Amanda Knox Speaks Out After Being Re-Convicted of Slander

Amanda Knox stays adamant about her declare of innocence, saying she plans to attraction her re-conviction for slander all the way in which to the Italian Supreme Court docket if she has to.

“I’ll struggle for the reality,” Knox mentioned in an interview with Sky Information Italy on Thursday, June 6, making her first public feedback since an appellate courtroom in Florence, Italy, dominated to uphold the conviction associated to the 2007 homicide of her British roommate Meredith Kercher.

The mom of two has been combating to clear her identify since shortly after Kercher was discovered useless within the residence they shared in Perugia as alternate college students. Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had been falsely convicted of Kercher’s homicide and spent 4 years in an Italian jail. Their homicide convictions had been reversed after three jury trials in 2011, and in 2015, the pair had been formally exonerated by the Cassation Court docket, Italy’s highest courtroom.

However one authorized hurdle remained: a conviction for slander that got here after Knox, whereas below coercive police interrogation, briefly wrongfully accused Congolese bar proprietor Patrick Lumumba of murdering Kercher.

It was a declare Knox made whereas being questioned for 53 hours by Italian police within the wake of her arrest. Although she rapidly recanted her accusation, Lumumba spent two weeks in jail earlier than his alibi was established.

The true killer, Rudy Guede, was convicted of Kercher’s homicide in a separate 2008 trial and was given a decreased sentence. He was ultimately launched from jail in November 2021, per The Guardian.

Knox’s attraction of her slander conviction, which got here whereas she was nonetheless in jail in 2009, got here after the European Court docket of Human Rights dominated in 2023 that her rights had been violated throughout her interrogation. Italy’s Supreme Court docket ordered a retrial. It started in April, however the conviction was upheld on Wednesday, June 5.

Although upset with the result, an emotional Knox advised Sky Information Italy that she’s going to come again to the nation as many occasions because it takes.

“I’ve been unjustly accused for 17 years,” a decided Knox mentioned within the interview, which was performed in Italian. “I spent 4 years in jail as an harmless. Seventeen years, that’s my total grownup life. I’ve been unjustly accused. From the start I simply wished to do the precise factor and inform the reality. Typically I really feel like there may be nothing I can do. I’m attempting to do one thing. I’ll attempt perpetually.”

She opened up extra about her emotions on two episodes of Labyrinths, the podcast she hosts together with her husband Christopher Robinson, which had been revealed on Thursday, June 6.

“I used to be 20 years outdated when this occurred, and I’ve simply been dwelling with this open wound and with this unbelievable stigma that comes from being accused of this crime and all the implications that observe,” she mentioned. “I am nonetheless dwelling with it and I can dwell with it — I’ll survive this, and I am gonna preserve combating it. Nevertheless it’s onerous.”

Her voice trembling all through the episode, Knox famous how the re-conviction stirred up related emotions to how she felt throughout her 2009 homicide trial.

“I have been right here earlier than,” she mentioned. “I have been in entrance of a choose and a jury. I’ve poured my coronary heart out to them earlier than, hoping that I’d be heard, and I have been torn down earlier than, so this sense is basically acquainted and it is sort of onerous to explain in phrases as a result of it isn’t only one feeling.”

“I am simply sitting right here, 17 years later with an open wound that I assumed was going to be healed this time round,” Knox mentioned.

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She added that she was “in a state of deep confusion” by the result of her attraction, saying it was a “very simple continuing” with only one doc to assessment, her three-page recantation that she says acknowledged “I have no idea who killed Meredith.”

“I am again on this place of questioning why this occurred as a result of it does not appear to be based mostly within the info,” she mentioned. “And I am simply going to attend for that motivation doc to see what sort of twisted logic goes to be utilized to justify decoding what the European Court docket of Human Rights clearly mentioned was a recantation, and they will one way or the other attempt to say it was an accusation. And I will struggle it.”

“I believe the courtroom is patently mistaken and I believe in the end what they’ve achieved is extended the inevitable,” she mentioned. “I will likely be acquitted of this, it is simply going to take extra time now.”

Recounting as soon as once more the evening of her interrogation, Knox known as it the “worst evening” of her life, even worse than the day she was convicted. “On the very least after I was wrongly convicted and sentenced, I knew what the reality was. … However that evening, I did not know what was true anymore,” she mentioned on the podcast. “I felt totally destabilized. I had no thought, and it was so scary.”

“The police had been individuals I used to be raised to belief and to obey,” she mentioned. “And I used to be already in a really terrifying scenario — my good friend had simply been murdered, there was a killer on the free and I used to be attempting to assist. After which to have the folks that I used to be counting on yelling at me and hitting me and telling me that I had witnessed one thing horrible and I could not even keep in mind it?”

And although she expressed gratitude for her authorized workforce and her supporters, the Seattle resident had harsh phrases for Italian authorities.

“I actually thought that everybody — and particularly Italy — had realized one thing from this case,” Knox mentioned. “This [appeals] verdict felt like an enormous step backwards into this land of fantasy that this case was for therefore lengthy. It felt like Florence wished to search out me responsible of one thing. I could not be simply an harmless particular person. Like, I needed to be in charge for all the pieces that occurred to me, as a substitute of the nation taking accountability for what it had achieved.”

“What’s occurring to me is mistaken. It has been mistaken from the very begin,” a tearful Knox mentioned. “It has been 17 years and I am drained. However I am not going to cease till it is proper.”