How can Amanda Knox's new show bring an end to sIut-shaming?

Amanda Knox interviewing Amber Rose. (Photo: Broadly/Amanda Knox Reports)

Sabrina Rojas Weiss
yahoo

Hester Prynne had to stand on a scaffold in the middle of town, wearing her red letter “A” for adultery in the novel from which the new Broadly Facebook series The Scarlet Letter Reports gets its name. Compared to series host Amanda Knox and her interview subjects, you might wonder if Hester got off easy.

[post_ads]In the series, which premiered Wednesday morning, Knox talks to women about the public shaming and abuse they experienced in the media and online after daring to speak up for themselves while also being female. In the 10-minute segments she sits down with Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist video blogger who was a target of Gamergate abuse; Amber Rose, who has been badmouthed by exes Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa; Mischa Barton, who took her exes to court for their threats of revenge pοrn; Daisy Coleman, the Missouri teen bullied by an entire town after she was date raped; and Brett Rossi, the pοrn star who has sued ex-fiancé Charlie Sheen for assault.

“I’m looking at women who’ve all had very different experiences, but they all have echoes of the same problem,” Knox tells Yahoo Lifestyle of her subjects. That problem is the way society simultaneously seχualizes women for profit and then vilifies them for it.
Yeah, Amanda’s Been There

Knox isn’t exactly approaching this as an objective journalist. In the show, she addresses the way police, prosecutors, and the media used her own seχuality as proof that she murdered her roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. She was acquitted of all charges upon appeal in 2011, and again by the Italian Supreme Court in 2015. Since then, she has been working as a writer and advocate for the wrongly convicted. She pitched the idea for The Scarlet Letter Reports (at first simply as an article for Broadly) knowing she would bring her own context to the subject.

“This isn’t going to be an interview, this is going to be a conversation between two women who have been there,” she says. “I can’t pretend I’m not me.”

In the first episode, Knox curls up on Sarkeesian’s couch and nods knowingly as she listens to her tales of being digitally edited into pοrnography and receiving graphic death threats.
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“As someone who has been vilified in the media, [I know] it takes a lot of courage to be willing to sit across from me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been there and I see you and I hear you,’ ” Knox explains. “That’s what the women said to me, as much as I was saying that to them.”