during the
appeal that the DNA testing process was badly flawed and the results
should be in admissible."
  

    
Thanks. Whew.

There's a story about this at Salon that is supposed to point up that
our justice system is as messed up as Italy's but in different ways. 

    http://life.salon.com/2011/10/03/amanda_knox_italy/

"Amanda Knox’s perverse luck" is the somewhat off-base title.
  

    
One thing you can say about the U.S. justice system - the odds of our
falsely convicting an articulate, attractive, and reasonably affluent
young white woman are almost zero!
  

    
Unless she's into sex or drugs, or gay, or otherwise demonizable, in
which case all bets are off.