SEATTLE _ Amanda Knox _ who spent four years in an Italian prison after being wrongly convicted for the murder of her roommate in Perugia, Italy _ has written a nicely subtle piece about non-sexual prison relationships.
Appearing this week in Vice, the piece titled "What Romance in Prison Actually Looks Like," is among several myth-busting articles about love the site published during the week of Valentine's Day.
In it, Knox writes about the relationship she had with a fellow inmate she calls "Leny" during the last year of her four-year stay in the Capanne prison.
"Every day, Leny watched me jog around the yard. She told me she was a lesbian and I told her I was straight," she said.
Knox writes that Leny, who had transferred to the prison and was lonely, was persistent in trying to be friends. Because she initially did not ask Knox for anything, nor ask about the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, Knox let her guard down.
While some prison relationships involve people who are "gay for the stay," Knox writes, that is by no means the truth for all. Many relationships in prison are intimate but non-sexual bonds that meet the nearly universal human need for companionship.
"Contrary to what you might guess," she writes, "many prison relationships aren't about sex _ just like most relationships outside of prison."
Knox's controversial and internationally followed conviction in the 2007 murder of Kercher was reversed in 2011. She was re-convicted in 2013 and then acquitted a final time by an Italian court in 2015.
