Amanda Knox could soon turn the page on the nightmare of the Perugia crime, which has haunted her for too long. The American woman, now a 36-year-old mother of two, faces a new trial in Italy, nine years after being acquitted of stabbing to death her friend and roommate, British woman Meredith Kercher. Yesterday she started a new trial in Florence in which she is accused of defamation for having wrongly implicated the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked part-time in the early stages of the investigation. It was Knox herself, convicted of this crime, who asked for the trial to be repeated, clinging to a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, which established that her rights had been violated during the police interrogations to which she was subjected in 2007. .
Everything goes back to November of that year, when Amanda Knox returned to her apartment in the Italian city of Perugia, where she settled to study at the University for Foreigners, to fulfill her dream of living in Italy. As she explained, when she returned to the apartment, which she also shared with two Italian students, she found Kercher’s semi-naked body stabbed together with blood everywhere. The police questioned everyone around the British woman and both Knox and her Italian boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty of the murder in what the Italian justice system defined as an orgy of sex, alcohol and drugs in 2009, when She had been behind bars for two years and was known by the press around the world.
Two years later they were acquitted, but the Supreme Court, in 2013, ordered a repeat trial. The following year they were found guilty again, until in 2015, an appeal determined their definitive exoneration of the homicide due to “glaring failures” in the investigation due to obvious contamination of the DNA evidence from the crime scene. The only one who remained indicted was the Ivorian Rudy Guede, the perpetrator of the rape, who was released from prison in 2021 after spending 13 of the 16 years of his sentence behind bars. Now, Guede is under investigation after an ex-girlfriend accused him of physically and sexually abusing her.
In the trial that is now opening, Knox’s slander of her then boss, Patrick Lumumba, owner of a bar in the city, will be discussed, whom she accused of the murder, and for which the American has already received a sentence of three years in prison. prison – which she served during the almost four years she spent in detention. Knox later explained that what she had said in the first interrogations (of 56 hours) at the Perugia police station was flawed testimony, since she barely spoke Italian and the police made her believe that she was testifying and not as a suspect in the crime.
The American tried to retract her accusation against her boss the next day with a handwritten note written in English, but Lumumba still spent two weeks in prison until a witness appeared who supported her alibi and she was freed. He lost his business and had to leave Italy with his family. As established by European Justice, his rights were violated because Knox spent the long night of interrogations without a lawyer or an official translator. “She was vulnerable, being a young foreigner, 20 years old at the time, who had not been in Italy for a long time and did not speak fluent Italian,” the Strasbourg court ruled, ordering Italy to pay 18,400 euros.
Knox now wants the trial to be repeated to free himself from this latest legal stain that weighs on his person, something that allows a legal reform introduced during the government of Mario Draghi. “On the one hand I am happy for this opportunity to clear my name, and I want the stigma I have been living with to be removed,” she explained on his podcast, Labyrinths, in December. “But I’m sure people will still be against me because they don’t want to understand what I went through, and they don’t want to accept that an innocent person can be coerced like this,” she lamented. Knox will be tried in absentia in Florence because she has preferred to be with her family in the United States, where a few months ago she gave birth to her second child and she has created a new life for herself as a writer and podcast host. .
