Amanda Knox’s notorious legal saga has finally come to an end, nearly 20 years after she was arrested and jailed for the 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, during a study abroad program in Italy.
Italy’s top court on Thursday upheld Knox’s slander conviction, brought against her after she wrongfully told authorities Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba was the one who killed Kercher.
The court’s decision foiled Knox’s last-ditch effort to completely clear herself of criminal wrongdoing in the case of Kercher’s slaying.
“This is my final bid to clear my name once and for all,” she wrote on social media Wednesday night while awaiting the verdict. “I am not a liar. I am not a slanderer. I was not present at my house when Meredith was murdered.”
Knox, a Seattle native, was a 20-year-old student living in the Italian city of Perugia when she and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested for killing Kercher. The British student was found with her throat slit on Nov. 7, 2007, beneath a blanket on the floor of the bedroom she shared with Knox in the Hilltop University dorms.
Authorities almost immediately homed in on the couple as prime suspects in the case, which garnered international interest and spawned sensational news headlines worldwide. Throughout the legal proceedings, resulting in two convictions and two appeals for Knox before she was finally acquitted of murder in 2015, the media dubbed the young student “Foxy Knoxy,” further fueling both her fame and notoriety.
The court, at the time, did however uphold her conviction for slandering Lumumba, who spent two weeks behind bars before authorities eventually confirmed his alibi.
Knox was sentenced to three years already served for falsely implicating him, but she launched an appeal in 2019. Her legal team specifically cited a ruling from the same year by the European Court of Human Rights, which concluded Knox’s rights to a lawyer and an interpreter were violated during her initial interrogations with Italian authorities.
An appeals court in Florence last year reconvicted Knox, who testified that she pointed the finger at Lumumba — the owner of a bar where she’d worked part-time — because of intense police pressure. She vowed at the time to again appeal the ruling in front of Italy’s top court.
“What really gets me is that this lesser charge was what the whole murder trial fell back on,” Knox said in a series of social media posts Wednesday. “My interrogation, which Italy’s own courts deemed to be illegal, derailed everything. … The police were never held accountable for the crimes they committed against me behind closed doors.”
Knox’s lawyers told Reuters she did not travel to Italy for the legal proceedings, opting instead to stay home with family.
In the wake of Thursday’s verdict, her attorneys said they were “incredulous” at the court’s decision to uphold her slander conviction.
“This is totally unexpected in our eyes, and totally unjust for Amanda,” lawyer Dalla Vedova told reporters in the courthouse.
Reached by telephone, Lumumba said he was satisfied with the ruling.
“Amanda was wrong,” he told The Associated Press. “This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life.”
Rudy Hermann Guede from the Ivory coast, center, is escorted by Italian penitentiary police officers as he leaves Perugia’s court after a hearing, central Italy on Friday, Sept. 26, 2008.
Rudy Guede, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast, was convicted of Kercher’s killing during a separate trial and sentenced in 2008 to 16 years behind bars. In December 2020, an Italian court ruled he could complete his term with community service. He was released from prison in 2021 for good behavior.