The Amanda Knox Haters Society: How They Learned to Hate Me Too

[Time]

When Italy's highest court reversed the acquittal of Amanda Knox and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito this week,  a small cottage industry on the internet began grinding back into high gear. Actually it has never had a down day: the Knox-hating websites have been passing along innuendo and cherry-picked factoids for six years now. If you have taken a dive down into the Amanda Knox rabbit hole, you will discover a couple of persistent acronyms. The first is PMF. That would be the Perugia Murder File, operated by a Seattle housewife and former French translator who is dedicated to the guilt of Amanda Knox. The other acronym you will encounter is TJMK, which stands for "True Justice For Meredith Kercher"—the young British woman murdered in this case–and is run by a New Jersey-based Englishman who claims that at one time he consulted at the United Nations. (MORE: Amanda Knox's Ex-Boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito Publishes Tell-All) These sites host extremely active avatars, many proclaiming to be lawyers, forensic experts, criminologists, but who never reveal their true identities. Researching my 2011 book on the Knox case The Fatal Gift of Beauty, I met both moderators behind the acronymic websites. In 2009, I sat down with TJMK founder Peter Quennell, who has always claimed he started the site to make sure that no one forgot the victim. A stout, ruddy Englishman living in New Jersey, he had been holding out the carrot of introducing me to the elusive Kercher family. He seemed vastly knowledgeable and connected. At the time, I also believed that Amanda Knox could be, indeed, a Charles Manson behind a pretty face. After a month in Italy doing reporting, however, I realized that some of the "facts" on Quennell's  website didn't seem to be in the police record in Italy. I emailed him to ask where he had found out that Knox and Sollecito  met police standing outside the murder house with a mop and bucket in hand. That damning incident  was nowhere in the record, not even the prosecutor would confirm it,

Via: TIME GlobalSpin