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in their
apartment, only a rack in the hallway, where Meredith was reluctant to hang her panties, and she was offended when Amanda left a clear plastic cosmetics case containing condoms and a vibrator in their shared bathroom. Not long after they moved in together, the two young women went out to the Red Zone discotheque, where they met up by chance with Giacomo and his friend Daniel de Luna, a twenty-two-year-old student from Rome who often came to Perugia to visit the guys downstairs. They all danced and flirted. Giacomo kissed Meredith for the first time on the dance floor, and she later confided to her British friends that this was romantic and “very Italian” and that she hoped it was the prelude to a more intimate relationship. Amanda and Daniel connected more quickly; he would later brag to friends that he ended up in her room that night having sex.
    After she was arrested, the police set a trap for Amanda by telling her she had tested positive for HIV. This sort of psychological trickery is commonly used by investigators in Italy to illicit a confession. In this case, it led a terrified Amanda to make a grave error that would permanently taint her image. She listed all the men she had slept with recently, trying to decide who might have infected her. The prosecutors knew
the press would jump at these salacious details of Amanda’s sex life, and one of the detectives close to the case leaked the document to British tabloid reporter Nick Pisa, who broke the story. Amanda wrote in her prison diary:
    I don’t want to die. I want to get married and have children. I want to create something good. I want to get old. I want my time. I want my life. Why why why? I can’t believe this. I don’t know where I could have got HIV from. Here is the list of people I’ve had sex with in Italy [scratched out and replaced with] in general:
    1. Kyle—also a virgin
    2. James—checks regularly and always used a condom
    3. Ross—a one-night stand, pull out
    4. DJ—condoms, mom is a nurse, he would know
    5. Elis—pull out—one night stand
    6. Daniele [sic]—condoms, one night stand
    7. Raffaele—condoms, one time w/o
    At the end, she concluded that it had to be Ross, Elis, or Raffaele Sollecito, then twenty-three, her most recent conquest, who, she noted, “used to use extensive
drugs.” (Police later told Amanda that the test results had been a “false positive.”)
    Consensual sex is not a crime. So Amanda’s promiscuity has little bearing on the murder itself. But her uninhibited behavior did cause problems between the roommates—problems that the prosecution would try to spin into a motive for murder. In his final arguments, the lead prosecutor hypothesized that as Amanda helped assault Meredith, she yelled, “You are always behaving like a little saint. Now we will show you. Now we will make you have sex.” Even before coming to Europe, Amanda, at times, seemed obsessed with sex. The to-do list she made for moving to Perugia included visiting a sex shop and buying condoms. Her diaries were full of fantasy letters to various lovers. To one former boyfriend she wrote in August 2007: “I’m waiting for you, I want to see something porno with you and put it into practice with you.” And once she arrived in Europe, she e-mailed friends back home about hooking up with a stranger on the train. One of her last postings on Facebook declared, “I don’t get embarrassed and therefore have very few social inhibitions.”
    Sexual confidence is one thing; blatant exhibitionism is quite another. Meredith was so mortified by the
pink “Rampant Rabbit” vibrator on display in their shared bathroom that she felt compelled to point it out to everyone who visited and explain that it wasn’t hers. It almost seemed as if Amanda were brandishing it as a symbol of her sexual power over Meredith. “Isn’t it odd that a girl arrives and the first thing she shows is a vibrator?” Meredith’s friend Amy Frost would later