Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit. At the heart of her wrongful conviction was the power of sensational “sticky” media narratives—stories shaped more by spectacle than truth, and weaponized in particular ways against women.

Amanda reflects on the journey of reclaiming her voice from the grip of global tabloids. She unpacks how the media often distorts female identity through the lens of sexuality to vilify women and sway public perception, especially during criminal trials. She also shares the surprising emotional work of coming to see her prosecutor—the man who helped orchestrate her wrongful conviction—as a human being.

But this conversation isn’t only about the past. Amanda also emphasizes today’s attention economy, where facts often lose to the most compelling narrative, and where the line between reality and fiction grows ever thinner.

-Visit Amanda's website ⁠here⁠.

-Order Amanda's new book, Free: My Search for Meaning ⁠here⁠ (released in March 2025):

*This episode is an extension of FAWCO’s recent expert panel at the United Nations 69th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and NGO-CSW, which examined the growing threat of Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), including real and deepfake content, as a tool of gendered abuse, especially targeting women in the public eye.

Watch the full panel discussion here featuring Andrea Powell, Susanna Gibson, Breeze Liu, Noelle Martin, and Silvia Semenzin.

AI's rapid ubiquity is exciting and threatening, especially to those outside of its development. Emmanuel Acheampong, the visionary co-founder of yShade.ai, has meticulously curated a dataset of 12 million diverse skin tones. This feat isn't just transforming the beauty industry's approach to inclusion—it's poised to enhance safety standards for autonomous industrial machines, prevent fatal accidents in self-driving vehicles, and revolutionize dermatological diagnostics.

With host Jessica Buchleitner, Emmanuel challenges the prevalent Value Neutrality Thesis of technology—the widely accepted narrative that technology emerges as neutral and becomes imbued with traits based on its user behavior. Through compelling examples, he reveals AI as a ubiquitous microcosm, where small enclaves of engineers and technologists create solutions for global populations while primarily addressing scenarios relevant to their limited perspectives.

What sets his approach apart is his human-centered methodology of building a diverse AI dataset through qualitative research interviews with beauty industry experts and medical professionals. This provides a stark contrast to the narrative that AI datasets are built solely by scraping the internet. As DEI measures disappear in government and private companies, he explains how economic forces remain the beauty industry's driver for inclusivity.

One conclusion is apparent from this conversation: Our understanding is fundamentally limited by our datasets, and we don't know what our data fails to show us.

Connect:

- Emmanuel's LinkedIn

- yShade.ai

America is Angry. Companies and individuals are profiting from our current state.

The Anger Industrial Complex - the interconnected relationship between economics, business and online vitriol - has plagued the United States since the 2016 presidential election (and arguably even before), driving our societal fault lines deeper, post after post on social media.

Jessica Buchleitner joins multi-award-winning journalist and documentarian Michele Mitchell to discuss its origins and how economic pressures facing journalism today are contributing to its amplification. Packed with decades of media experience and knowledge, they delve into how the shift from traditional news to infotainment, and then to social media has affected public discourse since the mid 1990s while emphasizing the importance of mobilizing community coalitions as an antidote to paralyzing cynicism, frustration, and outright online rage complaining. An episode after Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election news we can all use!

About Michele Mitchell

Michele Mitchell's award-winning career as a human rights filmmaker includes Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? (airing on PBS over 1,100 times) and the feature documentary The Uncondemned, which had a US theatrical release in 40 cities, has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is translated into six languages, and has continuously toured the world since 2017. She is the recipient of the National Edward R. Murrow for Best Television Documentary, Gracie Award for Best Investigative Documentary, CINE Golden Eagle and CINE Special Jury Award for Best Investigative Documentary, Gracie Award for Best Investigative Feature, Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for Peace & Resolution, Rabinowitz Award for Social Justice, among others. As an investigative correspondent for Bill Moyers on "NOW" (PBS), her critically acclaimed work spanned political corruption, economic issues and modern-day indentured servitude. As political anchor at CNN Headline News, she focused on US elections and post-9/11 legislative issues regarding terrorism and corruption. An Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University's Dart Center for Trauma in Journalism, Michele's human rights work includes an investigative stint with the USC Shoah Foundation to gather evidentiary testimonials from Rohingya survivors fleeing Myanmar. Her podcast The Cocktail Conversations is focused on unraveling the "anger industrial complex" in the United States (with a little help from wine!). She is the author of three books and began her career on Capitol Hill. Currently in production on her new nonfiction feature OG* (*Right Side of History, Wrong Side of the Law), she is strongly against the Oxford comma and her new favorite word to drop in conversation is kakistocracy.

About Narrative Dive

Your partner in narrative.

Whether you're aware of them or not, narratives permeate our consciousness, influencing our decisions and perceptions in powerful ways. They become our legacies and convictions, driving culture, politics, media, economics, art, literature, sex, spirituality, and ultimately how we communicate. Now in its second season after a minimum viable product (MVP) first season, Jessica Buchleitner, Angela Natividad, and notable guests deliver thoughtful analyses of the stories dominating our world, uncovering the constitutions of our cultural programming to help you create a healthy info diet.

Let's build a world of better communicators.

Jessica Buchleitner sits down with Marla Sofer to unpack the complex narratives surrounding personal finance that begin with parentally instilled beliefs and end with a crowded financial services ecosystem often too confusing for the average consumer to navigate. Marla shares her journey to founding Knomee, a financial wellness platform that offers the tools to understand your unique financial identity, and her insights on breaking free from limiting beliefs and using money for personal growth and impact. She highlights how to take charge and leverage an important digital age tool - our personal data - to set financial goals that will lead to more fulfillment via the right advisors.

This episode explores:

- The dangers of living reactively vs. the importance of crafting a clear vision for your financial future.

- How shame narratives drive us into money-avoidant behaviors.

- How the “hedonic treadmill” creates a reactive and constant search for meaning and happiness.

- The role of personal agency and data ownership in making informed financial decisions.

- Challenging societal narratives that undermine women’s financial confidence.

- How technology can revolutionize financial services to empower individuals.

- Blocker narratives exist to make us think that we are not worthy of having something for some reason.

About Marla Sofer

Marla Sofer, Founder and CEO of Knomee, is a financial services and fintech executive, founder of two women’s networks driving change and inclusion in corporations, frequent speaker on topics related to the future of financial services, wealth, and asset management, startup advisor, 2020 Woman of Silicon Valley, 2021 Woman in WealthTech to Watch, and proud mom, and wife. She led partnerships quantified in billions of dollars at J.P. Morgan and BlackRock before leaping into fintech in 2015 to improve customer experiences. Her experiences at Microsoft, Carta, Invesco, Xignite, and Lending Club influenced her decision to create a solution that would improve personal financial wellness and enable financial services companies to better serve their customers and prospects.

Visit Knomee’s website here.

Read this blog when you feel financially stuck.

financial wellness, women empowerment, personal finance, financial identity, technology in finance, financial narratives, data ownership, personal agency, financial services, overcoming shame

Author Hillary Augustine and host Jessica Buchleitner deep dive into the currency paradigm: a gestalt view of four individual, yet interwoven currencies: Time, Money, Energy, and Space. This four-currency guidance system is rooted in one simple concept: if you want to experience a greater sense of wholeness, you must acknowledge total currency flow. Augustine discusses the monocurrency world - our current reality that focuses solely on money while largely ignoring that the other three dimensions affect our wellbeing and success, especially in cross-cultural contexts:

• space as a container currency and the need to prioritize personal space for our well-being.
• Time is seen as a connector currency that can be fluid and flexible, challenging the structured narratives we have about it.
• Money as a companion currency that reflects our fears, exposes our wounds, and resources our dreams and the need to reframe our narratives about money and exploring its role as a companion in our lives.
• energy is recognized as a nuanced currency that often gets overlooked, but has a significant impact on our well-being and decision-making and is one of the first to be depleted when we allow it.

Check out the Currency Paradigm book here and on Amazon.

More about Hillary Augustine here.

Can the location of your birth and era affect the stories you conceive of and tell?

Birth narratives take on intricacies beyond their literal meaning by signifying new beginnings, conceptualizations around motherhood and the creation of life, and a notion of self-recreation that leads to perceived redemption. Angela and Jessica dive deep into their intricate tapestry, unraveling the complexities of how the stories we tell ourselves about creation intersect with concepts in sociology, psychology, and economics.

Human history is obsessed with virgins and virginity. They’re in religious texts, as alternating terms in our vernacular, peppered throughout our mythology, and embodied in our urban legend horror movies, teen dramas, and novels. We use the term “virgin” to refer to both purity and our first time trying something new. But what is actually behind the virgin curtain?

This episode delves into the complex and often stigmatized narratives surrounding virginity, especially on the roots of its significance and meaning and the role of media in shaping perceptions.