ABC News(NEW YORK) — Despite what you may have read this week, Amanda Knox and her fiance say they are not crowdfunding their wedding.
They just posted about their wedding on social media, asking for tips and suggestions and sharing a link to their wedding website. That website is connected to a publicly-accessible wedding registry.
“I did not put it out there expecting to get a dime from anyone,” Knox told ABC News.
On Sunday, July 20, Knox posted on Instagram and Twitter about her upcoming wedding, which included a link to the couple’s “wedding story” website featuring the story of how they met and a series of photos of the pair through the years. It also has a button at the top of the site that connects to their registry.
“Our wedding registry was never meant to be a crowdfunding source. It was meant for our family and friends and any well-wishers that I have” to see and participate in, said Knox, 32. “I have a lot of haters in this world but I have a lot of family friends and supporters as well. I wanted to share with them this fun, creative idea.”
Creative it is. The wedding is space-themed, so to speak, with the cosmos apparently playing a big part in their celebration. There are multiple levels of patrons that visitors could opt to become — stellar, galactic, or temporal — that will help pay for things like “outrageous costumes, crazier puzzles, mind-bending sets, and extravagant alien food,” the website states.
The registry does not solicit any specific gifts that may be staples of other wedding registries, such as place settings or blenders, with the couple writing at the top of the site: “Let’s face it, we don’t need any more stuff. What we do need is help putting on the best party ever for our family and friends!”
“We’re big nerds when it all comes down to it,” Knox said in explaining the theme, adding “we’re taking a very nontraditional route to our wedding.”
That includes the couple “writing a fun script,” Knox said, and asking guests to come in costume.
“We’ve told the guests that they have been displaced into time and they should dress” as is appropriate in their time period, “whether that is ancient Rome or the mutant wars of the 22nd century,” said Knox’s fiance Christopher Robinson, 37.
Knox said that she posted on social media about the wedding, which is set to take place on Leap Day aka Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, out of her excitement about the upcoming nuptials and “I didn’t have my normal restraint in deciding whether or not to share something with the world.”
“I suppose I should have anticipated the hateful response and the utterly misrepresented response that the media had,” she said.
Both she and Robinson, who work together on their podcast, “The Truth About True Crime with Amanda Knox,” felt that their wedding “means nothing” in the grand scheme of things and the news should be focused on bigger issues, like those who have been wrongfully imprisoned.
The couple used a password-protected website for invited guests to RSVP, but they said that they didn’t want to put the registry behind a similar protection because, as Knox said, there are “thousands of people who are supportive of me who follow me” and she said that “very often [they] want to feel connected to me and I try my best to share that.”
“We weren’t expecting people to go to the registries page,” Knox said.
Robinson said that they have been “planning and paying for this wedding for a year,” and the website notes that an unexpected cost that they faced this year was to travel to Italy when Knox was invited to speak by the Italy Innocence Project.
Knox was acquitted in 2015 for the murder of her roommate while the pair were studying abroad in Italy.
Knox was 20 years old when she was accused of murdering British student Meredith Kercher in November 2007. Her case involved two appeals court trials and two Supreme Court decisions before she and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were acquitted.
Knox sees the reaction to the wedding registry as the latest example of “the tabloids deliberately misrepresenting me.”
“In a way I anticipated this a little bit but I honestly didn’t expect the level of vitriol i thin in part because I am desperately in love with this person and I’m excited about it and excited to share it… it’s deeply sad that the news media has turned into a place where gratuitous shaming is making national headlines,” she said.
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