More than 6,000 people and counting, have signed a petition demanding that Amanda Knox’s Edinburgh Fringe show be cancelled.

Think about that for a moment.

Amanda Knox was convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder, but her conviction was ultimately overturned by Italy’s highest court in 2015. She was ultimately exonerated of the murder. She spent years imprisoned and nearly a decade living under the crushing weight of a case that turned her into one of the most sensationalised women in the world. Here we are, almost twenty years later, still demanding that she be silenced. Still judging her. Still deciding what she is and isn't allowed to say about her own life, her own trauma and her own experience of being publicly destroyed. We are apparently supposed to believe that a woman who survived wrongful imprisonment, public vilification and a worldwide media circus has no right to use comedy as a way of processing what happened to her? 

Comedy does not mean the subject is funny. People use humour to survive grief, trauma, abuse, illness, death, injustice and experiences that would otherwise be unbearable. Comedy can be confronting. It can be uncomfortable. It can make us look directly at things we'd rather avoid. The Edinburgh Fringe has always been a place for exactly that kind of artistic expression.

What concerns me most about this petition is that people are condemning a show that, in many cases, they have not even seen. Amanda herself has pointed out that the petition makes assumptions about the content and purpose of Cartwheel without seeing it. The Fringe's own description says the show deals with motherhood, raising a daughter in a dangerous world and Amanda's experience of wrongful imprisonment. You are entitled to be uncomfortable. You are entitled to say, “I don't think this is appropriate.”

But demanding that another person be silenced because you don't approve of her telling her own story is something else entirely.

Let's not forget the extraordinary role the media played in this case. Amanda Knox was turned into a global character before the evidence had even been properly understood. She was portrayed as a monster, a sex-crazed manipulator, a psychopath, an innocent angel, a liar, the media created whatever version of Amanda sold the most newspapers and generated the most clicks. Her face was everywhere. Her personality was analysed. Her behaviour was dissected. Her every expression became "evidence." She became entertainment. And that media machine helped create the very mythology that continues to follow her today. So when Amanda finally says, This happened to me. I want to tell you what it was like. I want to reclaim my own narrative, suddenly people are outraged that she is talking about it?

That is the irony I cannot get past.

You don't have to like Amanda Knox's comedy. You don't have to buy a ticket. You don't have to laugh. But you do not get to erase her right to tell her own story simply because the subject makes you uncomfortable. There is also an important distinction here:

Respecting Meredith Kercher's memory and allowing Amanda Knox to speak are not mutually exclusive. Meredith was murdered. Her family carries an unimaginable loss. That deserves compassion and respect. But Amanda Knox did not murder Meredith. The final judgment in her case cleared her of the murder. Two women were caught in a horrific tragedy. One lost her life. The other lost years of hers, her freedom, her reputation and her sense of safety, and became one of the most recognisable faces of a worldwide media spectacle.

We should be able to hold both truths at once.

So, I suggest, instead of launching yet another campaign to silence Amanda Knox, we should ask ourselves a much harder question: Why are we still so determined to punish a woman who was already punished for something she did not do?

I would call it “herd mentality” or “the psychology of the crowd”. It is fascinating and frankly frightening to watch how quickly people can adopt the certainty of the loudest voices in the room. Someone makes a confident statement. Someone else repeats it. A headline turns it into a fact. Then thousands of people repeat the same conclusion until it becomes accepted as truth. And once a narrative has taken hold, very few people seem willing to stop and ask: Wait. What is the actual evidence? Have I looked at the whole story? Am I repeating something I know to be true or something I have simply heard often enough that it feels true?

That is how witch hunts happen. 

Not necessarily because thousands of people independently examined the evidence and reached the same conclusion, but because people follow the certainty of others. The loudest voices become the trusted voices. Nuance disappears. Contradictory evidence gets ignored. And eventually, questioning the dominant narrative becomes almost as unacceptable as supporting the person who has been condemned. Amanda Knox's story should have taught us precisely how dangerous that can be. The world watched a young woman become a global villain before the legal process had reached its final conclusion. People who had never met her and often knew very little about the evidence, felt completely certain that they knew who she was and what she had done.

Now, years later, I find it deeply ironic that the same phenomenon seems to be happening all over again. A group decides that Amanda should not be allowed to tell her own story through comedy. Strong voices make declarations about what the show supposedly represents. Others repeat those declarations. A petition gains thousands of signatures. And suddenly the sheer number of people objecting becomes its own form of "proof." But popularity does not make an accusation true. And thousands of people repeating something does not turn it into evidence. Maybe instead of asking “Why are so many people against her?”, we should occasionally have the courage to ask:“ Why are so many people against her, and how many of them have actually looked beyond the narrative they've been given?”

Perhaps we also need to remember something very fundamental about trauma: people process it differently. There is no single "correct" way to speak about something devastating that has happened to you. 
Some people write about it. Some make art. Some become activists. Some retreat into silence. Some use anger. Some use music. And some use humour. Humour does not necessarily diminish the seriousness of what happened. Sometimes it is precisely the way a person can approach something that was once unbearable. 

Amanda has lived through an experience that very few of us could ever understand. She has spent years having her life, her personality, her relationships, her emotions and her trauma interpreted by other people. She should be allowed to interpret and express her own experience in whatever form makes sense to her. We don't have to share her perspective. We don't have to find her humour funny. We don't even have to agree with everything she says. 

But there is something profoundly troubling about telling a person that they are not allowed to express their own trauma because other people don't approve of the way they have chosen to process it. 

If we genuinely care about trauma, shouldn't we also care about giving people the freedom to find their own way through it? We cannot demand that survivors speak about their experiences only in ways that make everyone else comfortable.

For God's sake, let this woman finally have ownership of her own story.

The witch hunt has gone on long enough.

- T. Winther

I write this as a survivor of trauma who eventually discovered that freedom of expression through art, writing, poetry and other creative forms, can help us process what we've been through, find our way back to ourselves, and keep us from falling into the darkness.