Do you know who these people are? Most of the media don’t appear to. Image: AP Photo.

UPDATE: Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have been cleared of the murder of Meredith Kercher on appeal and freed. The morning after the verdict was given, Channel 5’s morning magazine show ‘The Wright Stuff’, ran a discussion segment prompted by the case called ‘Foxy Knoxy – Would Ya?’. The introduction, by presenter Matthew Wright, went like this.

‘She’s entirely innocent of the murder of Meredith  Kercher and foxy as hell, so what I want to know this morning is: If you met Amanda Knox in a bar  and she invited you back to her room – would ya?’

It’s actually worse than I thought.

ORIGINAL POST: Regardless of whether Amanda Knox’s conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher is overturned on appeal later today, it’s unlikely that anyone apart from Knox, her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede will ever know the truth of what happened that night in Perugia.

This is not because of any failures by the police, the he-said, she-said interpretation of certain events, or the validity of DNA samples found, although all have led to questions being asked about the legitimacy of the trial at one point or another. It’s because the moment the media realised that Kercher’s flatmate had posted an image of herself posing with a machine gun on myspace, the press realised she was ‘interesting’.

And they sought to exploit that.

Too simplistic? Perhaps. But suspend your disbelief for a second and imagine that Amanda Knox is your daughter. Imagine seeing your child portrayed as a sexual predator, so uncontrollable in the throes of her desires that she stabs to death a close friend when she refuses to take part in a sex game. That she is a liar and a control freak capable of manipulating others to the point that they will do whatever she wants. She is in short, a monster. Imagine if all that information about the person you know is based on hearsay, gossip and implication and then broadcast across the world. How would you feel?

And if that doesn’t give you pause, think of this. How many column inches have there been about Meredith Kercher, in comparision to the composite of Amanda Knox we’ve come to hate over last four years? Knox might face twenty-six years in jail but they face a lifetime of knowing that the reality of their daughter’s untimely and agonising death came a poor second in the newspapers to salacious speculation about one of protagonists.

Even if Knox is the reincarnation of Lucrezia Borgia, keeping her in jail is not going to make the Kerchers feel better. And most of it was so needless. Unless you count selling newspapers as a need, of course.