The Never Ending Story

In her new Facebook Watch series, The Scarlet Letter Reports, Amanda Knox interviews women, like herself, who have been tried and convicted by the media

- Maria Vultaggio

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S classic novel The Scarlet Letter tells the story of Hester Prynne, a 17th-century woman who wears the letter A stitched to her dress—a sign that she has committed the sin of adultery. In 1642, Prynne was forced to stand on a scaffold, to be shamed and condemned by her neighbors. Now, of course, the scaffold is social media, and neighbors number in the millions.

Take Amanda Knox. The American was convicted, along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of killing British fellow student Meredith Kercher in 2007. The three had been studying in the small city of Perugia, Italy, and Knox and Sollecito’s arrest for the crime riveted the world. She got the worst of it: Total strangers deemed her a slut and a murderer; headlines (her tabloid moniker was “Foxy Knoxy”) and an internet mob found her guilty long before she was sentenced to 26 years in prison. When Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in a second trial in 2011, Knox moved home to Seattle, which didn’t mean the vilification stopped.

So Knox knows about shaming, and thus the name for her new five part, Vice Media–produced interview show: The Scarlet Letter Reports (currently streaming on Facebook Watch). In it, she interviews women who have been publicly attacked by the media, social and otherwise. Subjects include model Amber Rose and Daisy Coleman, who became an advocate for sexual assault education after she was victimized. All of the subjects, like the host, have been publicly demonized and are now rebuilding their lives.