Amanda Knox grew to become a family title in 2007 after she and her then-boyfriend had been arrested and charged with the demise of her 21-year-old flatmate. Unprecedented pre-trial media protection painted her and her boyfriend as degenerate intercourse fiends who killed an harmless British girl in a kink gone mistaken.
She and her boyfriend had been finally convicted and sentenced to greater than 20 years in jail.
Throughout her trial and subsequent jailing, Knox maintained her innocence. Later investigations discovered that police had not supplied her with authorized illustration, coerced a confession, and made quite a few errors within the investigation that led to Knox’s conviction.
She was finally acquitted in 2011, and she or he returned to her life within the US, solely to be re-convicted after her case was compelled to retrial in Italy in 2013. Two years later, she was as soon as once more acquitted when the Italian Supreme Courtroom tossed out her conviction.
With all of that behind her, Knox has one remaining authorized wrinkle to iron out in Italy; a defamation case.
Her trial begins tomorrow in Florence.
What’s Amanda Knox doing now?
Knox, now 36, is the mom of two babies and is married to a person named Christopher Robinson. She lives along with her household in Seattle, Washington.
Her experiences within the authorized system impressed her to start campaigning for prison justice reform and to focus on how police use their energy to power confessions from suspects.
Along with her marketing campaign work, Knox has additionally recorded commentary for a meditation app that focuses on resiliency and launched a podcast along with her husband. A mini-series specializing in her battles with the Italian authorized system is in manufacturing at Hulu, with Monica Lewinsky as government producer, in accordance with Folks.
The general public’s notion of Ms Knox notably shifted after the discharge of the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox.
The documentary examined the costs introduced towards Knox and highlighted how she was offered within the media, particularly by salacious tabloid writers in Italy, the US, and the UK.
Meredith Kercher homicide and conviction
She was accused and convicted of the 2007 homicide of Meredith Kercher, a British scholar who shared a house along with her in Perugia, Italy.
Knox was learning on the College of Washington in 2007 when she determined to take a yr to check overseas. She shared a four-bedroom condo in Perugia with a pair of Italian ladies and with Kercher. A piece of the home had additionally been rented out to a bunch of Italian males.
Kercher was a scholar on the College of Leeds who was additionally learning in Italy.
Whereas learning in Italy, Ms Knox labored part-time at a bar known as Le Stylish, owned by a Congolese man named Diya “Patrick” Lumumba. She additionally started relationship a person named Raffaele Sollecito.
On 2 November 2007, Ms Knox allegedly returned to her condo the place she discovered bloodstains inside, and Kercher’s bed room door closed.
She left the condo fearing that one thing had occurred to Kercher. Ms Knox showered at her boyfriend’s dwelling and the pair returned to have a look at the condo. When Mr Sollecito discovered that Kercher’s door was locked, he known as the navy police.
When police opened the door they discovered Kercher’s physique mendacity on the ground, with a cover over her stays. Police reviews on the time stated her throat had been lower.
Knox and her boyfriend had been accused of killing Kercher in a intercourse recreation that went too far. She was jailed for 2 years in Italy earlier than she went to trial. After a virtually year-long trial, a jury finally discovered Knox and her boyfriend responsible.
She was sentenced to 26 years in jail. Sollecito was given 25 years.
Knox was freed in 2011 after an appeals court docket overturned probably the most critical of her costs. The Italian police who investigated the demise had been accused of blundering via the probe to hurry to a conviction.
Whereas the homicide was overturned, considered one of her costs — a slander conviction — was upheld.
In 2013, Italy’s Courtroom of Cassation tossed out Ms Knox’s acquittal and ordered a retrial. She was convicted once more, and this time sentenced to twenty-eight.5 years in jail, whereas Sollecito’s sentence remained 25 years.
Knox stated she would by no means return to Italy, and two years after her second conviction the Italian Supreme Courtroom overturned her second conviction.
The slander case
Knox was sued for defamation after she claimed that Mr Lumumba, the proprietor of Le Stylish, killed Ms Kercher.
Mr Lumumba supplied police with an alibi and subsequently sued Ms Knox for suggesting he was a assassin.
Knox appealed the defamation conviction, as she had not solely not been given authorized illustration as Italian police questioned her, however they warned her that getting a lawyer would make issues worse for her.
She stated she made statements concerning Mr Lumumba throughout the interviews the place she was being questioned with out requested illustration.
In 2023, the Courtroom of Cassation ordered that the conviction be retried. That trial begins tomorrow in Florence.
Knox stated on her podcast, Labyrinths, that she hoped the ruling would clear her of wrongdoing and permit her to be free from any authorized penalties of the 2007 homicide.
She stated any statements she made to police concerning Mr Lumumba had been made “underneath the pressures of stress, shock, and excessive exhaustion.”
She additionally identified that police advised her on the time she was dealing with 30 years in jail and that Sollecito had flipped on her, which was not true.
“On the one hand, I’m glad I’ve this opportunity to clear my title, and hopefully that can take away the stigma that I’ve been residing with,’’ she stated.
“Then again, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way in which I’m nonetheless traumatised by it. I’m positive folks will nonetheless maintain it towards me as a result of they don’t wish to perceive what occurred, and so they don’t wish to settle for that an harmless individual could be gaslit and coerced into what I went via.”