They twisted all available evidence to fit the incoherent statement they had coerced me into signing. That “false admission” was crucial in both my guilty convictions. & for years, I blamed myself for what happened that night.
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My Italian was too poor, I told myself. I was unable to explain myself well. It was my fault they misunderstood me when I told them the truth. & THEY, too, blamed me for it, convicting me of slander against my boss, whose alibi proved the incoherence of that false admission.
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To this day, people all over the internet blame me for that statement. They say I “falsely accused someone.” That even if I’m innocent, I’m a rotten, self-serving cunt who would throw another innocent man under the bus to save her own skin.
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They say this about the worst moment of my life. About the time I was most terrified, most confused. About the time I was broken down by police twice my age who lied to me relentlessly to get a confession.
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But there is a happy ending to this story. After my first conviction, I was contacted by a psychologist from New York named Saul Kassin. He asked me to write down everything I could remember about my interrogation & send it to him.
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I did, and only then did he send me his research. I was shocked to find that what had happened to me was COMMON. That police the world over use similar techniques to break down suspects. That these techniques yield false confessions.
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The Central Park Five were coerced into false admissions implicating each other. Marty Tankleff () was pressured into admitting to killing his own father after police lied to him. The list went on and on.
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Suddenly, I no longer felt alone. I no longer felt like that interrogation had gone wrong because of me. I understood that from the beginning, I had no agency in that equation, that the police were in control.
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That the police had abused their authority to everyone's detriment - to mine, to Raffaele’s, to the Kercher family’s.
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Saul Kassin gave me a gift unlike any other I’ve ever received. He gave me the knowledge that I was not crazy, that I was not at fault for what happened during that interrogation, & that I was not alone in my suffering.
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Replying to
I'm particularly interested in the feeling of the shift to the not-crazy frame. Did you ever doubt that shift later? Did you end up rewriting any memories based on this shift or have trouble empathizing with your past "I think I'm crazy" self?