Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [53]
Unfortunately, no one paid that much attention to controlling the family’s untelevised appearances in Perugia—in front of the people who would decide Amanda’s fate. Deanna and Ashley also wore their short-shorts and tank tops to hearings. Curt in his Hawaiian shirts and Chris in his slick suits and military haircut might not have fit in with the stylish Italian men, but they did not offend the court. Edda and the girls were another story. Italy is a country where women dress seductively, but they rarely bare their thighs—shorts are for the beach. The court of justice is an esteemed institution. On more than one occasion, friendly members of the press whispered to Edda that her daughters would be well advised to cover up their bare shoulders and tuck in their bra straps or wear more appropriate dresses. Edda always defended her daughters’ attire by pointing out that officials in the courtroom wore tight pants and low-cut sweaters. Detective Monica Napoleoni and Stefania the stenographer, whose short skirts and sequined tops were the talk of the press room, were hardly conservative dressers—but they weren’t in court to support someone on trial for murder. After the verdict, jurors said they thought the Knox family appeared arrogant in the courtroom. Edda and the others continued to “be themselves” when they should have tried harder to respect local customs in a country where image counts for so much. Edda once told a morning news program that her lawyers told them “to just be who we are.” Those same lawyers told me that they could not get the family to cooperate.
“They don’t understand,” Amanda’s assistant attorney Maria del Grosso once told me over breakfast at the Fortuna Hotel. “They can’t see beyond the immediate urgency of their situation. They can’t see the big picture.”
Nor, it seems, could David Marriott, who apparently did not anticipate how ill-advised American editorials based on his very partial and partisan information would play in Italy. A decade ago, many major newspapers would have dispatched a correspondent to Perugia on a story like this, but with the economic pinch, the number of foreign correspondents on the ground in Italy has dwindled dramatically, and those few are often responsible for Spain, Greece, and North Africa as well. Even the Associated Press had a difficult time staffing all the hearings, because of budget constraints. So most U.S. papers covered the trial from afar, and it was much simpler to quote the family and pipe information from Marriott than to wade through volumes of Italian court documents.
Even the New York Times fell prey to Knox family propaganda. In June, as the prosecution was wrapping up, blogger Timothy Egan lambasted Italy’s derelict justice system: “The case against Knox has so many holes in it, and is so tied to the career of a powerful Italian prosecutor who is under indictment for professional misconduct, that any fair-minded jury would have thrown it out months ago.” He declared the trial a “railroad job from hell”—citing the authority of CBS legal analyst Paul Ciolino, who had been to Perugia in the early days of the investigation. But Egan never came to Italy for a hearing or read any court documents. If he had, he might not have made such basic mistakes as getting the number of jurors wrong or substantially misrepresenting Rudy Guede’s role. (Another part of the pro-Amanda brief was that since Guede had already been convicted of the murder, it was a horrible miscarriage of justice