Amanda Knox could soon turn the page on the nightmare of the Perugia crime, which has haunted her for too long. The 36-year-old American woman, now a mother of two, faces a new trial in Italy, nine years after she was acquitted of stabbing to death her friend and roommate, British Meredith Kercher. Yesterday, a new process began in Florence for which she is accused of defamation for having wrongly implicated the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked part-time during the first stages of the investigation. It was Knox, convicted of this crime, who requested that the trial be repeated, relying on a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, which established that her rights had been violated during the police interrogations she was subjected to submitted 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 . When he returned to the flat, which he also shared with two Italian students, he found Kercher’s half-naked body stitched together with blood everywhere, he said. 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 Italian justice defined as an orgy of sex, alcohol and drugs in 2009, when she had already been on the hook for two years and was known by the press all over the world.
Two years later they were acquitted, but the Supreme Court, in 2013, ordered a retrial. The following year they were again declared guilty, until in 2015 an appeal determined the final exoneration of the homicide due to “blatant errors” in the investigation, in view of an obvious contamination of the DNA tests of the crime scene. The only one who remained indicted was the Ivorian Rudy Guede, material author of the rape, who was released from prison in 2021 after having served 13 of the 16 years of the sentence. Guede is now under investigation after an ex-partner accused him of physically and sexually abusing her.
In the trial that opens now, Knox’s slander of her boss at the time, Patrick Lumumba, owner of a bar in the city, whom she accused of the murder, and for which the American already she received a sentence of three years in prison – which she served during the almost four years she spent in detention. Knox later explained that what he had said during the first interrogations (of 56 hours) at the police station in Perugia, was a flawed testimony, since he could barely speak Italian and the police made him believe that he was testifying and not as a suspect in the crime.
Knox tried to retract his accusations against his boss the next day with a handwritten note written in English, but Lumumba still spent two weeks in prison until a witness appeared who endorsed his alibi and could be released He lost his business and had to leave Italy with his family. According to the European Court of Justice, his rights were violated, because Knox spent the long night of interrogation 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,” ruled the Strasbourg court, which ordered Italy to pay 18,400 euros.
Knox now wants the trial to be repeated to free himself from this last legal stain that weighs on his person, something that is allowed by a legal reform introduced during the government of Mario Draghi. “On the one hand I’m happy for this opportunity to clear my name, and I want the stigma I’ve been living with to be removed,” she explained on her 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 in this way,” she lamented. Knox will be tried in absentia in Florence because she preferred being with her family in the United States, where she gave birth to her second child a few months ago, and has created a new life as a writer and podcast host .
