When Italy's highest court exonerated Amanda Knox of murder in , the bulk of her adult life had been consumed by a legal saga that began during her time as a study abroad student in Perugia, Italy. That odyssey quietly continued, however, for yet another decade, culminating this week in that same court upholding her convictionโnot for murder, but for slander.
In , Italian authorities accused Knox, a year-old from Seattle, Washington, of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor said was a bizarre sex game gone awry. The evidence invoked against her, which included mishandled DNA, was spurious from the outset.
Most importantly, it included a highly coerced confession, during which she implicated her boss at the timeโsomething that would come to dog her not only during her trial but for years after. Following Kercher's murder, law enforcement took little time zeroing in on Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, Knox's boyfriend of one week, despite that the DNA evidence went on to overwhelmingly implicate Rudy Guede, who ultimately served 13 years.
During her hour interrogation, Knox was slapped, screamed at over the course of multiple days in a language she did not speak fluently, and was not permitted to go to the restroom when she got her period. She was made to believe, she says, that she had repressed memories of the murder, which she needed to unearth if she wanted to help police and see her family again. But speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that I have never been put in a position of doubting my own sanity like I was in the hands of those police officers.
After law enforcement continued demanding she furnish a story, she eventually named someone: Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a bar she worked at part-time, who was arrested and spent two weeks behind bars before an alibi set him free. Though Knox's murder conviction was overturned in and thrown out for good in , she was reconvicted of slandering Lumumba in June of last year, which the Rome-based Court of Cassation has now allowed to stand.
