Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case (2 page)

In the first few weeks after her arrest, the anti-Amanda comments seemed random and inchoate. But as time passed, a more organized movement developed. The anti-Amanda bloggers coalesced and created two websites, “Perugia Murder File” (which later split into two after a dispute, with extensions .net and .org) and “True Justice for Meredith Kercher.”

Not all the bloggers at these sites appeared to fit the stereotype of losers who needed to get a life. Many appeared educated and intelligent. They wrote well. They were articulate. They were effective. They seemed to have friends and jobs. And they were utterly and completely obsessed. The chief moderator of “Perugia Murder File,” Skeptical Bystander, according to statistics on her profile, has blogged about Amanda Knox an average of seven times per day, every day, for the past five years. The creator of “True Justice,” Peter Quennell (the only anti-Amanda blogger to use his real name), wrote over eight hundred detailed articles about the case in addition to posting more than two thousand comments. His writings add up to more words than the
Bible
,
War and Peace
,
Finnegans
Wake
, and the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
combined. Five and a half years later, all three of these websites are still going strong, especially after the March 26 verdict requiring that Knox be retried. These people, who saw their cause apparently lost with her acquittal in 2011, acquired a new lease on life with the verdict. They are ecstatic and have come roaring back, angrier than ever.

Almost from the beginning, the “True Justice” site became a clearinghouse of anti-Amanda fervor. It would eventually mushroom into a website receiving millions of hits. It specialized in long, detailed articles with bulleted points, footnotes, diagrams, and photographs, which dissected and evaluated every aspect of the case. There were analyses of the crime, the trial proceedings, the cast of characters, and the scientific evidence. There were gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations. The website opened files on people connected with the case, and it paid especial attention to Amanda’s defenders, researching their backgrounds and raising questions about their motives, honesty, and qualifications.

The website wasn’t entirely negative. It praised the integrity, incorruptibility, and perspicacity of Italian police and prosecutors. A particular hero of the site was Giuliano Mignini. The website’s pages were garlanded with pictures of Meredith Kercher, and it featured articles about her life, condolences to her family, and expressions of mourning for the loss to the world by her death. It should be noted that Meredith Kercher was, by all accounts, a remarkable person, her death a terrible loss.

The tone of the site was one of measured outrage. The many articles with their masses of detail created a believable alternate reality. This reality painted a picture of Amanda Knox as a sexual predator, drug addict, and killer, whose beautiful face was a mask covering sexual depravity. She was the product of a dysfunctional and possibly incestuous family. In this alternate reality, her younger sisters (one was 12) dressed provocatively and sexually, and they showed clear signs of psychopathology; if not placed in foster care they, too, might become killers. The “murderess” (the feminizing of the word was standard) was supported by a cast of “carpetbaggers” — that is, opportunistic lawyers, money-grubbing journalists (like me), glory-seeking FBI agents, corrupt judges, narcissistic criminologists and unqualified forensic scientists, all of whom were “wading in the blood of a murdered girl” for fame and money. “True Justice” detailed how Amanda’s family had hired an expensive, multi-tentacled PR firm, which had managed to mislead the national media, including the four national television networks and
The New York Times
. Dissenting posters at “True Justice” were banned and their opinions removed.

A person who knew nothing of the actual facts of the case might well have found the “True Justice” website to be informative, believable, and consistent. And there were many people out there who did not know the facts. “True Justice” over time would be consulted and used as a source by some major news organizations, most notably the BBC and
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
.

The online furor was not just white noise. It drove public opinion against Amanda. It influenced coverage by legitimate journalists. For example, Barbie Nadeau, a Rome-based correspondent who covered the case for
The Daily Beast
, wrote a book about the case,
Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox
. While the book included no footnotes or bibliography, it appears to have used information sourced from anonymous bloggers — identifiable as such because it was incorrect. Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
, contributed the foreword to the book. In it, Brown wrote that “a merciless culture of sex, drugs, and alcohol” led to Amanda’s “descent into evil,” and she wondered if Amanda’s “pretty face” was perhaps only a “mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul.” To see statements like these come from pen of the editor-in-chief of
Newsweek
shows how deeply the noise of the blogosphere had penetrated legitimate journalism. Tina Brown was joined by other media personalities who appeared to have gotten much of their information from anti-Amanda online commentary. Ann Coulter wrote that, “Despite liberals’ desperate need for Europeans to like them, the American media have enraged the entire nation of Italy with their bald-faced lies about a heinous murder in Perugia committed by a fresh-faced American girl, Amanda Knox.”

For this piece, I interviewed as many of the dedicated anti-Amanda bloggers as I could get to correspond with me. I asked them what in particular had drawn them to the case. While I received staggeringly long replies, emails running to many thousands of words, not one was able to articulate the source of his or her passion, beyond general statements about victim’s rights, wanting to see justice done, or seeking to protect our children from murderers. Skeptical Bystander told me she was originally drawn to the case because she saw a photo of Amanda Knox, mistook it for the victim, and thought, “gee, she looks more like a killer than a victim.” Their level of self-awareness seemed in inverse proportion to their level of outrage.

The online furor against Amanda spilled over into the real world, dramatically confirmed by what happened to Steve Moore, a much-decorated former career agent with the FBI. Becoming a special agent at 25, Moore had served as a counterterrorist specialist, certified sniper, and helicopter pilot. He participated in covert operations against the Aryan Nations and other white supremacist groups, and he ran the FBI unit responsible for investigating acts of terrorism against the United States in Asia and Pakistan. He retired from the FBI in 2008 and took a job as deputy director of security for Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California. A handsome, rumpled man, he was known for being funny, self-deprecating, blunt-talking, and extremely stubborn.

After retiring, he was bored. In late November 2009, his wife, Michelle, was watching a CBS News report about Amanda Knox and asked him to come over and take a look — that it seemed an innocent American girl was being railroaded in Italy for a murder she didn’t commit.

“I dismissed it,” Moore told me. “I told her that those people are invariably guilty.”

Michelle persisted. “Show me where this report’s wrong.”

Steve went online and started looking at the case. “Right away,” he said, “I found serious, damning problems with each major piece of evidence. … The further I dug, the more it became obvious to me that it was absolutely a fabrication. Later, when I finally got hold of the crime scene tapes, I realized it wasn’t an accident: It was intentional. This was an
intentional
frame.”

At first, Moore did nothing. Amanda and Raffaele’s trial was almost over and the verdict would be announced in a few weeks. He was sure they would be acquitted. “In the U.S.,” he said, “you don’t get evidence into court unless it’s totally unimpeachable. I thought Italy must be like the U.S. There was no evidence again Amanda.”

On December 5, 2009, they were convicted of murder. “I had to go home from work I was so shocked,” he said. “My ears were ringing. I realized I couldn’t sit idly by.” As a former FBI agent, he was in a position, he hoped, to do something. He went to the administration of Pepperdine and received verbal and written permission to advocate on Amanda’s behalf.

Moore delved into the case, researching it in depth. When he was ready to go public, he made a splash. On September 2, 2010, he appeared on three shows on the same day — The
Today
show with Ann Curry,
Good Morning America
with George Stephanopoulos, and the CBS
Early Show
with Harry Smith. He told Stephanopoulos that the evidence against Amanda was “ridiculous,” Italian forensic techniques “horrible,” and her interrogation “Third World.” He said, “I am as certain of her innocence as I am of anything in the world.”

Moore was devastatingly effective. The three main anti-Amanda websites went incandescent.

“I’m used to people not liking me,” Moore said. “I’ve had murderers threaten me. The Aryan Nations posted on their website that I was on their list, that I was an enemy to my race. I went up against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. But this was beyond belief. I’d never experienced anything like it. Even the murderers I put away didn’t fight me as hard as these nutcases over at PMF and TJMK.”

The posts attacked Moore, ridiculed and mocked his Christian faith, called him a pedophile, a white supremacist, a liar, and a fool. They accused him of molesting his daughters. His oldest daughter received menacing phone calls. Michelle, Steve’s wife, became a particular object of attack. “Michelle was the recipient of some of the most vicious, nasty stuff, some of them saying ‘I long to do to you what they did to Meredith, only it won’t be as nice,’ telling her she needed to be raped.” Someone sent her pornography. The discussion about Moore on the three anti-Amanda websites ran to hundreds of posts. “True Justice” opened a separate file on Moore in its “Carpetbaggers” section.

Skeptical Bystander got the ball rolling at her website, PMF:

My bullshit detector is on high alert! … When I was a kid, my mom would threaten to wash our mouths out with soap if we lied or swore. Next time Steve is on television, he’ll probably have soap bubbles seeping from every orifice.

GEEZ Skep! Give a body a warning, would ya? I’d rather not even think about Skeevie, let alone his orifices. He’s a walking, talking orifice.

he pretends to be on a crusade to save the Holy Land of Amanda, who’s just another drunken immoral college kid like the ones he despises at Pepperdine, except she’s a million times worse! Oh, but she’s young, she's hot, she’s got blue eyes, she’s sexy, so he lost it. He’s a real Jekyll-Hyde and so is his wife, she drove him to this insanity…

Pepperdine immediately became aware of the online furor. Moore returned on September 3 to a “firestorm” at the University. Officials there had been following the posts at “Perugia Murder File,” “True Justice,” and elsewhere, and they were troubled. Ten days later, Moore got a letter from the administration, which demanded that he stop advocating for Amanda. Their reasons were, in part, that they were concerned about “the threat to the University’s reputation as some begin to question your investigation, your qualifications as an expert in this matter, and your motives.” The “some” could only refer to the blogosphere, as only anonymous bloggers had raised these questions. (The regular media had received Moore cordially and treated him as the expert he clearly was.)

“I was gobsmacked,” Moore said. “Stunned. In shock. It wasn’t just the vicious, malevolent and defamatory criticism by PMF/TJMK … it was that some sophisticated people believed their garbage. That’s the danger with these types of Internet trolls; if they use the right verbiage, callow people will believe it.”

Moore felt too strongly about the Knox case to abandon it. Pepperdine fired him. The bloggers went wild with jubilation.

There was no doubt that his suicide mission would fail … He is just another Knox agent in a long line of very ordinary sock puppets and he will not be the last one who will ruin him/herself for the murderess.

Moore would seem to be the sacrificial moron … Go get him, Mignini

I am glad another murderer sympathizer is getting what he deserves. He will not be the last one. More research is been done to make sure.

Moore sued Pepperdine for wrongful termination. Pepperdine settled for a “mutually satisfactory” sum. When I asked Moore what “mutually satisfactory” meant, he said, dryly, “I think I might say I was very satisfied with the settlement.”

“I feel like I have a purpose in life now that I didn’t have before,” he said. “I see injustice out there. And who is better to help right injustice than someone who knows how the justice system works?”

The blogosphere didn’t forget. For the past four years, Moore has been pilloried online. Even today, he and his family are contending with vicious, anonymous attacks. In November 2012, a blogger named BRMull went to Moore’s daughter’s website, copied some of her songs to “Perugia Murder File,” and critiqued them. He appended a threatening message: “
yes Steve Moore, I’m talking about your daughter, BRMull plays for keeps.
”

Moore said, incredulously: “And I haven’t done anything to them!”

During this time, a different sort of affray took place at Wikipedia. In April 2010, a group of Wikipedia editors, some with high administrator status, replaced the rather thin article entitled “The Murder of Meredith Kercher,” with a new one. The new article, dressed up in the usual objective language of the site, was, in the view of other Wikipedia editors, strongly biased against Amanda. But when these editors tried to add balancing information to the article, the anti-Amanda editors swiftly removed the edits, saying the material was based on unreliable sources. Among the sources they deemed unreliable were CBS News, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, criminologist Paul Ciolino,
Vanity Fair
reporter Judy Bachrach, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times
columnist Timothy Egan. At least two of the Wikipedia editors posted diatribes against Amanda on anti-Amanda websites under their Wikipedia user names, calling into question their neutrality. One such editor was the same BRMull who threatened Steve Moore’s daughter; BRMull was responsible for more than 400 edits to the article and had opined on cafemom.com: “I am a well-known Knox hater and proud of it.”