Amanda Knox and Lorena Bobbitt team up on behalf of ‘shamed and vilified women’
They’ve each been involved in notorious criminal cases. Now, Amanda Knox and Lorena Bobbitt Gallo are finding common ground over their shared infamy by teaming up for a live podcast episode.
Knox — the former American exchange student who served almost four years in an Italian prison for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher before her conviction was overturned in 2015 — announced on Instagram this week that she’d invited Bobbitt to tape a live episode of her podcast, The Truth About True Crime, during the Death Becomes Us Festival in Washington, D.C.
Bobbitt, who currently uses her birth name Lorena Gallo, became a household name and late-night punchline in 1993 after severing then-husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis as he slept and tossing it into a field. The attack, she explained, was prompted by her husband’s alleged rape and years of domestic abuse. She was found not guilty due to insanity and now works as a domestic violence advocate.
"Lorena and I have a lot in common,” Knox, now 32, told Washington, D.C. news station WTTG ahead of the event. “The thing that resonates most with me when we both spoke to each other over the phone was how this is a historic moment in the history of shamed and vilified women.
“You don't see shamed and vilified women coming forward and supporting each other, reclaiming narratives and calling into account all those forces that are turning us into characters that are in morality plays and exploiting our trauma for the sake of profit and entertainment.”
“We are human beings,” added Bobbitt, 49. “Just like you, just like people sitting watching television. We are human, we are women and we can support each other.”
Knox, meanwhile, has criticized “armchair detectives” enthralled with the true crime genre without respecting the real people involved.
“I think people expect us to crawl under a rock of shame and die,” she noted. “We are showing that not only are we the characters you thought we were, but we have a right.”
The podcast episode will be released at a later date.
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
