Foxy Knoxy almost dipped into the lady pool in the pokey!
Amanda Knox opened up about her friendship with a female inmate that almost turned sexual during her time in an Italian jail in a new essay for
Vice, and it's an utterly fascinating glimpse into what life was like behind bars until she was acquitted of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2015.
The 29-year-old first met Leny (whose name was changed) three years into her four year stay at the Perugia women's facility, when the "small town drug dealer" first approached her in the prison yard.
"Deny told me about how, in Italy, she had experienced a lot of judgement and closed-mindedness. I sympathized. When I was 14, a rumor went around my Catholic high school that I was a lesbian, alienating me from everyone but a small group of my classmates. Later, I became an LGBTQ ally and helped found the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school," she recounted.
"When I told her that, Leny grinned ear-to-ear. Afterwards, she scampered, puppy-like, alongside me as I paced the exercise yard – the next day, and the day after that, and eventually every day," she added.
Knox says that for a while, it seemed Leny just enjoyed the company.
"
At least initially, Leny might not have been trying to seduce me, and was actually just in need of someone kind to distract her from her loneliness. This is common. Contrary to what you might guess, many prison relationships aren’t about sex — just like most relationships outside of prison," she wrote.
After a while, Leny worked up the courage to plant a smooch on the unexpecting exchange student.
"I gritted my teeth and half-smiled, wavering between embarrassment and anger. It was bad enough that the prison institution took ownership of my body ― that I was caged and strip-searched on a regular basis and had already been sexually harassed by male guards," she revealed.
Knox understands the curiosity about how women's sexuality can become fluid while incarcerated.
"We’re intrigued by the idea of prison relationships, in part because we’re morbidly curious about anything to do with transgressors and criminals, but also because their relationships are titillating and a little mysterious. We overlook non-sexual romantic relationships. The relationships inmates establish with each other are treated as nothing more than kinky lies to be ashamed of upon returning to the real world. But they’re not. ‘Gay for the stay’ is an insensitive oversimplification that signals a lack of understanding about what it’s really like to be imprisoned, and an underestimation of human nature," she concluded.
Oh to be a fly on the wall!
