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AMANDA KNOX – THE woman who spent almost four years in an Italian prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder – will appear on RTÉ’s the Ray D’Arcy Show this Saturday.
US citizen Knox was convicted by a court in Perugia, Italy in 2009 for the murder of Leeds University exchange student Meredith Kercher.
Kercher’s body had been found in a pool of blood in the cottage she shared with Knox.
Knox became a suspect in the case and later implicated herself and two others in the murder of Kercher.
The manner in which she was interviewed by police is still under dispute.
Later in 2007, police in Germany arrested Ivorian immigrant Rudy Guede, who had fled Perugia, after DNA evidence linked him to the murder scene.
He was later sentenced to 30 years in jail for the murder and sexual assault of Kercher, but had his sentence reduced on appeal.
Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito went on trial for Kercher’s murder in 2009. The case attracted widespread domestic and international press attention.
Knox was heavily characterised in the Italian press for her supposed sexual promiscuity, with her diaries being released and scrutinised by the Italian press for evidence of this.
She and Solletico were convicted in 2009, and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively.
The conviction received huge criticism in the US and around the world for the manner in which the police investigation and the trial was conducted.
In 2011, after a retrial, Knox was acquitted of all charges and returned home immediately to the US.
She was later re-convicted following a trial in Florence where she wasn’t present. This was again overturned, with Italy’s top court ruling that Knox and Sollecito did not murder Kercher, bringing the case to an end.
After returning to the US, Knox wrote a book – Waiting to be Heard: A Memoir – giving an account of what she went through in Italy.
The murder and subsequent legal battles were also the subject of the popular 2016 Netflix documentary, Amanda Knox.
Knox will be a guest on the Ray D’Arcy Show on Saturday. She is expected to talk about what it was like to be imprisoned in a foreign country for a crime she did not commit and how her life dramatically changed with everything that happened.
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sell it and leave us in peace
@Johnny Mason: Aye, the one thing in the public service they don’t seem intent on privatising and it is the thing that would be best privatised.
@Jeffrey McMahon: only a foolish government would lose control of the media!
@Paddy: You are dead right. All governments need a state propaganda machine. Which we pay for!
Why are we still blindly following a 50 year old model of funding public service broadcasting here? In the 1960′s, there was was no other option but to fund the RTE organisation and trust it to deliver public service broadcasting. In 2018, doing this is simply funding the biased corporate monolith that RTE celeb land has become. Fund public service programming not the RTE organisation.
@Brian Deane: Agree but to be honest that place is on the wane and has been for years. Viewership numbers for the once popular programs such as the Late Late have been sliding for 10 years. The standard of their production and their programs is chronic (Fair City…Jesus wept). Look at who Tubridy can just about manage to drag on and compare it to Graham Norton.
@Tony Skillington: and we are forced to pay through the nose for this…
@Brian Deane: Corporate monolith!?! Let’s not get carried away.. They’re hardly competent enough to have become that. They’re more a parochial Micky Mouse operation that has been allowed to get way above it’s station. One that badly needs it’s wings clipped…
The Revenue Commissioners are letting the bogus self-employed in RTE with murder! How come? Not because RTE is the governments propaganda machine?
Finucane, O’Callaghan, Darcy, Duffy,
An overpaid collection of opinionated FG wafflers.
Make it subscription based, and they can do what they like with the money!
I thought Ming’s comment a few years back summed RTE up perfectly…. Marion Finucane gets €250,000 a year to have a cup of tea and a chat on Saturday and Sunday morning
Sell RTÉ! If the “top presenters” want to set up private companies let them. I want my €160.
Wow, that’s an expensive orchestra budget – one million euro per month ?
RTÉ should be sold off and the tax money given back to the people who work for it. Since losing Rugby and dare I even say soccer there is no value in the stations. Let me keep my €160
Just an example.. Why was one reporter-(Caitríona Perry) sent to America to interview another reporter-(Brian O’Donovan ) on Patrick’s weekend.
@Enuff Said: Also a reporter and a camera man touring the Caribbean for the sake of 4 minutes during the 6pm news.
The whole setup is a rort. A ‘licence’ required whether you look at the station or not. Then the government throw in a few hundred million and to add insult to injury, it’s full of paid advertising! The salaries paid to presenters and senior staff is exorbitant and unacceptable. The whole thing should be shut down tonight!
@Elizabeth Gregory: what do they do with all the competition money now being extracted from the public!
They’d wanna be a bit more impartial with the news. They seem to have an unwavering loyalty to FF and FG and their corrupt, incompetent gombeen politics.
Incestuous little organization…”your dad was great, so you can join too,no need to advertise the job!” I wouldn’t mind paying the license if there was a bit more transparency, if the “big boys” threaten to leave for more money, let them off, most of them wouldn’t get a job outside Ireland anyway. The orchestras should be self funding if they were good enough. Local radio stations should get more of the license fee, they at least provide some kind of a service to the community.
@zippo: more like your dad was a coke head, have a job dear
@Thomas Paine: I really thought the breakfast show on 2fm was about as bad as it could get with Jennifer zamparelli….but in fairness to the ” hugely talented” Lottie it’s reached a new low
Sell up quick lads….
Do we need twenty news bulletins a day. Or to send a reporter off to some random location for a day. Or some reporter standing in the snow during storm Emma over and over again. And then there’s fair city. It’s an embarrassment that is being produced even if there are sad people watching it making it commercially viable.
@James McCarthy
And yet it toom them 48 hours to send a reporter to Catalonia during their referendum. Prior to that, they relied on the British channels for information.
Something else I’ve noticed, particularly with radio, when an ‘expert’ is required, they nearly always have someone from a British university. Thereby the only opinion we get is a British one.
I’d rather stand outside burning 32 fivers rather than fund Daithi and co
Abolish the TV tax. State propaganda is State propaganda regardless of the State.
Whats the point when they seem to just spend their time interviewing each other and issuing regurgitated Govt releases as news reports?
Why isn’t D4bes controlling it? Sure isn’t she the best thing since sliced bread? Or just another waster.
I think the most shocking thing is Lyric FM gets €6m funding. Imagine how much a fraction of that would help independent local radio stations, many of which have greater listers and have a greater impact on the local communities.
“Remain independent in policy” Remain!! They are anything but independent; always taking one side in debates and pushing agendas and getting public funding to do it.
Give it all to tnag
We live in an era now we no longer require a state broadcasting station. 99.9% of channels are now viewed from outside this country. But it’s ridiculous to think that our Irish state will criminalise anyone who objects to funding the massive salaries of hyped up DJ’s and newsreaders. It’s actually against the law to refuse to contribute to Joe Duffy’s €500,000 salary !!!
RTE gave birth to itself like Frankenstein’s monster who time travels to fathers his creator? Familiarity breeds contempt?
Repeats repeats. Is rte for real. Don’t pay for the licence. You will get a fine if you don’t pay. Go to mountjoy they’ll look after you. And give you money to get a train or bus home. Plus ur grub.
With their bias towards FF FG, they are turning the nation against them. Propaganda shite…
Nothing a single thing do i watch on RTE , let it die
Do Lyric FM use taxpayers money to fund Marty Whelan’s jolly to watch the opera in Italy and to broadcast his show from there? If so then why do RTE think it acceptable to do this ?. You can see where the waste of money occurs. They take it as a given to waste money because there is no accountability of their actions
PAC lobbing PUCKS at RRRRTTTTEEEEEEEE
Much a do with Ta se mahogany gas pipes!! State funded windbags.
Give the committee teeth,or scrap it.
I like RTE – I love Nationwide, Room to Improve, Home of the Year – Perry and Shanley are crushing it on the News. I like the seasonality and Irish people talking about Irish matters. Very difficult to get enough good content – we have all seen it already or they can’t get it. I can’t stand Tubridy or Darcy and their salaries are ridiculous and they have way too much air time. Glad to see the politicians looking for a service agreement with RTE and article about it.
Could thejournal.ie find annual cost of taxis in RTE. Seems staff, guests and in RTE have taxis available to them.
Why are the most expensive presenters and newscasters despatched with crews to foreign and long-distance locations to conduct 4 or 5 minute interviews that could be done either by their own correspondent in the region or an on-site contract journalist, e.g. Miriam and crew get hotel and travel expenses to Belfast for a short Prime Time interview on a roof in Belfast yesterday that could have been done from the studio. Six-One news are constantly at it. Dobbo, Sharon, Eileen Dunne etc. presenting the news from bogs, housing estates, political party conferences etc. presumably with full crews, frequently interviewing themselves or their own local reporter.
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