President Donald Trump’s colorful past on Twitter has resurfaced again, this time in connection with a decade-old murder case.
Amanda Knox, the American student who was accused of murdering her roommate in Italy in 2007, had an unlikely ally in Trump, who spoke out on her behalf at the time and tweeted five times in support of her, proclaiming her innocence and blasting the U.S. government for allegedly not doing enough to help her.
My thoughts on the situation in Norway and Amanda Knox... http://t.co/225OYhf #trumpvlog
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2011
Everyone should boycott Italy if Amanda Knox is not freed---she is totally innocent.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2011
@AmandaKnox is innocent. Italian government should pay for this travesty.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2011
@USGovernment has done nothing to help @AmandaKnox.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2011
It's about time Italy recognized the innocence of @AmandaKnox---great news!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2011
According to Business Insider, Trump also offered financial assistance to Knox and her family in 2010, when she was still appealing the conviction that put her behind bars.
But in 2016, Knox, who was later acquitted and returned to the U.S., wrote in a guest column for the Ballard News Tribune, a local newspaper, that she was supporting Hillary Clinton, not Trump, in the presidential election. She called Trump a “destabilizing agent.” After Trump defeated Clinton, she wrote that she cried on election night.
And according to a new report by the New York Times, Knox’s support for Trump’s rival does not sit well with the new president. One of Trump’s friends, George Guido Lombardi, told the Times that Trump is “very upset” with Knox, whom he considers ungrateful.
In one of her columns with the News Tribune, Knox defended her decision to support Clinton over Trump, acknowledging that Trump had believed her “during (her) worst crisis and most vulnerable moment” but arguing that that did not entitle him to her support.
“Politics is not a tit-for-tat game. It’s not: I helped you, now you help me,” Knox wrote.
Trump’s support for Knox at the beginning of the decade was not the first time he had weighed in on a controversial murder case. In 1989, he paid for ads in every major New York City newspaper calling for the death penalty to be restored in New York in relation to the case of the “Central Park Five,” a group of young men accused of raping a young woman in Central Park.
While the five young men were later acquitted of the crime, Trump refused to acknowledge their innocence during the 2016 campaign. Several of those men have since blasted Trump for rushing to judgment and inciting anger against them.
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