STORY:  "In memoir, Amanda Knox takes case to court of public opinion," by reporter Julie Bosman, published by the New York Times on April 18, 2013.

GIST: “Until now I have personally never contributed to any public discussion of the case or of what happened to me,” Ms. Knox, 25, wrote in an author’s note at the end of the book. “While I was incarcerated, my attention was focused on the trial and the day-to-day challenges of life in prison. Now that I am free, I’ve finally found myself in a position to respond to everyone’s questions. This memoir is about setting the record straight.”.........She pointed to the Italian prosecutors who she said willfully ignored and manipulated evidence while they clung to the theory that she and Mr. Sollecito were responsible for Ms. Kercher’s death. A conversation with her mother from prison was distorted to help place her at the scene of the crime and promptly leaked to a British newspaper, she writes. Prosecutors were just as adamant in making their case, presenting DNA and forensic evidence in court that they said proved her guilt. According to Ms. Knox’s account, the police interrogated her for hours and sporadically slapped her on the back of her head. Her requests to use the bathroom were denied. Eventually they goaded her into signing a statement that implicated herself and an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a bar where she worked. Confused and panicking after being taken to prison, Ms. Knox asked to make a phone call. “The guard looked at me like I’d asked for caviar and prosecco,” she wrote......... “First I showed not enough emotion; then I showed too much,” she wrote. “It’s as if any good will others had toward me was seeping out like a slow leak from a tire, without my even realizing it.” Later, a journal entry from that day, in which Ms. Knox wrote that she would “really like to say that I could kill for a pizza but it just doesn’t seem right,” would make her appear even more suspicious. In the book, she dismissed it as “gallows humor.” “The words in my journal were taken literally, and they damned me,” she wrote. “It was a situation I would find myself in again and again.”"