"I can't make it sincere enough": Karen Read, Amanda Knox, and the performance of innocence

Photo by DJ Paine on Unsplash

I had heard about the MAX docuseries A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read enough times that, although I don’t do much true crime, I tried it one Sunday night.

I watched two episodes straight before prying myself to bed.

The show kicks off with an intriguing exchange between Karen Read — accused of murdering her boyfriend — and a producer:

Producer: So, did you drive your car into John?

Karen Read: I did not drive my car into John. Didn’t reverse it… did not hit John with my car.

Producer: Is there any chance this was an accident?

Read: There’s zero chance this was an accident. There is zero chance John was hit by a vehicle.

*smirk*

Producer: [Reacting to Read’s smirk] You’re tired of it, you’ve spent so much time … You know I have to ask.

Read: No, I just — No. I’m not tired of it. I hate answering it because —

I feel like I’m being so scrutinized, like did she blink three times or twice? And did she like smirk or look to the right and down and up and left and whatever and it just feels so, like fake, even though it’s true. I’d rather like explain everything else. And like I did not hit John with my car. I can’t make it sincere enough.

*smirk*

I hate saying it.

The camera fixes on Read closely, reality-TV-confessional style, while we hear the producer’s questions off camera.

The series is actually sympathetic to Read, and follows the events of her first trial for the murder of her boyfriend. (The second trial is happening now).

But the question propelling the series is: Did she do it?

From that sneery introduction, your first impression as the viewer is that Read is guilty and doesn’t care. The rest of the series gives you reason to question that. Onlookers are divided, but I think she’s innocent.

My autism diagnosis earlier this year was an aha! for so many things. Such as why I show different emotions outwardly from what I’m feeling inside.

I laugh at moments of high tension. In high school, I scraped my parents’ car backing out of our driveway – pretty badly. I sat them down in the living room to break the news. I felt terrible and wanted them to know that, but all I could do was laugh as I told them what happened. Why am I laughing? I wondered, frustrated.

The same thing has happened in other fraught moments. These are moments when I feel bad inside — ashamed, embarrassed, sorry — yet I can’t stop awkwardly smiling.

It’s not just shame or embarrassment. When I’m feeling deep joy in the presence of another person, I don’t know how to express it. If I try, it’s awkward. (Luckily I’ve never had trouble expressing joy and love with my children, which is an interesting difference.)

When I’m really, really angry or frustrated, I might yell at first but the overwhelming physical expression is deep, shaking sobs.

None of this has ever made sense to me. My inner emotions and the way I express them are all mixed up.

If someone judged how I feel based solely on how I behave, they’d draw the wrong conclusion every time.

I’ve tried to research the neurological basis for this trait, but I’ve turned up only research reporting that the challenge exists, not why. It may relate to alexithymia, which most sources define as being unaware of your emotions. I have that too, but it’s different from what I’m talking about here: a mismatch between my internal emotional state (which I do recognize) and my external behavior.

Alexithymia is sometimes used more broadly for assorted challenges with emotion, including “expressive and affective challenges.” That seems to be what I experience — expressive challenges.

This is an under-examined aspect of autism in the research. Yet other people with autism report similar challenges. Julia Maher’s thoughtful piece on emotional challenges in autism concludes that, “Ultimately, my external appearance does not always reflect my internal reality.”

False accusations disproportionately affect people of color. There are many reasons this is so: racism; racial bias in perception and memory, leading to mistaken eyewitness IDs; policing practices; charging disparities; and unequal access to legal resources.

As a white woman, I’m insulated from many of these risks. The figure of wrongful imprisonment I relate to most is Amanda Knox. She wasn’t a victim of racial profiling. Her entanglement with the Italian justice system stemmed from how she behaved — strangely and coldly. According to prosecutors, the media, and Kercher’s friends, Knox’s behavior was not that of an innocent woman.

For that, she spent four years in prison and eight years being pursued by prosecutors. She was robbed of her youth and gaslit about who she was and what she was capable of.

The evidence at Knox’s trial was mostly about what happened after the murder:

• Knox and her boyfriend kissed not far from the crime scene, which was seen as indifference.

• Knox sat on her boyfriend’s lap at the police station and made faces at him, which was proof that she didn’t mourn Kercher’s death.

• One of Kercher’s study-abroad friends testified that Knox “showed no emotion” after the murder, when everyone else was visibly distraught.

• Another friend of Kercher’s sought a consoling hug from Knox, but Knox rejected it, evidence of her “cold” behavior.

• When another Kercher friend said she hoped Kercher didn’t suffer, Knox responded: “How could she not have suffered? She got her fucking throat slit!” That, too, was taken as evidence of a lack of empathy.

• Knox didn’t attend Kercher’s memorial service and other public gatherings of mourning, which she later said was because she was afraid to go alone and of awkward conversations, but was cited as evidence of “strange coldness” and “odd detachment.”

It’s striking how much trial evidence condemning Knox’s behavior came from Kercher’s friends, Knox’s own study-abroad peers.

Amanda Knox has never said she’s autistic. Neither has Karen Read.

This means that even apparently neurotypical people stumble in performing their innocence. Because when you’re accused of a crime, that’s what innocence becomes: a performance that you can fail.

Sociologist Erving Goffman’s view is that all social behavior is a performance. Not just for neurodivergent people; for everyone. When we interact with others, Goffman said, we are performing, even if we’re not aware of it.

Accepting Goffman’s framework, the difference for autistic people is that we’re highly aware we’re performing. The performance is at the forefront of our minds, which makes it less natural and more tiring.

Read’s statement at the start of this piece — “I can’t make it sincere enough” — and Goffman’s interaction-as-performance theory links to yet another MAX docuseries: The Rehearsal, which critics are raving about during its second season. (The Guardian called it “TV’s most fascinating show.”)

(Read my Note explaining why The Rehearsal is an autistic amusement park here.)

In season 2 episode 4, Nathan Fielder says:

I’ve always felt sincerity was overrated. It just punishes the people who perform it better than others.

Read’s struggle — “I can’t make it sincere enough” — illustrates the very problem Fielder identifies in his theory of performed sincerity.

If Goffman is right that all social interaction is a performance, then what separates a successful performance from a flop? Logically, the way to deliver a convincing performance is to study people who’ve been believed in similar situations, and mimic them.

But where are the models for how to act when falsely accused of murder? I can’t think of any.

Even though Knox hasn’t identified as autistic, I wonder: could Knox have been experiencing emotional delay in the aftermath of Kercher’s murder?

It’s an autistic phenomenon in which a person doesn’t process the emotional significance of an event until later — days or even months.

I recently made a connection between emotional delay and my own issues. I was talking with my husband about autistic meltdowns, where a person can go from 0 to 60 and absolutely lose it. Just unleash an angry, emotional outburst. I’m embarrassed, ashamed, to say that I have a history of this.

These outbursts seem to come from nowhere. I feel fine one minute, and then an irritation occurs — my husband is late again, my husband corrects my phrasing again (it’s always my husband these days, but there’ve been others), and suddenly a cascade of related irritations bears down.

Whatever the nature of the irritation, suddenly it seems that it has always been present and always will be present; a psychic disruption without end. And I explode.

I now wonder: could my meltdowns be the build up of unexperienced emotion finally bubbling to the surface? Caused by a delay in processing emotions from earlier, related events? I’m finding this a convincing explanation for why everything seems fine… until suddenly, in the face of some fairly ordinary provocation, it’s not fine at all.

In writing this, I wonder if this kind of processing delay might explain Knox’s behavior too. Doing a cartwheel after a murder might seem utterly different from a meltdown when your husband’s late again — but maybe they’re not so unrelated.

So, could it be that Knox was simply slow to process the emotional significance of Kercher’s death? That her behavior wasn’t just a strange way of reacting, but a failure to react in the first place — because the emotions hadn’t reached her yet?

Knox herself would probably reject that idea. For her part, she doesn’t think her behavior was all that strange:

Some people have made claims that I am histrionic or autistic, because it might explain strange behaviour. I think people have exaggerated how strangely I reacted. I was not concerned with what people were thinking.

I’m as sympathetic to Knox as a disinterested observer can be. I even boycotted traveling to Italy as protest for the government’s treatment of her. I’m also neurodivergent.

But even I think Knox’s behavior was odd.

If there’s a parting message from this salad of ideas, it’s this:

In our justice system, innocence isn’t a state of unchangeable reality, no matter how much we want to think it is. Innocence is a subjective performance. One that is difficult to carry off no matter who you are, since there’s no playbook.

For autistic people who find themselves falsely accused, the outlook is bleak. Our everyday performances are already arduous and fraught. And in the courtroom, that difference can be fatal.

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