Ten years ago, Amanda Knox swore that she would “never willingly” return to Italy, the country where she was wrongly convicted of murdering fellow exchange student Meredith Kercher after a furiously contested case that made international headlines. But the 36-year-old American was not just back in Italy but in a courtroom this week in the latest bid to escape the toxic magnetism of a story that continues to define her.
This time, it wasn’t a murder charge that Knox was fighting but one of slander – her final conviction not to have subsequently been overturned. However, in a retrial, a court in Florence once again convicted her of slandering Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba: she had blamed the murder of Kercher on him during her police interrogation in 2007.
Knox won’t have to do any jail time, as she has already served four years, but it’s still a huge blow. Knox wept when the verdict was read out in court and was comforted by her husband, author Christopher Robinson.
Knox’s lawyer said that they would appeal the verdict, adding: “Amanda is very upset. She was hoping to finally clear her name.”
During the trial, Knox claimed that authorities coerced her during the interrogation – resulting in her accusations about Lumumba. “The police threatened me with 30 years in prison, an officer slapped me three times saying, ‘Remember, remember,’” said Knox in her testimony.
She apologised for not being strong enough to “withstand the pressure from the police”, and added: “I never wanted to slander Patrick. He was my friend, he took care of me, and he consoled me for the loss of my friend.”
This reconviction must be especially galling for Knox since the whole trial was at her instigation. It was because she appealed the original slander conviction that she was back in court, once again staring down the barrel of the Italian justice system.
But is this latest legal battle really evidence that Knox wants to end her association with the case – or that she just can’t let it go?
It was on Nov 2 2007 that Knox’s life changed for ever. Italian police discovered the dead body of Meredith Kercher in the Perugia apartment that Kercher, a 21-year-old British student, shared with Knox, 20, and two trainee Italian lawyers.
Knox, originally from Seattle, had fallen in love with Italy during a family holiday. She went on to study linguistics at the University of Washington and worked extra jobs to fund her dream: an academic year in Italy.
Knox moved into the ground-floor apartment at Via della Pergola 7 in September 2007. She got a part-time job at bar Le Chic, owned by Lumumba, and started dating 23-year-old Italian software engineering student Raffaele Sollecito.
Kercher and Knox also befriended their neighbours – and it was this group of residents to whom Rudy Guede, a migrant from the Ivory Coast, attached himself, tagging along on their visits to the girls’ apartment.
On Nov 1 2007, Kercher was violently stabbed and died of blood loss. When the carabinieri found her body, they immediately fixated on Knox. Why hadn’t she called the police sooner? Knox – who had spent the previous night at her boyfriend’s place – had noticed bloodstains in the bathroom and that Kercher’s room was locked that morning, but didn’t officially raise the alarm until after telephoning her mother at 12:47pm.
In her interrogation, Knox then accused Lumumba of breaking in, sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher. But the police refused to believe she had nothing to do with it, and they arrested Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba on Nov 6 2007. Lumumba was released after a customer gave him an alibi.
The case immediately became a cause célèbre. There was the stark juxtaposition of this terrible crime – and its international players – with the sleepy medieval city of Perugia.
Then leaks from the Italian police began positing salacious motives for the killing, suggesting it was a satanic sex game or a coerced threesome gone wrong. They lied to Knox that she was HIV-positive so that she would give them a list of her past partners (seven in total), then used that information, as well as the discovery of a vibrator in her bathroom, to suggest she was wildly promiscuous.
Knox was also painted as a she-devil who smoked pot and, perhaps showing sociopathic tendencies, who reportedly bought red underwear on the day Kercher’s body was discovered, and later turned cartwheels during questioning.
The discovery of Knox’s MySpace page with the handle “Foxy Knoxy” was the icing on the tabloid cake. She was portrayed as a femme fatale who had slain the comparatively innocent Kercher (a dichotomy that Knox later strongly refuted) in an act of horrifying, but titillating, girl-on-girl violence.
Knox’s good looks – and odd habit of flashing a megawatt smile in the courtroom – certainly played a part. The Italian media described her “acqua e sapone” complexion, which literally means “water and soap”, but which we might call “peaches and cream”. Yet this girl with a “face of an angel” was also reportedly a carnal killer.
Knox’s description, in an essay for Vice News, of how a lesbian inmate tried to seduce her while she was in Capanne prison in Umbria didn’t exactly help counter the media’s Sapphic soft-p*rn account. Knox wrote: “The idea of women in prison brings out the horny teenage boy in many of us,” adding that it was common for lonely incarcerated women to become “gay for the stay”.
Yet this lurid picture was worlds away from the Knox that friends and neighbours knew back home: the hard-working schoolgirl who got good grades. In fact, Foxy Knoxy was a reference to her footballing skills, but, as Knox later explained, Italian press interpreted it as “evil fox” or “the cunning fox”.
Knox was ordered to stand trial in October 2008, along with her boyfriend, Sollecito, even though a separate fast-track trial had led to the conviction of Guede; his fingerprints had been found at the crime scene, and his shoeprint, along with a shard of glass, suggested he had broken in. He was sentenced to 30 years, reduced to 16 on appeal.
After 14 months in prison, Knox’s trial finally began in January 2009. She continued to maintain her innocence, but during his appeal, Guede claimed that Knox was present at the murder scene, and that he’d heard her arguing with Kercher (one of his many versions of events). On Dec 4 2009, Knox and Sollecito were both convicted of Kercher’s murder and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively.
But that was just the beginning of an entrenched legal war. In October 2011, the appeals court overturned both murder convictions, and Knox finally flew home to Seattle. Then, in March 2013, the Court of Cassation in Rome, Italy’s highest criminal court, reversed that latest decision and ordered a retrial – resulting in another conviction for Knox and Sollecito in January 2014. Knox told Good Morning America that the ruling “really hit me like a train”, adding that she would “never willingly go back”, and that she would “fight this to the very end”.
Thankfully for Knox, yet again, their convictions were overturned by the Court of Cassation in March 2015. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay €18,400 (around £15,700) in damages to Knox for that original interrogation – which she has claimed took place for 53 hours, “without a lawyer, in a language I understood maybe as well as a 10-year-old”.
Most of us, after enduring such a horrendous ordeal, would surely want to hide away and try to live a normal life. But this is where we arrive at the continuing enigma that is Amanda Knox.
Instead of retreating from public scrutiny, and from the case, Knox released a memoir about her experiences in 2013, Waiting to Be Heard, for which she received an estimated $3.8 million (£3 million) advance. Reportedly the proceeds of the book were urgently needed to cover her legal fees and debts incurred by her family.
Yet in 2021, she described as “frustrating” the charge that “I’m profiting off Meredith’s death by having a career in any way relating to my experiences”. She continued: “I exist only through the lens of Meredith’s murder in some people’s minds. They forget that I’m a human being with my own life and my own experiences and I’ve literally had nothing to do with Meredith’s murder, except that I was her roommate at the time.”
But she continues to write and speak about the murder, even shape her career around it – so it’s hardly surprising that Knox hasn’t yet, and perhaps never will, shake off that association. Does she even want to, when it’s turned her into a minor celebrity?
She has rebranded herself as a victim-turned-defender of other wrongly accused people, working with the Innocence Project. She also did a series for Facebook Watch called The Scarlet Letter Reports on the “gendered nature of public shaming”.
So far, so admirable. But Knox can’t seem to resist returning to her own case. In 2019, she went to Italy to speak at a festival about how the media had “contaminated the inquiry”. The Kercher family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, called this visit “inappropriate”, stating that Knox “should accept the verdict that she received, which was extremely positive for her, and stop embarking on initiatives which seem designed to garner publicity and attention”.
Knox also appealed against that slander conviction, which resulted in her return to court this week. You can understand her desire to be fully exonerated, but might wonder whether it is really worth all the trauma and drama involved.
As for her personal life, in 2017, Knox made her Instagram public, sharing strange images such as one where she’s dressed as a virginal Little Red Riding Hood being stalked by the Big Bad Wolf. It felt peculiarly provocative given the frenzied debate around her sexuality during the trial.
Knox told The New York Times in 2021 that she’d kept the birth of her daughter, Eureka, a secret, concerned that the media would write sensationalist stories about Foxy Knoxy becoming a mum. But she and her husband had publicly documented the pregnancy on their podcast Labyrinths. (The couple have since had a son as well, in 2023.)
They also host a true-crime podcast. Knox has complained that it’s hard to get a “regular job” because people recognise her, but she isn’t exactly helping herself.
Then there’s the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox, in which she played a major role, and a forthcoming drama for streaming service Hulu – executive-produced by Monica Lewinsky.
Of course, Knox – a resident of the countercultural city of Seattle – might also just be rather eccentric. She and her husband attend Renaissance fairs, and their wedding was time traveller-themed: they emerged from futuristic pods to say their vows, and guests were given a book of poems they’d written called The Cardio Tesseract.
Not every victim is as perfectly innocent and explicable as we might like, nor is every criminal as uncomplicatedly evil. Knox might exhibit some hypocrisy by lambasting journalists for fixating on her, while also making money from her public profile, but you can understand why, after all these years, Knox might want to shape her own story.
