As any casual visit to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed will demonstrate, the 45th president nurses a lot of grudges. And it seems like Amanda Knox is one of the many people who has hurt his feelings
It all came out in a New York Times profile Friday of Italian-American businessman George Guido Lombardi, a Trump Tower resident who has presented himself as a point of contact between the president and hard-right European political parties.
The article contains many interesting details about Lombardi’s purported relationships with European white nationalists like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, albeit with plenty of implied side eye. (Says the Times, Lombardi is “a chief executive of plausible-sounding foundations.”) It also suggests a man who is unafraid of using his proximity to power to boost his public profile, and is willing to dish dirt to imply he’s an insider.
Which brings us to Amanda Knox, subject of a 2016 Netflix documentary that bears her name. Knox was of course wrongly accused and convicted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate in Perugia, Italy. But she was declared not guilty by an appeals court and freed in 2011, and in 2015 definitively exonerated by Italy’s Supreme Court. Knox’s innocence became a cause celebre in the U.S., and as it happens, Donald Trump was among those firmly on her side. He spoke about the case in at least one interview and on his YouTube channel. In 2011, he even called for a boycott of Italy if she wasn’t acquitted.
Everyone should boycott Italy if Amanda Knox is not freed—she is totally innocent.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2011
Trump hasn’t publicly spoken about Knox since then, but according to Lombardi, he hasn’t forgotten her either. In fact, Lombardi says, Trump is kinda angry with Knox over her support for Hillary Clinton:
“When it came to Italy, though, Mr. Trump’s interest centered on demonstrating the innocence of Amanda Knox… Mr. Trump often spoke out and posted on Twitter in support of Ms. Knox, and asked Mr. Lombardi to look into her case during a trip to Italy. Now, Mr. Lombardi said, the president is “very upset” with the ingratitude of Ms. Knox, who supported Hillary Clinton.”
Whatever the truth of it, we’ll definitely be on the lookout for a 5 a.m. tweet from the president denying he even knows Lombardi.