Amanda Knox Reveals Recent Miscarriage in Emotional Podcast: 'Felt Like a Betrayal'
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Amanda Knox is opening up about her recent miscarriage.
On a new episode of her podcast Labyrinths, Knox, who turns 34 on Friday, reveals that she recently experienced a miscarriage at six weeks while also opening up about her fertility journey with husband Christopher Robinson, whom she wed in February 2020. This is the first of a five-part miniseries about the topic.
Knox — who was wrongfully convicted and then exonerated for the 2007 murder of roommate Meredith Kercher when she was an American student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy — says they "thought it was a straight line from unprotected sex to baby" but, as Robinson says, "We were wrong. Painfully wrong."
She says they "got pregnant very fast" once they began trying after having an IUD removed, and they began nesting for their baby on the way, setting up the nursery and a mural in the baby room. The couple told their parents on Mother's Day in May that they were expecting their first baby.
When they had a subsequent ultrasound appointment that didn't find a heartbeat at the stage they were supposed to be able to hear it, Knox says she "knew something was wrong." Doctors set another appointment for a week later, hoping for a different outcome.
"We went back in a week later — that week sucked, waiting — and it hadn't grown. It didn't have a heartbeat," she recalls. "That was confusing to me, because I thought, 'Why would there be a dead baby just hanging out in there? If it wasn't viable, why wasn't it going away?' My body didn't even know, and that felt weird to me. ... I didn't know that you could have a missed miscarriage."
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"For all intents and purposes, I was pregnant with something that just was not growing," adds Knox. "They were like, 'Well, your body will probably figure it out sooner or later. It could take weeks, and if you wait, it becomes a more invasive procedure, a D&C is more invasive than a pill-based miscarriage, so they recommended that I induce it."
Knox get emotional in the podcast episode as she recounts filling her prescriptions for the procedure, the pharmacist explaining the next steps, also talking through tears as she remembered sharing the news with her mom and mother-in-law.
She described "shaking" from a pain "like I've never experienced before," followed by two days of "birthing blood, wads of blood, not like a period at all."
"I did feel incredibly disappointed that that was the story of my first-ever pregnancy. ... I thought, like, I knew exactly what I want to do with my first pregnancy, and to have it not come to fruition not through choice felt like a betrayal," says Knox.
Adding what then went through her mind: " 'Why? Do I have bad eggs and I just never knew? Am I actually too old? Did something happen to me while I was over in Italy?' If it's not easy and you don't know why, then anything could be the problem. It's frustrating how little information you have at any point in the process."
Robinson says he now feels "more determined" to try to conceive again, as Knox says trying again became like "work." As she puts it, "It's not a fun thing, which it was before. It was fun making the baby room, and it was fun to f--- like bunny rabbits."
Knox adds that she had already been thinking of the baby as the name they plan to give their first child, but "as soon as I figured out that it wasn't alive, I very much immediately tried to divorce those two ideas in my head. That was not my baby. It doesn't have a name."
Crying at the end of the episode, Knox says, "I don't know who that baby was. I don't know if I'll ever know. It's a weird thought." In a voiceover, she adds, "We sat with the miscarriage for a while, trying and failing to be okay," until she found a community of other women who'd gone through similar situations.
Speaking out on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt in October 2019, Knox admitted it can be hard to know what people think of her after her highly publicized murder case.
"I'm a real human being too and I'm trying to do the best I can with what life has given me," she said at the time. "I don't think I'm the most resilient person in the world. I just know that I take it day by day. Some days are really hard and some moments are really hard."
