I think so too. It makes more sense to me that she was enraged with Alex for having spoken the truth that her sexual relations with Josh's (the older boyfriend who went off for some military training) friend John were consensual thereby further damaging that idealized romantic relationship (she would have liked for John to have been punished to vindicate herself from her own bad behavior)which was supposedly important to her (but not important enough that she didn't have sex with two others, one of whom was his close friend) Maybe she thought that she could make it look like Alex attacked her too so that would "prove" that John did as well and make everything fine with Josh.
I agree. On both points. The State's proffered motive was by far the weakest element of their case (yah, they didn't have to provide one, etc).
Ezra didn't bring a knife to convince Alex to repent of having had sex with her. How exactly would such a theoretical repentance have changed anything at all for Ezra or her attempt to reclaim Jason?
Ezra said herself, in both her back to back interviews with LE in March, that she had spoken to Alex about "what would come up" in LE's investigation of her rape charges against John, and that Alex had been upset by this conversation.
I'm not sure how much more straightforward it gets than that. Alex would have had no reason to be upset by the conversation unless Ezra had either (or both):
1. Accused him of destroying her life/relationship with Jason because of what he'd told LE.
2. Demanded that he go back to LE to tell them he'd lied, she'd never said she willingly had sex with John.
And on your second point, about staging an attack by Alex to make her allegations against John seem more credible (yah, twisted, but so is she).
I think it's possible she originally brought the knife intending to stage that attack--as a plan B, or even as part of her plan A about the John rape charges, and the "BOY" carving was central to her plan.
She'd go off on a drive with him- in plain sight, with witnesses watching them go (says she went into Alex's house because she believed his roommate was home). And he would attack her on the drive, or perhaps she had originally planned on going to a park to have been in plain sight there too for awhile, committing the hate crime of carving BOY on her.
How credible to LE is someone who would commit a hate crime like that? How could Jason not believe her after Alex attacked her too? And it surely could also serve to turn their coffee house friends against him, and make her the sympathetic victim, not the freeloading, lying cheater kind of peep others write crude things about on the bathroom wall.
(I think the reason she inexplicably and stupidly carved BOY on herself after killing him was because that, not killing him, had been her original plan, and ultimately she really wasn't bright enough to come up with a remotely plausible story--ever-- after he wouldn't bend to her will & she lost it).
.