The American woman falsely accused and wrongly convicted of killing her roommate while studying in Italy is finally getting the chance to completely clear her name.
Amanda Knox, who, along with her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was exonerated by Italy’s highest court in the murder of Meredith Kercher, but the records still showed she was convicted of slander, Barron’s reported. The slander conviction came after an interrogation – during which Knox says police yelled at, slapped, and threatened her – in which Knox spoke about a Congolese bar owner named Patrick Lumumba.
Kercher’s real killer was Rudy Geude, who was released from prison in 2021.
On Friday, Italy’s highest court overturned Knox’s slander conviction and demanded a new trial. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Knox was not provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during the interrogation and that this treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole.”
Lumumba spent a week in jail after Knox’s unfair interrogation.
On X, Knox said that she did not “point[] the finger” at Lumumba but that the “police implicated someone else through” her.
I was bullied into signing statements they wrote based on their speculations. False confessions and false admissions, like mine, are not authored by the people under the coercive police pressure. They are authored by the police themselves. https://t.co/nePriUDjIO
— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) October 13, 2023
“I was bullied into signing statements they wrote based on their speculations. False confessions and false admissions, like mine, are not authored by the people under the coercive police pressure. They are authored by the police themselves,” Knox wrote.
Back in 2021, Knox said this interrogation was the actual “worst moment” of her life. She explained that she was 20 years old, 3,000 miles away from home, and her friend had just been killed. A killer was on the loose when she was brought in for the interrogation and questioned by “seasoned adults” for 53 hours over five days without an attorney. She said she spoke Italian about as well as a 10-year-old and that police kept lying to her.
“They told me I was a witness, that I was helping them. A lie,” Knox wrote in 2021. “They told me that Raffaele had contradicted my alibi. A lie. They said they had evidence that placed me at the crime scene that night. A lie.”
She said the final interrogation wasn’t recorded like the others, and that they kept her awake all night, told her she had amnesia, and that she had repressed what happened the night of Kercher’s murder because she was traumatized by what she saw. She said police shouted at her and slapped her.
Her mom, who had just arrived in Italy to help her daughter, started calling Knox, but she was not allowed to answer, she said, as police just kept telling her that “everything will be fine” if she just told them that she was in the apartment and knew what happened to Kercher.
As to how Lumumba became entangled in the saga, Knox said that police found a text on her phone to Lumumba, who was her boss at the time. She had tried to write “See you later. Good night,” but police interpreted it as a literal meeting appointment.
“You must have met him at the house. Remember! Remember the truth!” she said police told her.
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On X, Knox wrote that the new trial “is a good thing” and said that Lumumba was her friend at the time this happened.
“We are both victims of the violation of my human rights during my interrogation, without which I was helpless against the coercive pressure of the police,” she wrote.
I’m on trial in Italy again…and this is a good thing.
As everyone knows, on March 27th, 2015, the Court of Cassation definitively acquitted me and Raffaele Sollecito of the murder of Meredith Kercher, per non aver commesso il fatto—for not having committed the act.
/thread
— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) October 13, 2023