Amanda Knox is back on trial in Italy, where she spent years behind bars for the 2007 slaying of her British roommate before she was ultimately acquitted and allowed to return the U.S.
Knox was a 20-year-old student when she and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were accused of murdering Meredith Kercher during a study abroad trip in the Italian city of Perugia. She 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, sparking an ongoing long legal saga that could finally be coming to a close with a new trial set to begin in Florence on Wednesday.
Kercher and her Italian boyfriend were initially convicted but the ruling was later annulled in 2015 by the country’s highest court after years of legal limbo. Judges in their final decision cited flaws in the investigation and pointed to a lack of evidence, including the lack of “biological traces” linking the pair to Kercher’s slaying.
By then, Knox, now 36 and a mother of two, had spent four years in prison.
The court at the time did however uphold her 2011 conviction for slandering Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner she claimed was involved in Kercher’s killing. He was jailed for two weeks before his alibi was verified and he was freed.
In 2019, Knox’s legal team appealed the conviction, citing a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights from the same year that concluded her rights to a lawyer and an interpreter were violated during her initial interrogations with Italian authorities.
“Ms. Knox had been particularly vulnerable, being a foreign young woman, 20 at the time, not having been in Italy for very long and not being fluent in Italian,” the European court noted at the time.
Italy’s top court ordered a retrial of the slander conviction in October. While it’s unclear whether Knox will appear for the trial’s opening on Wednesday, she previously said she planned to take the stand and defend herself. Should she be found not guilty, she would be cleared entirely of the charges linked to Kercher’s slaying.
“I am not afraid to travel back to Italy and take the stand in my defense,” she wrote on X back in December.
“I was so unprepared to do so as a 20-year-old,” she continued. “All these years later, I finally am. And I want my daughter and my son to see what standing up for the truth and for your princples looks like.”
Rudy Guede, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast, was convicted of for 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 the next year.
