Amanda Knox Is Not Saying Raniere Is Innocent; She Wants Prosecutorial Accountability

Amanda Knox appears on NBC News' "Today" show -- (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC NewsWire)

Amanda Knox has entered the fray in the Keith Raniere case and her entry seems fair enough.

She is concerned about prosecutorial misconduct in general and claims she, herself, was unfairly prosecuted in the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy.

Since there is controversy concerning her innocence or guilt, Frank Report is interested in pursuing her story further – in the hope that we can shed some new light on the very much reported subject.

Knox is not claiming she believes Raniere is innocent or guilty. Instead, she is interested in bringing light to some of the unseemly methods used by some prosecutors.

Here is what she told Rob Gavin of the Albany Times Union:

“I was contacted by some former members of NXIVM who claim that Mr. Raniere has been wrongfully convicted and that the story being told in the media is wrong,” Knox wrote the paper in an e-mail Sunday.

“I personally do not know enough about the case to make any judgments about whether his conviction is wrongful or not.

“These supporters of Mr. Raniere asked me to sign a petition asking the prosecutors in the case to affirm some principles of prosecutorial conduct that any prosecutor should be able to affirm, such as not engaging in perjury, not tampering with evidence, and not threatening witnesses.

“I signed the petition because violation of these practices would constitute prosecutorial misconduct, regardless of Mr. Raniere’s guilt or innocence.”

***

Almost everyone is aware of the lopsided and unfair advantages the prosecution has in the American criminal justice system.

They can target people, overcharge them, and then force them into accepting plea deals rather then risking the longer sentences that would be handed out if they went to trial and were convicted. Their frequent shortcutting of due process should be a national disgrace.

Some are beginning to understand that prosecutors are not more moral than any other public official – like a senator, a congressman, a president, a police officer, or your local bureaucrat or elected official and just as these folks cheat or act in their own best interest, so do prosecutors.

And when prosecutors act in their own best interest, people, oftentimes innocent people, lose their freedom.

Prosecutors are in business to take freedom away from people. Ostensibly they are supposed to bring justice but their real job is taking freedom away from people. This is good when people are bad or dangerous. This is evil when people are innocent.

The problem is that prosecutors are incentivized to take freedom away; they are promoted based on how many people’s freedom they take away.  They are rewarded by their conviction rates, conviction stats, and not by the justice they obtain – which is much harder to measure.

When they put an innocent person in prison; when they cheat a little – hide exculpatory information, pressure a witness to testify in a certain way, give the truly guilty person immunity so he can testify against their prechosen target, and lie by omission or outright suborn perjury –and the innocent defendant is convicted, they get rewarded not penalized.

It is well known that police do these kinds of things all the time. I have seen no proof that prosecutors are morally superior to the police or anyone else.

It may be time to have prosecutors wear the equivalent of body cams – some kind of serious monitoring of their actions – all their actions – by an independent watchdog group.

Knox is right in that we need something better than a toothless grand jury system – a group of uninformed citizens who merely do whatever the prosecution leads them to do.

The idea of the grand jury was to protect the accused as well as investigate possible crimes. The grand jury, made up of private citizens, was supposed to give permission to prosecutors to indict. This was meant to be a safeguard against overzealous prosecutors since once a person is indicted, his life is generally destroyed, even before a conviction.

Today, grand juries are uninformed. They do not know their historic role. They do not know they can hear evidence of their choosing. That they are not working for the prosecution. That they are in conflict with the prosecution and that they have the obligation to determine if someone committed a crime and not rely on the prosecution to tell them.

Because they don’t know their true role in the justice system, grand juries today are mere tools of the prosecution. Something needs to be done to create a watchdog for the prosecutors prior to the indictment of any individual and it is no longer the grand jury.

There should be penalties for malicious prosecution also.

Keith Raniere with his devoted financiers, Sara and Clare Bronfman, as the Prefect, Nancy Salzman, stands by.

Though Keith Raniere may be the least deserving of due process – he still must get it.  If there were misdeeds by the prosecution with regard to his case, then they should be held to account.

This is what Amanda Knox is supporting. That prosecutors should be willing to sign the affidavit.

She is not seeking  Raniere’s exoneration but to put a spotlight on prosecutors, something that urgently needs to be done in a nation where there are more people in prison than anywhere else in the world.

Raniere wrote the petition that the Nxivm-5 delivered to prosecutors, asking them to respond to “8 simple statements’’ about their conduct by Wednesday.

“Potential witnesses for the defense were threatened, corrupted, and coerced along with the prosecution’s tampering with vital evidence,” the petition claims.

“After all of this, the prosecution made inaccurate and inflammatory statements to the press, to justify, cover, and praise their actions.’’

About the author

Frank Parlato

9 Comments

Click here to post a comment

Please leave a comment: Your opinion is important to us! (Email & username are optional. To leave a name, click on the email icon)

  • “Former members” = they renamed it.

    The prosecutors already agreed to everything they are requesting in the insane affidavit when they swore an oath as a member of the bar to uphold the constitution. This is a bullshit tactic and classic cult-like nonsense.

  • Prosecutorial accountability? She wants that? How ironically amusing.

    I would give my imaginary butler permission to stuff her craw with epicurean dogshit paté.

  • ““I was contacted by some former members of NXIVM who claim that Mr. Raniere has been wrongfully convicted and that the story being told in the media is wrong,” Knox wrote the paper in an e-mail Sunday.” Frank Parlato

    Ms. Knox, If you read the Frank Report you will discover that many so called former members of NXIVM are still members of NXIVM.

  • WTF is the point of this affidavit? It has no binding authority. So, it just seems like NXIVM members are using the same tool that the whistleblowers used to spread information about DOS via the media to stir law enforcement into action, except instead of shocking the public with sex cult allegations, they are trying to move them with a call for justice (as if the sex cult, racketeering, blackmail, etc., was not unjust) and some patriotic belief in “We the people” to stir them into action against law enforcement. Is this a desperate attempt to capitalize on the current, somewhat negative public image of the police that seems to exist in the country, to try to throw the same shade onto prosecutors and judges? To ride such a wave like the #metoo movement helped in bringing down NXIVM?

    There are processes in place for alleging and proving prosecutorial misconduct. If they had such evidence, they could present it to the arbiters who decide such misconduct and the public if they wanted to.

    This just reeks of desperation, a last Hail Mary attempt as Raniere’s sentencing date gets closer to the present, that is bound for failure with very little (there’s always crazy) to no stirring of positive public sentiment for NXIVM.

    “We the people” outrage against the alleged wrongful conviction of a sex-obsessed cult leader (compared to say a Nelson Mandela) has a slim (there’s always crazy) to zero chance of success.

  • Frank, would you be willing to sign an affidavit swearing that you have not beaten your wife in the last week? Since it is common for men to get drunk and beat their wives, it is important that you demonstrate that you are not a wife beater. No one is alleging that you have beaten your wife, but you should sign such an affidavit because it would make Amanda Knox pleased.

  • The trouble here is she is a compulsive liar, an attention seeker who does nothing if it won’t benefit her and nobody gives a rat’s ass what she has to say. An educated, well-respected person would be better putting their name to this. Someone might then listen and take the issues seriously. How can someone who filled a memoir with childish shit like how many one night stands she’s had and how she got herpes be taken seriously?

  • Even if the prosecutors do not sign the affidavit, both they and the judge are subject to the ethics rules for both prosecutors and judges.
    (I will not deny that prosecutors and judges can and do violate these ethics rules.)

    I wonder who of the Five Founders of Make Justice Blind and Stupid contacted Foxy Knoxy, Amanda Knox.

    I have been a long time fan of MK10Art.
    She started her drawings as a result of the Meredith Kercher case.
    My favorite drawing is Keith Raniere taking Allison and Nicki for a walk.
    https://www.instagram.com/p/BqT6KU6l5on/

    I never believed that the Amanda Fox/Meredith Kercher case would end up tied in some way to the NXIVM madness.

About the Author

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist.

His work has been cited in hundreds of news outlets, like The New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CBS News, Fox News, New York Post, New York Daily News, Oxygen, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, The Sun, The Times of London, CBS Inside Edition, among many others in all five continents.

His work to expose and take down NXIVM is featured in books like “Captive” by Catherine Oxenberg, “Scarred” by Sarah Edmonson, “The Program” by Toni Natalie, and “NXIVM. La Secta Que Sedujo al Poder en México” by Juan Alberto Vasquez.

Parlato has been prominently featured on HBO’s docuseries “The Vow” and was the lead investigator and coordinating producer for Investigation Discovery’s “The Lost Women of NXIVM.” Parlato was also credited in the Starz docuseries "Seduced" for saving 'slave' women from being branded and escaping the sex-slave cult known as DOS.

Additionally, Parlato’s coverage of the group OneTaste, starting in 2018, helped spark an FBI investigation, which led to indictments of two of its leaders in 2023.

Parlato appeared on the Nancy Grace Show, Beyond the Headlines with Gretchen Carlson, Dr. Oz, American Greed, Dateline NBC, and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, where Parlato conducted the first-ever interview with Keith Raniere after his arrest. This was ironic, as many credit Parlato as one of the primary architects of his arrest and the cratering of the cult he founded.

Parlato is a consulting producer and appears in TNT's The Heiress and the Sex Cult, which premiered on May 22, 2022. Most recently, he consulted and appeared on Tubi's "Branded and Brainwashed: Inside NXIVM," which aired January, 2023.

IMDb — Frank Parlato

Contact Frank with tips or for help.
Phone / Text: (305) 783-7083
Email: frankparlato@gmail.com

Archives