`  ::::About cutting the lede, I think you need to look at ref 2 a bit more closely  ``After a few weeks in Perugia, I saw that there was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that the authorities and the media were presenting. There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case. It became clear that it wasn't facts but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case. In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior. A prison ``doctor`` (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with. Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it. Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was mistaken and she didn't have AIDS. Outside prison walls, Italian criminologists were opining in the media and eventually on the witness stand that because the body had been covered with a blanket, the killer was surely female because such an act was evidence of feminine ``pieta.`` Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a ``luciferina`` — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity. She was ``dirty on the inside.````  ::::Too many people were willing to believe lurid slurs about Amanda Knox ``There are many deeply troubling facets to this case. But an important one, surely, is the degree to which it exposes so many humans as only too happy to believe lurid and destructive slurs served up by a tabloid media culture that they all know – or should know – exists to make money from peddling damaging sensation, the more outrageous the better``   `