Amanda Knox gets real about prison and her fears that she would never become a mother

In a very personal interview today with the popular podcast Infertile AF, Amanda Knox gets real about spending four years in prison and fears that she would never become a mother, even comtemplating suicide

Now mom to one-year-old Eureka, Amanda also talks about her devastating “missed miscarriage,” finding love after being “vilified in the press,” her friendship with Monica Lewinsky, why she considers herself “lucky,” and how she is advocating to help wrongfully convicted women everywhere.

The revealing, highly entertaining interview comes on the heels of Infertile AF’s announcement that the podcast has reached 555,000 unique global downloads. Listen to the rest of the episodes here.

Here are some of the highlights from Infertile AF’s interview

On being wrongly convicted

“The moment that I was convicted and I was sentenced, I was no prepared for it because I had been experiencing this investigation and two years of imprisonment and a whole year on trial, from the perspective of, This is all just a big misunderstanding and the adults in the room are gonna figure it out, and I’m gonna get to go home. And my mom was very patiently alongside me the entire way, telling me, We are in a tunnel. But there is a light at the end of this tunnel and you’re going to be found innocent, the truth is going to be vindicated, and we’re gonna take you home. And indeed, my entire family showed up for that verdict, my littlest sisters who were preteens at the time and not even old enough to go into the courtroom were there, waiting to take me home. We had a plane ticket and everything, and then I was convicted. Then everything I thought I could trust in the world: That the truth mattered, that the criminal justice system was like a scientific laboratory where all this extraneous information is boiled down to truth without a reasonable doubt, all of that disappeared. And I realized that the truth didn’t matter, and that the story mattered. That the villain that the prosecution had created mattered to people, and I didn’t.”

On how her prison sentence meant she might never become a mother

“I went back into my prison cell and I had to completely reframe this experience that was happening to me. I had been processing this whole thing, thinking, This is a temporary thing. This is not my life. This is, I’m sort of in this limbo space that’s not really my life, and I’m gonna get my life back as soon as the world figures it out. And I had this, like, deep, deep visceral sad realization that Oh no, this is my life. And my life is not what I thought it was going to be. And not only am I not gonna go home, I’m not gonna have a career, I’m not gonna have a family. Like, the loneliness of that. I was already experiencing loneliness, and then the loneliness or realizing that I was not gonna share my life with a man I loved and I was not going to have children deeply, deeply impacted me. And I tried to think, If that’s not true anymore, how do I make my life worth living?”

On how the criminal justice system affects fertility and family building

“What I lost was not just time and youth and human potential, but also there was the prospect of a family. That was very very real and lost for me in that moment. And it is lost for any woman who is sentenced to lose her childbearing years to prison. I wanted to point out that there is a unique cost that the criminal justice system doesn’t really take into consideration, when we are sentencing women for crimes, and that we should potentially be thinking about that.”

On considering herself lucky

“I consider myself honestly a very lucky person, to be honest. Yeah, if you think about it, I didn’t get murdered, first of all. The only reason I wasn’t murdered the same day that Meredith was murdered was because I had met a nice boy five days earlier. Raffaele Sollecito, I didn’t know him from a long time. I met him five days earlier and was hanging out with him, and that’s why I wasn’t home that night, and that’s why I wasn’t murdered. So I consider myself an incredibly lucky person. and it’s mind boggling to me that despite this incredible stigma that I live with to this day, I stumbled upon a person who instead of like, paying attention to true crime and being on the up and up with all these crazy stories that are out there, in the world, he’s a poetry guy. All those years that I was in prison, my now-husband was traveling around at artist colonies and writing poetry. True crime was not his thing.”

On finding love after being a tabloid villain

“For me, I came out of prison thinking that I could never ever ever meet a new person again who didn’t know who I am and who didn’t already have some weird idea about me because they had heard about this idea of the villain, Amanda Knox, in the media, and even if they had good thoughts about me, are they going to be wrapped up in the image or the story and not just little old me who had this bad thing happen to them? The idea that someone would love me because of the worst experience of my life and not just love me, that was something I was deeply scared of.”

Amanda Knox gets real about prison and her fears that she would never become a mother IVF Babble

On bonding with Monica Lewinsky

“That’s kind of my schtick. I always try to connect with people who end up, especially women, who end up becoming vilified and cartoon cutouts for our sort of, schadenfreude entertainment content. Yeah, I’ve absolutely spoken to Monica Lewinsky, I consider her a friend, and she’s been through hell. Notably, she doesn’t have family, doesn’t have children yet, because it’s been, that story about her is something that distances her from the rest of society in a meaningful way.”

On her devastating miscarriage

Then to walk into that eight-week ultrasound, so looking forward to seeing for the first time this real person that’s happening inside of me, and then to have the nurse pause, and be quiet and then say, ‘I have to get the doctor…” And then that disbelief and dread to feel that settle on me. I had what they call a missed miscarriage. The fetus was dead, it wasn’t developing, but my body hadn’t figured it out yet. There was that feeling of just like, How? How could I not know that something that is a part of me is dead and gone? As I was losing this pregnancy, in a toilet, in pads in my underwear, I kept feeling like, Where is my baby in all of this? Where did it go? Where did the love go? It felt like my love was still there, but where was the baby? And it just hurt way more than I was anticipating. and it gave me this feeling of dread and existential uncertainty that I was not expecting to feel about pregnancy and motherhood.”

On the anxiety of pregnancy after miscarriage

I was very uncertain. The first trimester I really struggled with it emotionally. Second trimester was better, and then third trimester, I was convinced I was gonna die. Like, no one could talk me out of it. Everyone was like, ‘You know that that’s not rational, you know that the likelihood of that happening…’ And it’s like, ‘Well, you know what the likelihood of being wrongfully convicted is?’ I absolutely could die.”

To listen to the full interview visit here.