Free Angel Face by Barbie Latza Nadeau Page B

Washington, police department when it was charged with failing to protect an underage student from sexual relations with schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who bore two of his children.) A youthful blonde, Bremner was already a network regular before anyone ever heard of Amanda Knox. The attorney had provided round-the-clock media commentary on the Michael Jackson pedophile case and the Scott Peterson murder trial. Bremner quickly embraced Amanda’s
cause pro bono, even though the family claimed they’d never met her. Bremner honestly believed that Amanda was being railroaded in Perugia, but she also wanted a piece of the media attention whirling around the case. She frequently spoke on the family’s behalf and might have served them well as the official spokesperson. But the family had other ideas. They hired David Marriott, a mustachioed ex-journalist-cum-public-relations-guru who specialized in crisis management for some of Seattle’s troubled politicos.
    Very quickly, Marriott lost control of the situation. As he spoon-fed the Knox-approved message to American outlets that couldn’t afford to send correspondents to Italy, those of us on the ground in Perugia began passing his contradictory e-mails around as entertainment during the long days in the court. In one instance, Marriott confirmed to me that ABC News had paid for Amanda’s parents to fly to Perugia in exchange for exclusivity. When I confronted my friend Ann Wise, an ABC producer based in Italy, she quickly passed on the leak. ABC got a denial from him that he had ever told me this—despite the fact that I had an e-mail to prove it. Similarly, in the spring of 2008, he told me that the Knoxes would not give interviews, and then Rachel Donadio of the New York
Times had a sit-down with Amanda’s father, Curt Knox. Marriott told me that Rachel must have door-stepped Curt in Perugia; she confirmed that Marriott had set up the interview for her. What Marriott failed to realize was that the Italy-based press corps was a close-knit group that could not be played against each other.
    Meanwhile, the networks started vying for the Knoxes’ attention with their own legal analysts. Among the first was Joe Tacopina, a sexy Italian American New York lawyer who keeps a media clip file of his high-profile cases. His famous clients included Jordan Van der Sloot, the Dutch student implicated in the murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, and Raffaello Follieri, Anne Hathaway’s rogue Italian con man. In the spring of 2008, Tacopina came to Perugia as a paid consultant for ABC News to investigate the real story behind the Kercher murder, and I interviewed him for Newsweek in Rome in March. He said he was acting as a consultant to the family, even though he was being paid by ABC, and he was the first to call foul on the missteps by Italian investigators. But he also told me that deep down, he wasn’t sure about Amanda’s story.
    “Her best defense, I think, is probably going to be the truth. Am I saying she didn’t make mistakes? No.
And do I know for a fact that she’s innocent? Of course not.”
    That was the end of Joe Tacopina’s involvement in the case and the beginning of more aggressive message control out of Seattle. Andrea Vogt, a Bologna-based freelancer stringing for the Seattle Press-Intelligencer, wrote her own story about Tacopina’s behavior in Perugia, and Marriott quickly tried to shut her down. Typically, Marriott denied that my interview had even taken place, and he told Andrea that “the reporter got it wrong.” Not convinced, Andrea called me. I gave her a transcript of the interview and a copy of the tape, and we began what would be a two-year battle against the Seattle message machine, incurring personal attacks and outright threats. Andrea and I became known on the pro-Amanda blogs as “Void and No Clue,” and I was often referred to as a “failed travel writer,” despite a career of thirteen-plus years covering Italy’s major news events