The party made its decision based on the US President's stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

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“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t. They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own.

Related:

Intimidating Americans will not work. What conservatives mean by freedom of speech

Today’s News

The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director in a 51–49 vote. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would not be seeking reelection.

The Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in America, which puts them on track to be targeted for deportation this summer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium,” Kat Hu writes. “As persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it.”

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George Packer: The Trump world order The secret that colleges should stop keeping The ultimate antidote to toxic behavior online Spared by DOGE—for now

Evening Read

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The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App

By Faith Hill

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Listen. Americans are stuck. Who’s to blame? Hanna Rosin talks with Yoni Appelbaum about the end of upward mobility in the United States.

Read. “The Moron Factory,” a short story by George Saunders.

“Is true: our office odd. No one stable. Everyone nuts in his/her own way. Usually, at work, I keep to self. Don’t socialize. Just do my work, head straight home.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Threats to free speech aren’t just a national problem, and they’re not just about the press—they’re about the public’s right to hear from and be involved in government. I was struck this morning by two different, appalling stories out of Mississippi. The Mississippi Free Press reports on how a chancery court judge has ruled that the state legislature is not a public body and therefore not subject to open-meetings laws. If the elected lawmakers of a state aren’t a public body, what is? Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on another judge in the state ordering a local paper to remove an editorial from its website criticizing Clarksdale officials for not issuing a public notice before a special meeting. The headline on the article: “Secrecy, deception erode public trust.” Perhaps the judge would have been well served to read it himself.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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I’ve been on trial half my life. Yesterday, my 18-year legal drama finally came to an end when the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, definitively convicted me of criminal slander. Many people are familiar with my wrongful conviction for Meredith Kercher’s murder, but this lesser charge, arising from statements I signed during my interrogation, is the one that has continued to haunt me. The charge resulted from a lie invented by the police: that I was present when my roommate Meredith was sexually assaulted and murdered at our apartment in Perugia in 2007. Everything that subsequently went wrong in the investigation and prosecution—the tunnel vision, junk science, biased witnesses—flowed from that lie.

The interrogation I was subjected to remains the most terrifying experience of my life—more terrifying than that first crushing guilty verdict and 26-year sentence; more terrifying than prison itself. I was 20 years old, and was questioned for more than 53 hours over a five-day period in a language I was only just learning to speak. The night of Meredith’s murder, I had stayed with Raffaele Sollecito, a young man I’d just started dating. But no matter how many times I said that, the police refused to believe me. I was berated, threatened, lied to, and slapped, and eventually my sanity broke—I began to believe the lies the police were telling me, and I agreed to sign statements placing myself and another innocent man in the house when the crime had occurred. I recanted only a few hours later, but it didn’t matter. I was coerced into signing the statements and then charged with criminal slander for doing so. (The police, who did not record the interrogation as they were supposed to, deny that I was hit or pressured into making these statements.)

This conviction branded me a malicious liar, and cast suspicion over me even after I was acquitted of murder and freed from prison. And it allowed the Italian authorities to scapegoat me for leading the investigation astray, instead of owning up to their failures. Now I have to live with this wrongful conviction for the rest of my life.

In the first few days of the investigation, the police found what appeared to be black hairs on Meredith’s body that they seem to have believed belonged to someone of African descent. A young man who lived in the flat below ours told the police that a Black man known as “the baron” had visited his apartment in the past. With fingerprints and DNA yet to return from the lab, these were their big leads.

But the police were also suspicious of me. Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor who led the investigation, was convinced that the perpetrator had not broken into our home, as it appeared—a window was shattered, a rock was found inside. On a hunch, Mignini decided that the break-in had been staged, and therefore, that someone with access to our flat was involved in the murder and covering it up. Of Meredith’s three roommates, I stood out as the youngest and most immature. I was also the lone foreigner—the others were Italians working in law offices. One had been out of town, and the other had screamed and wept after seeing the grisly scene in Meredith’s bedroom. I never saw inside the room, nor did I understand much of the rapid-fire Italian being shouted back and forth. It took me longer to comprehend what had actually happened, and I came off as cold and unmoved in comparison.

One of my roommates also asked me to lie—to deny to the police that we smoked marijuana. She said that they would lose their jobs if anyone found out. So I covered for them. But the police found marijuana plants in the apartment below ours—something I was unaware of—and began to wonder if I was keeping more from them.

When the police interrogate you, the first thing they do is isolate you. Isolation is not just about the room you’re in (one with no windows and no clocks). It’s about making you feel that the police themselves are your only support system. This was easy for the Perugia police; I was in a foreign country thousands of miles from my family, and I often didn’t understand what was being asked of me. I assumed that the police’s unwillingness to believe me was the fault of my own inadequate Italian. The police had also tapped my phone, and knew that my mother was flying to Italy to help me, and that soon I’d no longer be alone. And so, hours before her arrival, they broke me in that final interrogation.

They had discovered a text message on my phone that I’d written to my friend Patrick Lumumba the day of Meredith’s murder. I had been working for Patrick part-time as a hostess at his pub, Le Chic. He’d given me the night off, and I’d replied: “Certo. Ci vediamo più tardi, buona serata.” This was my attempt at translating the English idiom see you later, but to the Italian police, it read as if I’d made a literal appointment to meet Patrick later that night. Bingo.

Patrick was a Congolese immigrant. Here was their African—the source, they assumed, of those hairs. The police were convinced that I’d invited Patrick over, that he had assaulted and murdered Meredith, and that I’d staged a break-in to cover for him.

The interrogation became a relentless pursuit of a confession. I now know that the tactics the police used on me were a version of the Reid Technique, the most widely used interrogation tactic in the world. Police-reform advocates argue that the approach increases the stress associated with denial, while reducing the stress associated with confession. The problem is that it works against the guilty and innocent alike, and studies have shown that police are no better than a coin flip at predicting whether a suspect is lying—though they are, unfortunately, confident in their judgments. (The Reid company denies that the technique increases the risk of false confessions, which they say happen when investigators don’t follow its guidelines.)

They began by contradicting me relentlessly. Countless times, I denied meeting Patrick or knowing anything about the murder. But they would not hear it. They nitpicked every detail of my testimony about my night at Raffaele’s—Did you have dinner at 9:30 or at 10? Did you have sex before or after, and how long did it last? With a guilty suspect, this technique is effective at poking holes in their lies. But with me, an innocent suspect, it degraded my trust in my memories.

Then they lied to me: We have hard evidence placing you at the scene of the crime that night. We know you were there. Like many people, I had assumed that the police were bound by some code of ethics to tell the truth. I could not fathom that they would, or even could, lie to me.

All of this—compounded by the bullying, exhaustion, promises, and threats—reshaped my sense of reality, and made it hard to know what was true and what wasn’t. It was here that my interrogators suggested a reason I couldn’t remember being present when the crime had occurred: I must have witnessed something so traumatic that I’d blocked it out.

This was a minimizing tactic to position me as a witness, not a suspect. And after hours of being accused of lying, it was almost a relief to think that I really was suffering from trauma-induced amnesia. But I still couldn’t remember anything other than spending the night at Raffaele’s. So the police led me to add more details: We know you met with Patrick that night. Where did you meet him? Was Meredith home when you let him inside? I tried my best to imagine what they demanded I remember. I strung together fragments of real memories—Patrick’s brown jacket, a basketball court on the way to my house, our kitchen. But even as I was threatened with 30 years in prison if I didn’t give them the answers they wanted, I still couldn’t imagine anything to do with the murder itself.

This culminated with an officer named Rita Ficarra slapping me on the back of the head, shouting, “Remember! Remember!” until my sanity gave way completely, and I blurted out, “It was Patrick!”—surprising even myself. I was so traumatized, I truly believed that I was on the cusp of recovering some lost memory.

The police high-fived and cheered, then typed up my ramblings. At 1:45 a.m., I signed the statement. Then they rushed off to arrest Patrick. My mom had arrived in Italy and she was calling my phone, but the police wouldn’t let me answer it. They said it was evidence now. A few hours later, Mignini, the prosecutor, arrived to take another statement to try to fill the gaping holes in the first one. I made inferences based on his suggestions.

Did you hear her scream?

I don’t know.

We know you were there. How could you not have heard her scream?

I guess I must have heard her scream.

The police typed it up. Compliant and disoriented, I signed that statement, too, at 5:45 a.m. Only then was I allowed to rest. I curled up on two plastic chairs and fell asleep.

When I woke a few hours later, the “memories” I’d been pressured into imagining didn’t feel real. I told the police that I couldn’t bear witness against Patrick. They ignored me. One reassured me, Your memories will return in time. I demanded a pen and paper and wrote a recantation, explaining that I had been confused and pressured into implicating Patrick. I wrote, “Is the evidence proving my pressance [sic] at the time and place of the crime reliable? If so, what does this say about my memory? Is it reliable?” and “Who is the REAL murder [sic]?”

I handed this recantation—what would become known as my memoriale—to the police. They handcuffed me and led me to Capanne prison. Even then, I still believed them when they said I was merely a witness. It wasn’t until days later, when I was officially charged with murder, that I understood I was a suspect.

Knox in 2007. Courtesy of Amanda Knox

Patrick, thank God, had a rock-solid alibi. But despite his alibi and my recantation, the police still refused to release him. They kept him in custody even after the forensic evidence came back showing that the hairs they’d recovered weren’t human; they were likely coarse wool fibers. Among the many samples and evidentiary items collected from Meredith’s room, there was not a single trace of Patrick—or of me.

Instead, the evidence started to point to a local burglar named Rudy Guede, whose nickname was “the baron.” The murderer had left behind, traced in Meredith’s blood, fingerprints, a bare footprint, and multiple shoeprints. Just a week before the murder, Guede had been arrested in Milan after breaking into a nursery school, where he was found with a large knife. After the murder, he fled to Germany. Soon, the police released Guede’s name and photo to the media and issued an arrest warrant. In a Skype call with a friend, secretly observed by the police, he said that he’d been with Meredith at the house that night, and that I was not there, as the media were reporting. He made no mention of Patrick.     

Once Guede was apprehended, Patrick was released. The media paid little attention as one Black man was traded for another. (The police kept Le Chic closed for months, and Patrick ended up losing the business.) Instead, the media focused on me—“Foxy Knoxy,” the allegedly drug-addled girl next door gone wild who’d orchestrated what they were now describing as a death orgy with Guede and Raffaele. Guede was charged and convicted of sexual assault and murder “with others” in a fast-track trial; Raffaele and I were charged and convicted of the sexual assault and murder a year later. (Guede has maintained that he is innocent, and continues to insist that Raffaele and I carried out his crime.)

The lie that I was at the house when the crime occurred led to repeated instances of what is called forensic confirmation bias. The lie colored the collection and analysis of all the other evidence. It led police to ignore exonerating evidence, such as my lack of a motive or any history of violence or mental illness, my alibi, and the virtual impossibility of participating in such a brutal murder without leaving a single trace of DNA in the room. And it led them to distort and magnify the significance of trivial evidence, such as the fact that my DNA had been found in the bathroom where Guede attempted to clean off Meredith’s blood. Of course my DNA was found there—that was my bathroom too.

This phenomenon has been demonstrated by the cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror. In a 2006 study, he gave six fingerprint experts pairs of prints that, unbeknownst to them, they had previously judged in their own casework as matching or not. The experts were given some made-up context for each pair of prints. For the nonmatches, they were told that the suspect had confessed to the crime; for the matches, they were told that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. This fictional information resulted in two-thirds of the experts changing some of their original judgments. Believing that a suspect confessed alters the supposed objectivity of scientific experts. Dror went on to show a similar effect in other forensic domains, including DNA analysis and forensic pathology.

The jury, too, was swayed by the lie, though I truly believe that if they could have observed my interrogation, they would have known better. But my interrogation was not recorded, so no one saw the yelling, the slapping, and how I was psychologically manipulated. The irony is that at the time, Italy was more progressive on this issue than the United States: Recording interrogations was mandatory. But the police and prosecution claimed that my interrogation had been merely an “interview”—that I was not a suspect but merely a witness, and thus I was not entitled to a lawyer or a recording.

Italy’s own courts ruled that my interrogation was illegal and that the statements I’d signed were inadmissible as evidence for the murder charge. But while being tried for murder, I was simultaneously being tried by the same jury for criminal slander, and the judge allowed the statements as evidence for the slander charge. So the jurors were instructed to ignore the statements for the first charge, but scrutinize them closely for the second. It’s absurd to think that one didn’t affect the other. Had I not been charged with slander, I may never have been wrongly convicted of murder.

After four years in prison, Raffaele and I were acquitted of murder in 2011, when the court-appointed DNA experts found that the minuscule traces supposedly linking us to the crime were unreliable, and possibly the result of lab contamination. But our acquittal was appealed by the prosecution, and we were reconvicted of the same crime in 2014, based largely on spurious character evidence. Finally, in 2015, we were definitively acquitted by the Court of Cassation. In all of those trials, my slander conviction was upheld, with a sentence of three years—time served. And in that 2015 ruling, the high court also affirmed the police’s initial lie. Many who still believed in my guilt pointed to this “judicial fact” to support their theories: Amanda Knox is a liar, and she was there that night. Even if she is innocent, she knows more than she’s telling.

This left me free, but wrongly convicted; it let Guede avoid taking full responsibility for his crimes; and it left the Kercher family with a needless cloud of uncertainty.     

I have been trying to appeal the slander conviction ever since. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in my favor, sanctioning Italy for failing to provide me with a lawyer during the interrogation. Then, with the help of the Italy Innocence Project, I appealed to the Court of Cassation to reopen the case, and in 2023, it overturned my slander conviction and sent the case back to the appellate level for retrial. The high court limited this new trial to examining a single piece of evidence. The statements I’d been pressured into signing were no longer admissible. All that the judges and jury could consider was the handwritten recantation, my memoriale, in which I’d written things like “I’m unsure about the truth,” and “I don’t feel I can be used as condemming [sic] testimone [sic].”  

I traveled back to Italy for the hearing in June 2024, and testified once more. The judges and jury deliberated for two hours, then came back and found me guilty. I was dumbfounded, and deeply depressed. The conviction legally required two things to be true: that I’d made a false accusation, and that I’d done so knowingly. As for the false accusation, the presiding judge pointed to this line in my memoriale: “I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik [sic].” I wrote this to affirm to the police, after being repeatedly accused of lying, that I was genuinely confused. I finished that sentence with “but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me than what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele’s house.”

As for the second requirement, the court cited my memoriale when I wrote, “I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming. But I’ve said this many times so as to make myself clear: these things seem unreal to me, like a dream.” Despite the obvious confusion of my statements, the court argued that this mention of a scream was irrefutable evidence of my presence at the house, and proved that I knew who was and wasn’t there. In short, the court ruled that my memoriale was both false and slanderous and accurate and reliable.

I appealed this ruling to the Court of Cassation in one last bid to clear my name. And here we are.

In Italy, there is a notion of bella figura—of putting on a good face. An old-world sanctity persists around reputations, defamation and slander are taken very seriously, and officials are terrified of looking bad—everyone’s egos are at stake. An Italian lawyer once explained my slander conviction to me as a contentina, a “small contentment” handed down by the Court of Cassation to the lower courts and prosecutors. It was incredibly embarrassing for all involved when the high court absolved me of murder and cited “sensational failures” in the investigation and “culpable omissions” in the prosecution. So the high court upheld the slander conviction as a consolation prize for the officials they were rebuking. This absolved them of responsibility for justice going awry, because they could blame me, the liar, for derailing the investigation.

I’m crushed that Italy has cemented this lie into the legal record, and that I have no further recourse to clear my name in that country.

I am not a liar or a slanderer. But in the midst of all this, there is someone who committed slander, though he has never been charged with it. Rudy Guede falsely accused me and Raffaele of his crime after his arrest; in one interview from prison, he said that he was “101 percent” certain I was there the night of the murder. He is free again, after serving just 13 years in prison, and is being charged and investigated for sexual and physical abuse of another young woman. (He denies the allegations.) He continues to smear Raffaele and me. After his release, he said in an interview, “The documents say others were there and that I did not inflict the fatal wounds.”

Guede’s lies—and his relatively short sentence and release—are derivative of the lie invented by the police that evidence placed me at the scene of the crime. For a long time, I blamed myself for succumbing to the pressure to believe that lie. But what happened to me is not unusual.

My first glimmer of understanding came in prison, when I received a letter from Saul Kassin, a psychologist and an expert in false confessions. What had happened to me fit a playbook that had been used against hundreds—perhaps thousands—of other innocent people. The isolation, the bullying, the nitpicking of my memories, the excessive hours under interrogation, the refusal of food and bathroom breaks (I was even on my period and bleeding through my pants), the minimization, and the deception—they were all by the book. A tremendous sense of relief washed over me in realizing that what had happened was not my fault, and I came to find fellowship with others who had been put through coercive interrogations.

“Can you imagine,” Kassin told me recently, when I interviewed him for a podcast series I produced called False Confessions, “in the Central Park Five case, if each one of the five was charged with slander for implicating the others?” They, too, were lied to about the evidence against them. And like me, they all believed that they were merely witnesses, and that they would be released after signing their confessions.

But the case I see as most parallel to my own is that of Marty Tankleff, who was accused of killing his parents in Long Island in 1988. He was told that his father had awoken from a coma to say that his son was responsible. Tankleff could not comprehend how his father would lie about something like that, and after the police offered him the suggestion of a traumatic blackout, he came to believe that he’d been involved—just long enough for the police to obtain his confession. It sent him to prison for 17 years, until he was exonerated.

The problem with police deception is not that it breaks your will—isolation, bullying, and exhaustion do that—it’s that it loosens your grip on reality. This is why advocates in the U.S. are now pushing to ban deception by police during interrogations, something that has long been illegal in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, and elsewhere.

In the past few years, laws have been passed in various states in the U.S. to prohibit the police from lying to suspects during custodial interrogations, but they are all limited to minors. Adults, too, are vulnerable to these same pressures. At 20, I was in so many ways still a naive child. When I testified before the Washington State legislature last year in support of a bill that would ban the use of any testimony gathered through police deception, regardless of the suspect’s age, I was shocked to hear a law-enforcement representative frankly admit that police need to lie to do their job. The bill ended up being gutted; next week, I will testify in support of a new version of it.

When police tell the truth, they’re not only being more ethical—they’re also being more effective. A rapport-based interview method called PEACE has been embraced by the U.K., Canada, and several other countries. It eschews deception in favor of open-ended questions, and has been found to yield better information than guilt-presumptive techniques. And it has the added benefit of not destroying the trust between the police and the communities they are supposed to protect and serve.

Today, I’m going to allow myself to grieve this final ruling in my own case. But tomorrow I’m going to pick myself up and continue advocating for changing the law going forward. I’ve emerged from this legal saga with a deep understanding of how lies can derail the course of justice. When the police lie about evidence to suspects, they usually do so with noble intentions. They aren’t trying to elicit false confessions, but those lies can send the innocent to prison, let the guilty go free, and deprive victims of the closure they deserve.   

BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton takes on doctor and comedian Ed Patrick with his predictions for this weekend's Premier League fixtures.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Photo Album

A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

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