Amanda Knox reconvicted in slander case

A court in Florence has reconvicted Amanda Knox for slander, years after she was acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. Knox will not face further prison time as she already served four years for the murder, for which she was initially convicted.

During her original police interrogation, Knox was also convicted of slander for falsely accusing local bar owner Patrick Lumumba of the murder. Although this conviction was quashed last year, leading to a retrial, Knox's lawyers have stated they plan to appeal the latest verdict. They expressed that Knox is disappointed, having hoped to clear her name after years of legal battles.

In court on Wednesday, Knox claimed she had been coerced by police into implicating Lumumba. "The police threatened me with 30 years in prison, an officer slapped me three times saying 'Remember, remember'," Knox, 36, said. Speaking in Italian, she added, "I'm very sorry that I wasn't strong enough to withstand the pressure from the police. I never wanted to slander Patrick. He was my friend, he took care of me and consoled me for the loss of my friend (Meredith). I'm sorry I wasn't able to resist the pressure and that he suffered."

Lumumba was arrested in connection with Kercher's murder and spent two weeks in jail before being released without charge after a customer provided an alibi. Despite this, Lumumba's lawyer stated that the case had severely damaged his reputation, saying, "He became known everywhere as the monster of Perugia." His lawyer added, "He lost his job, had his bar seized for months, and had to return to Poland because his wife was Polish.” Lumumba did not attend the court hearing.

The hearing was held behind closed doors, with audio and video recording prohibited.

Knox was famously tried, convicted, and later acquitted of the murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, originally from south London. Both were language exchange students sharing a house in Perugia in 2007. Kercher was found dead in their house, having been sexually assaulted and her throat cut. The trial garnered global media attention as prosecutors alleged that Kercher was the victim of a drug-fueled sex game gone wrong.

In December 2009, Knox, her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede were convicted of murder and sexual violence. Knox was convicted of slandering Lumumba in 2011. However, later that year, a jury freed Knox and Sollecito on appeal due to doubts over the forensic evidence against them, and Knox returned to the U.S. after spending four years in prison. Although their guilty verdicts were reinstated in 2014, they were ultimately overturned in 2015.

Knox is now married with two young children and advocates for criminal justice reform. She returned to Italy five years ago to speak at a conference on wrongful conviction, discussing the pain of being tried by the media. The trial was also the subject of a 2016 Netflix documentary, and Knox published a memoir about her prison experience.

Sollecito has kept a low profile since his release, revealing in a 2017 BBC interview that the case left him in debt. Guede, a Perugian resident from the Ivory Coast, was linked to the scene by DNA evidence and is the only person whose conviction for Kercher's murder was upheld. He was released early in 2021.