Amanda Knox releases statement after recent reconviction of slander in Italy

Seventeen years after she was accused of killing her British roommate, Amanda Knox was back in an Italian court Wednesday, this time to hear the outcome of a slander charge that has stuck long after she was exonerated of the murder.

Knox said on X that she came to Italy to show she wasn’t afraid, “to look the judge and jury in the eyes, and to hear the verdict from their own lips.”

A lot of people think that the worst night of my life was on December 4th, 2009, when I was convicted of a murder I didn’t commit and sentenced to 26 years in prison. But it wasn’t. The worst night of my life was on November 5, 2007. 

Just days earlier, I had come home to discover the cottage in which I lived transformed into a gruesome crime scene, and my friend and roommate, Meredith, transformed into a victim of horrific violence. I was utterly shocked, but instead of running home to the safety of my family, I stayed in Perugia to assist the police in their investigation. I was in shock, exhausted, homeless, and thousands of miles away from my family. I had never been so unanchored and vulnerable in my life. 

On November 5th, the police questioned me for hours overnight, in a language I barely knew, without an official translator or lawyer. They refused to accept my answer that  I was with Raffaele at his apartment and I didn’t know who killed Meredith. They asked me the same questions over and over again, calling into question everything I said. Then the police discovered a text message I had sent to Patrick on November 1st, saying, “Ci vediamo piu tardi.” This was my poor attempt at translating the English expression “see you later” into Italian. In English, “see you later” means “goodbye,” but the police mistakenly concluded that I had made an appointment to see Patrick the night of the murder, and therefore, that I was lying about my whereabouts and somehow involved with the crime. They insisted that I had met with Patrick and demanded to know what we had done. When I tried to explain that I hadn’t met Patrick, they refused to believe me. Over and over again, they called me a liar. But I was not lying, and I was utterly terrified. When a police officer told me that my boyfriend Raffaele claimed I was not with him on the night of the murder, and that there was physical proof of my presence at the crime scene connecting me to the crime, neither of which was true, I was utterly destabilized. I couldn’t understand why the police, who I had been raised to trust and obey, were treating me this way.

Recognizing my distress yet willingness to cooperate, the police told me I must have witnessed something so horrible that my mind blocked it out. And they threatened me with thirty years in prison if I didn’t recall every detail. So I tried to remember what I couldn’t remember. When I couldn’t immediately recover these supposedly lost memories, one of the officers slapped me on the back of the head and shouted, “Remember! Remember!”   

Eventually, I pieced together an incoherent jumble of memories from many different days–and the police typed up a statement and had me sign it. I had been bullied into submission and was too exhausted and confused to resist. The interrogation was a violation of my human rights.

Finally left to myself, I scrambled to try to reassemble my sanity. Even though I was still in a daze, my supposedly recovered memories did not seem accurate, and I realized that I could not stand in front of a jury and testify to the statements I had signed. I tried to bring this to the police’s attention, but they were too busy rushing to arrest an innocent man so they could announce to the television cameras, “Case closed.” “You’ll remember the truth with time,” was all they said. So, I asked for a piece of paper and wrote the document that is in question today. 

This document was addressed to my interrogators, and though I was terrified that they would again become angry with me, yell at me and hit me, my primary goal was to recant the earlier statements.

I wanted the police to know that I was doing my best to collaborate. I was not lying. On the contrary, I was desperately trying to understand if those confused images that the police pushed me to evoke could be true. And until I knew which of my memories was true, I would not testify against Patrick. I could not be the witness against Patrick that the police wanted me to be. I didn’t know who killed Meredith. There was no way for me to know. Patrick was not just my boss; he was my friend. I would never knowing accuse an innocent person, much less a friend, of a grave crime.

Patrick gave me the opportunity to practice Italian by serving customers in his pub. He looked out for me. The day before our arrests, he consoled me for the terrible loss of my friend. I feel terrible that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure from the police, and that he suffered as a result. At the first moment of reprieve from that pressure, I wrote this document to recant the statements I had signed under duress, and to remove any suspicion from Patrick. 

This document is evidence that a scared 20-year-old girl was lied to and abused by the police until she was psychologically destabilized enough to not trust her own memories. It is evidence of a girl in a moment of existential crisis, who was outnumbered and outwitted, but who nevertheless was trying to do the right thing.

This is why I humbly ask the court to find me not guilty.

Knox, now a mother of two, was reconvicted of slander Wednesday for wrongly accusing an innocent man of the 2007 murder of Briton Meredith Kercher when the two were exchange students in Italy.

She had hoped to remove the last legal stain against her as she appeared at an Italian tribunal for the first time since she was freed in 2011 after spending four years in prison for Kercher’s slaying.

Despite a murder conviction against a man whose DNA and footprints were found at the scene, and a 2015 high court verdict definitively clearing Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, doubt about her role has persisted. That is especially true in Italy, among members of Kercher’s family and for the innocent man she accused, Patrick Lumumba.

©2024 Cox Media Group