When Perseverance Doesn't Break Down Resistance
Persevere anyway and you may very well gain outcomes you didn't expect but come to value
Disciplined devotion to the cause will not always, despite what many popular quotes suggest, create the reasonable and desired breakthrough to an agonizing problem or injustice. As most all of us long ago learned, life disappoints.
Of course, this is not to say that disciplined commitment can’t “win the day.” It absolutely can achieve objectives and the mission. It’s just not a guarantee.
The question then becomes, “now what?”
There is one recent example that will addressed today. I will preface what I will communicate next by saying that I am unsure what really happened with this person. The Italian government thinks it knows, says it knows and the courts have agreed. The person in question however, disagrees.
Why is this important? The legal system doesn’t always get it correct. There is a long list of injustices that the courts have mercilessly inflicted on people.
“Italy’s highest court upheld Amanda Knox’s slander conviction, likely bringing her nearly two-decade legal saga to an end,” reported Tyler Piccotti at Biography.com.
This is a complex case that I won’t fully unwind here yet if you care to read about it, here is the link.
Two decades of effort. The passionately-wanted and pursued outcome, snuffed out.
“This past summer, Knox was found for the sixth time, to have wrongly blamed the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, her study-abroad roommate in Perugia, Italy, on the owner (Patrick Lumumba) of the bar where Knox worked part-time,” Piccotti reported.
Six times, rejected. Ruled responsible over and over again. It’s therefore easy to assume that Knox was guilty of slander to save herself in different ways.
This is a case of — saddle up, this is going to take a moment — a false accusation against her and another man, two convictions in error and wrongful imprisonments for murder, a deprivation of freedom, legal bills to address the legal process, an attack on her name and reputation, police misconduct, judicial malpractice and no ownership of the law enforcement conduct that led to the slander.
“Knox was exonerated of Kercher’s killing. An Italian court reconvicted her of slander in June 2024 related to her initial testimony and signed confession, accusing her former boss of the murder,” Piccotti wrote.
“Knox has maintained she made those statements after a lengthy police interrogation (and bullying tactics) without a translator or lawyer present. In October 2024, she told Reason, ‘my boss obviously was completely innocent and had nothing to do with this crime.’”
While one can squint and see how the slander evolved and feel at least a minimal amount of understanding, slandering someone, especially for murder, is deviant.
“My life as a man, husband and father has been ruined because of Amanda Knox,” Lumumba once said.
It’s crucial however, to at least take into account what Knox wrote (January, 2025) for The Atlantic.
“I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak,” Knox communicated.
“The night of Meredith’s murder, I had stayed with Raffaele Sollecito, a young man I’d just started dating. But no matter how many times I said that, the police refused to believe me.
“I was berated, threatened, lied to, and slapped, and eventually my sanity broke—I began to believe the lies the police were telling me, and I agreed to sign statements placing myself and another innocent man in the house when the crime had occurred. I recanted only a few hours later, but it didn’t matter.”
She elaborated on it, as Billy Binion reported on at Reason.com.
"A lot of people like to think that, if they were in my shoes, nothing short of being beaten with a rubber hose or dangled out a window would get them to implicate themselves or others in a crime that they knew they were innocent of she told me late last year on The Reason Interview,” Binion wrote.
"Obviously, the research speaks otherwise,” Knox told him. “But speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that I have never been put in a position of doubting my own sanity like I was in the hands of those police officers."
A Question
Is there any possibility, no matter how small, that Knox is being honest and for which she has long been punished for anyway?
When I ask if there is any possibility, I mean any at all.
What makes me believe that there is a scintilla that Knox could be telling the truth? Most guilty people don’t try as hard — stay as committed over years and endure great emotional, psychological, social, legal, societal and financial costs — to have their name redeemed, especially if they have their freedom.
Human beings, by nature, are going to give up after so many times of, figuratively speaking, having the door slammed in their face.
What She Feels Now
“It’s a surreal day,” Knox posted on X. “I’ve just been found guilty yet again of a crime I didn’t commit.’”
She Tells Her Story for Others
Knox has written about her experiences in Waiting to Be Heard and in, Free: My Search for Meaning, (release date, March 2025).
No matter what her critics think of her — and there’s certainly a lot of damning reporting easily accessible online — Knox has proven she’s not a quitter and that she wants to make her pain and trauma work for good for others.
Yes, in her case, financial benefit too but mostly to heal by telling the story of a moral crime and legal and social injustice she has long fought, endured and suffered.
Will her name be cleared? Legally? Maybe one day, yet for now it seems doubtful.
Knox may have to learn to live with it the best she can do. What I hope will be encouraging for her and others is to learn is that healing, maybe not full restoration, can come by communicating the facts and context in an concerted effort to help others in need, now and in the future.
That’s how, as a byproduct, her name can become a more positive narrative.
Knox can draw people to her for telling her story that resonates with them in some way and helps — or does so for those people that readers care about.
This newsletter — Reputation Intelligence — is written by Michael Toebe, and is a product of Reputation Intelligence - Reputation Quality, a firm which helps individuals and organizations assure a greater peace of mind, provide stress relief through reliable decision analysis, consulting, advisory and communications.
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