Amanda Knox is set to return to a familiar Italian courtroom - this time to face slander allegations.
The 36-year-old American will return to court on Wednesday for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher, while the young women were exchange students in Italy. The case featured multiple convictions, and appeals, and instantly became a high-profile case spreading across the globe.
“On June 5th, I will walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself yet again,” she wrote in a post on X on Monday.
“I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”
Kercher’s body was found with her throat slit on November 2, 2007, in her locked bedroom in an apartment she shared with Knox and two other roommates.
Knox, from Seattle, had recently arrived in Perugia, Italy, when she endured a long night of questioning over the murder, despite having only rudimentary Italian language skills.
She ended up accusing the owner of a bar where she worked part-time – Patrick Lumumba – of killing the 21-year-old British student.
In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled the interrogation violated her rights because she was questioned without a lawyer or official translator.
In November 2023, Italy’s highest court threw out the slander conviction — the only remaining guilty verdict against Knox after the same court definitively threw out convictions for Kercher’s murder against Knox and her and Sollecito nine years ago.
That conviction, which endured multiple trials and appeals, has remained a legal stain against her, especially in Italy, as she pursues a new life in the US campaigning for judicial reform.
Knox’s 2007 accusation against Lumumba appeared in statements typed by police that she signed, but which have been ruled inadmissible in the new trial by Italy’s highest court.
She recanted the accusation in a four-page handwritten note in English penned the following afternoon — the only evidence the court can rule on. Despite her attempts at walking back the accusation, Lumumba was picked up for questioning and held in jail for nearly two weeks.
The slander conviction carried a three-year sentence, which Knox served during nearly four years of detention until a Perugia appeals court found her and Sollecito not guilty. After six years of flip-flop verdicts, Knox was definitively exonerated by Italy’s highest court of the murder in 2015.
Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted in Kercher’s murder in 2008.
Guede, whose DNA and footprints were found at the scene, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
He was released in 2021 after serving 13 years, and is currently being investigated for allegedly physically and sexually assaulting a former girlfriend since being freed.
