Amanda Knox is an American who was convicted and later acquitted of murdering her roommate who was studying abroad in Italy. Lost the case again.
Ms Knox was convicted by a Florence court of defaming a man who ran a bar in 2007, unfairly accusing him of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher, 21 .
Ms Knox was originally found guilty in 2009 of defaming Dia Lumumba, also known as Patrick, and several Italian courts upheld her conviction. At the time of the murder, Mr. Lumumba was running a bar called Le Chic, where Ms. Knox worked part-time.
Ms. Knox declined to speak to reporters after Wednesday’s ruling. Standing in front of the courtroom, she appeared distressed and hugged her husband, Christopher Robinson, tightly.
“Amanda is very frustrated,” one of her lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said after the verdict. He said she had been looking forward to the trial, which would bring an end to “17 years of judicial proceedings”.
Her defense team said it would read the court’s full written ruling within 60 days and then likely file an appeal to Italy’s Supreme Court.
Addressing a court packed with reporters earlier on Wednesday, Ms Knox described “the worst night of my life” over her comments about Mr Lumumba in 2007 and said she was guilty of Accusing an innocent man of being bullied by the police.
She told the court in Italian, her voice cracking at times, that the 20-year-old had been deceived, frightened and “mentally unstable”. She said she didn’t understand why police, “who I had been raised to trust and obey”, forced her to admit things that were untrue and sign a document that was nothing more than “a mixture of incoherent memories.”
Wednesday’s hearing was the latest twist in a legal journey that has echoes of the murder of British student Ms Kercher nearly 17 years ago, which made headlines around the world and made Ms Knox a tabloid staple Still echoing.
A European Court of Justice ruling and changes to Italian law allowed Ms Knox to lodge a new appeal against the defamation charges, and Italy’s top court ordered a retrial in October, which began in April.
In 2007, Ms. Knox was arrested with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, then 23, on charges of murdering Ms. Kercher during a sex game, which prosecutors said Something went wrong, and Ms. Knox became a household name. All three studied in the picturesque central Italian city of Perugia.
In 2009, an Italian court found Ms Knox guilty of murder but was found not guilty on appeal. She returned to the United States in 2011, and her case bounced around various courts until Italy’s Supreme Court acquitted her and Sollecito in 2015.
Ms Knox arrived at court early on Wednesday and had to make her way through a crowd of photographers waiting for her to appear. One of her lawyers said she was accidentally hit in the forehead by a camera.
Ms Kercher was “a victim of horrific violence”, Ms Knox said in court as she recalled the events that led her to accuse Mr Lumumba. In the days after Ms Kercher’s death, Ms Knox said she was “shocked and exhausted” and “I have never felt more vulnerable in my life”.
It was then, she said, that she exchanged text messages with Mr Lumumba that night after police forced her to reveal Mr Lumumba’s name during a nightlong interrogation. She said an officer slapped her.
The morning after the trial, she retracted her statement in a handwritten statement and wrote of her confusion: “I want to make it clear that I have serious doubts about the veracity of my statements as they were made in Made under pressure, shock and fear.
Lumumba, who lives in Krakow, Poland, did not attend Wednesday’s hearing and did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Knox, now 36 and a mother of two, returned to the United States and became an advocate for people incarcerated for crimes she did not commit and a campaigner for criminal justice reform.
Perugia resident Rudy Guede, who had a history of burglaries, was tried separately in the murder case and convicted. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison, served 13 years and was released in 2021, and recently made headlines after his ex-girlfriend accused him of physically abusing her. His lawyer said this week that the case involving his ex-girlfriend remains under investigation.
Although Ms. Knox withdrew the charges against Mr. Lumumba, he was arrested and held for two weeks until he was released after one of his clients provided an alibi.
Mr Lumumba sued for defamation and Ms Knox was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison, of which she served four years.
Ms Knox said in December 2023 on the podcast “Maze”, which she co-hosts with her husband, that the libel verdict still left her uneasy.
She said that to some people, this “proves that I’m a liar, that I’m a nasty person, that I have something to hide, that I never told the whole truth about what happened to Meredith, but only participated in it” The person responsible for this incident.” Criminals may even make comments about themselves and others. “
There was no record of the interrogation that night, and Italian police sued Ms. Knox for defamation over her account of the interrogation. She was tried on these charges in 2016 and acquitted.
In 2019, Europe’s top human rights court ruled that Ms. Knox had been denied adequate legal aid during her trial, violating her right to a fair trial, and ordered Italy to pay her €18,400 (about $21,000 at the time) in compensation. , costs and fees. The court also questioned the role of Ms Knox’s interpreter and said Ms Knox’s statements during the trial “were made under great psychological pressure”.
At a hearing in April related to the libel case, Italian prosecutors and Mr Lumumba’s lawyer Carlo Pacelli argued that Ms Knox deliberately accused the bar manager of diverting attention from herself and undermining the investigation. .
Ms Knox was ordered to pay compensation to Mr Lumumba, but Mr Pacelli said she never gave Mr Lumumba any money. As a result of the accusation, Mr. Lumumba lost his business and left Italy with his family.
“I am sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of the police and he suffered as a result,” Knox said before the ruling on Wednesday.
Luca Lupária Donati, another lawyer for Ms. Knox, called Wednesday’s verdict a “serious error of justice,” adding, “We will not stop here.”
