Amanda Knox: image et relations publiques

On peut déterminer avec certitude les retombées des efforts pour modifier l'image d'Amanda Knox avant et pendant le procès. Un survol des efforts déployés.

"When Amanda Knox and her family landed home in Seattle on Tuesday, it was the culmination of an exhaustive four-year legal, lobbying and public relations effort that ultimately succeeded when an Italian court overturned her murder conviction and freed her from prison.

The Knox family hired a public relations company specializing in crisis management soon after Ms. Knox was arrested in 2007 during her junior year abroad in Perugia, accused along with two men of killing her housemate, Meredith Kercher, during a sexual attack. Volunteers — including parents of Ms. Knox’s former classmates at Seattle Prep — created a Web site that posted wholesome family snapshots of Ms. Knox. It was all part of an effort to counter her portrayal by prosecutors and in the European press as a “she-devil.”

At one point a Seattle judge was admonished for using court stationery to write to Italian officials on her behalf. And Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, championed her case, reaching out to both American and Italian officials.

A tearful Ms. Knox thanked her supporters Tuesday evening at a brief news conference at Sea-Tac Airport. “I’m really overwhelmed right now — I was looking down from the airplane and it seemed like everything wasn’t real,” she said, after her parents reminded her to speak English. “What’s important for me to say is just thank you to everyone who has believed in me, who had defended me, who has supported my family.”

In some respects, her supporters had their work cut out for them. The crime Ms. Knox had been accused and eventually convicted of was lurid, her statements to the police were inconsistent and DNA evidence presented at trial seemed to link her to the brutal killing. Her case — with its nightmarish elements of a young American in Italy caught up in a sexually charged murder case — brought international notoriety to Ms. Knox. The British tabloids took to calling her Foxy Knoxy, adopting a nickname she had used herself on her Facebook and MySpace pages. (Her family said later that the nickname referred to her soccer skills, not her love life.)

But by the time she was freed from an Italian prison on Monday, her public portrayal was very different: Many media accounts in the United States, at least, portrayed Ms. Knox as a nice young woman, a linguistics major at the University of Washington, who had fallen victim to the Italian justice system while on her junior year abroad.

No one can say for sure whether the painstaking and calculated rehabilitation of her image helped sway the Italian courts. Ultimately, it was an official report casting doubt on the DNA evidence in the case that led to her exoneration. But the media frenzy was mentioned by both the prosecution and the defense last month in court."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/court-fight-and-tireless-battle-over-an-image.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2