Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2324 - Amanda Knox
Uploaded: 2025-05-20T17:01:11.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2324 - Amanda Knox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2324 - Amanda Knox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-20. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2324 - Amanda Knox

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello.
Hey.
Good to see you.
Good to see you again.
You have a book?
I do.
Yeah, I hope you like it.
Free.
That's a great name for it.
Yeah, well, it's on point.
Yeah, it's on the nose.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, that whole question of what does it mean to be free and what, you know,
yes, there's the physical like, oh, you're out of prison, but then also
is your life the thing that you expected it to be and how do you make your own
freedom
when you feel hemmed in by all of the things that happened to you, so.
Yeah, you're connected to that forever.
That's always going to be a part of your life.
It's not like anything else that didn't really happen, like you didn't do
anything,
and you're connected to something that you didn't really do forever.
For people that don't know the story.
Yeah, yeah.
We should do a little recap.
Recap.
Okay.
Recap, friends.
Real quick.
Recap, friends.
And you can go back to the episode of Joe Rogan.
What number was that?
I don't know.
Not the top of your head.
If you just Google Amanda Knox, you'll go, holy shit.
They'll go down a crazy rabbit hole.
Yes.
So, in a nutshell, what happened?
Yeah.
I was studying abroad when I was 20 years old in Perusia, Italy.
One of my roommates was raped and murdered by a burglar who broke into our home.
But I was accused of having orchestrated a murder orgy.
And I was sent to prison for four years.
I was sentenced to 26 years.
And it became this international scandal where it sort of pinged all of the
buttons in all
the right places.
This happened in 2007.
So, you know, early 2000s when the internet was, or the internet, the social
media was really
becoming a thing.
The iPhone was becoming a thing.
I think that that played a huge role of people sort of going into their little
echo chambers
and fighting online.
And so I think that there was, yeah, it was a case that for whatever reason
rose above the
level of other cases, like, ultimately, this case was actually very simple, and
it wouldn't
have risen to the level of international infamy were it not for the series of
mistakes that
the prosecution and the detectives made at the very beginning by trying to pin
a man's
crime on me, a woman.
Yeah.
And if anybody wants, there's a documentary.
Yes.
There's a Netflix documentary.
I wrote a book called Waiting to be Heard.
And then more recently, I wrote this book, Free My Search for Meaning, which
covers, like,
you know, you can read it and learn about the case, but it's mostly about how
do you come
out of an experience like that and make sense of it.
And then one of the big stories in it is how I then developed a relationship
with my prosecutor,
which I think you'll probably be in the camp of people of thinking that I'm
utterly insane
for having done that.
Maybe, maybe, maybe you won't.
I just remember that when we talked about this back in the day, you were like,
this motherfucker.
Yeah.
So you've become friends with him?
Friend is an interesting word.
What is a friend?
Someone else asked me that, like, I was like, it depends on what you mean by
friend.
And because, and they said, well, do you trust him?
And I said, well, I, I think that at the point that we are now in our
relationship, I do trust him.
I trust that he's telling me the truth about what he really thinks and feels
about the situation.
So I feel like I have very privileged, special access to the mind of the person
who put me in prison.
And that is a very interesting, awkward, but also empowering place for me to be.
Because one of the things that really bothered me about this experience was not
understanding why it happened to me.
Why did this man look at a 20-year-old girl with no criminal history, no
motivation to commit this crime?
Why did he look at me and think, there's my rapist and murderer?
And I didn't understand it.
And I didn't feel like demonizing him in my mind or vilifying him in my mind
was going to actually give me a satisfying answer as to the why of it all.
A lot of people said, well, it's just because he's a bad dude.
He doesn't care what the truth is.
He's just covering his ass.
Like, these were all really simplistic ways of framing his motivations.
And I didn't really buy them.
So instead, what I was interested in was going to the source and confronting
him, asking why.
But to ask someone, why did you hurt me?
Which I think is a really common thing that people who have been hurt want to
know.
Is they want an acknowledgement that they've been hurt and they want to
understand why.
And they want to know if that person's not going to hurt them anymore or not
going to hurt other people.
Like, that's really common for people who have been hurt.
The challenge is that people who hurt other people don't like to be confronted
with that fact.
And so how do you start a conversation that's not going to immediately become
adversarial?
And that was one of my biggest challenges.
But I came up with this methodology that I actually became so important to me
that I tattooed it on my arm.
So this is it.
There are four steps.
And the first one is find common ground.
So it's this Venn diagram.
Find common ground.
I promise you that every single person on this earth, you have something in
common with them.
Find it.
So I asked myself, what could I and my prosecutor have in common?
I didn't know this man.
I didn't know what his history was, what his background was.
But I did know that he, like me, was part of this really big scandalous in the
media case.
And he very likely felt misconstrued or misrepresented also in the process,
maybe dehumanized in the process.
And so I reached out to him and I acknowledged that fact.
I said, hey, I don't know who you are.
I only ever encountered you in the police office and in the courtroom where you
were someone who was trying to ruin my life.
So you were a big, scary boogeyman and I saw you in the media and I, you know,
I've seen how the media represented you.
But I, knowing from experience, I know how that can be very misrepresentative.
So I said to him, I want to know who you really are.
And I hope that you might be interested to know who I really am, because I don't
think you know who I really am.
I don't think that you would have prosecuted me if you knew who I really am.
And that was the beginning of the dialogue, this like, I went out of my way to
acknowledge that he might have had noble motivations, even if he was wrong.
And I think this is like a really important thing is I, I wanted to give him
radical benefit of the doubt.
Maybe, just maybe, this like horrible thing that happened to me could have been
the result of understandable mistakes.
And if anything, I think coming into contact with the innocence movement and
criminal justice system stuff and reform, all the stuff that I've learned after
having gone through this experience has made me realize that like some of the
most horrible things can happen and can be enacted by people who have the best
of intentions.
And so I assumed that of him, and I gave him that benefit of the doubt, and as
soon as I like opened that door, like, hey, you hurt me, but maybe that wasn't
your intention.
Maybe your intention was something else.
He filled that void with his story and his message and, and what he wanted me
to understand about himself.
And, I mean, one of the wildest things about this book is that I talk about,
like, I do not sugarcoat what I went through, like, and especially what he did
to me.
Like, I very, like, clearly set out, like, here's the fucked up shit he said
about me in court, completely without evidence, like totally made up bullshit.
Like, and it ruined my life, right?
Here's what it is.
Acknowledge these facts.
And also, and also, here is a person who might have had, like, in doing so,
might have been coming from a place of trying to rationalize things in his own
mind, which is a thing that we all do.
We all do on a, on a regular basis.
We're all just sort of interpreting our reality in the way that suits us.
And so I, and I wrote this book from my perspective.
I translated the entire thing into Italian before it ever got published so that
I could share it with him, so that he would know what I was saying about him in
public, what was imminently going to come out.
And his response was, I have never felt more seen.
That's what he told me.
That sounds like something a teenage girl would say.
Well, that's an interesting observation.
Because it's become quite emotional, especially on his part.
I don't know, I, I, I shouldn't go there too much.
You're protecting his privacy?
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
You're a very nice person.
You're so much nicer than me.
Well, I don't know.
I've just had really bad stuff happen to me and like, I don't wish bad stuff
upon other people.
That's a beautiful way to live your life.
It really is.
I mean, that's what all Christians aspire to is what you're doing.
Yeah, I guess I'm not a Christian.
Radical forgiveness.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I didn't really set out for people like point to that.
They're like, forgiveness, forgiveness.
You're doing forgiveness.
And I was like, is this forgiveness or is this?
Just communicating with him is forgiveness in some way and not having extreme
anger.
Well, that's the thing.
I do have extreme anger.
Like, that's all part of it.
And this is where like the Buddhist in me comes out where you can have extreme
anger towards a person.
And at the same time, hold them in your hand as this like tender, fallible
creature that is capable of violence against you, but is also capable of being
hurt.
Just because someone hurt you doesn't mean that they're not capable of being
hurt.
And I certainly don't want to be in the position of hurting someone.
Like, that's just who I am.
And if anything, like one thing that I've communicated to him is like, look, I
don't know if you're ever going to really wrap your head around what you did to
me.
But if you do one day, I know that you're going to feel really, really bad.
And I just want you to know that I don't wish suffering on you.
I don't.
Did you ask him if he had gone over any of his previous cases and wondered
whether he did the same thing to other people?
Because I don't think that's something you do once.
I don't think you are an ethical prosecutor who just really objectively analyzes
the evidence and puts forth a case based on what you think is the facts.
I don't think you do that your whole career.
And then this 20-year-old bitch, I think, she's too cute.
I don't like how she's smiling.
Yeah, there was that element to it.
It has to be.
Well, yeah, I think that and I do feel like there was some kind of pornographic
nature to it.
Like, I don't know.
Like, I think that maybe.
Well, there's a lot of men that have like a deep resentment for beautiful women.
Just from feelings of rejec