Seven years ago, Amanda Knox was released from prison. Last week she got engaged.

In 2007, when Amanda Knox was just 20 years old, her roommate Meredith Kercher was brutally murdered.

The women, who had only known each other for a few weeks, were living in the same house in Perugia, Italy.

They were both studying abroad at the time, with Knox originally from the United States and Kercher moving from the UK.

By the time fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to local man Rudy Guede, police had already charged Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, with Kercher’s murder.

In 2009, Knox was convicted of the crime. She spent a further two years in an Italian prison before she was released on October 23, 2011, when her conviction was overturned on appeal.

The next day, Knox flew back to the United States.

 

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#TheScarletLetterReports crew is hard at work on Season 2!

A post shared by Amanda Knox (@amamaknox) on Oct 6, 2018 at 7:21pm PDT

Knox, then 24, returned to college and wrote a book about her experience called Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir.

In 2014, she was retried in absentia, found guilty and sentenced to 28.5 years in prison. Her nightmare finally ended on March 27, 2015, when Italy’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Cassation, vacated her conviction.

“The knowledge of my innocence has given me strength in the darkest times of this ordeal,” Knox, then 27, said in a statement. “And throughout this ordeal, I have received invaluable support from family, friends and strangers. To them, I say: Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your kindness has sustained me. I only wish that I could thank each and every one of you in person.”

Since then, Knox has been trying to rebuild her life, and to build a career in media.

She graduated from college in May 2014, and began working in a bookstore and writing for the West Seattle Herald.

The exonerated woman then agreed to take part in Netflix’s Amanda Knox, a documentary directed by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn. This was the first time she had so publicly and so extensively told her own story.

The documentary once again propelled Knox into the public eye, so she decided to use her fame for good.

She started working for the Innocence Project and began to talk publicly about her experience as a murder suspect, convicted murderer and eventual exoneree.

In 2015, Knox joined Instagram. Suddenly she went from a mysterious figure, who the public still heavily scrutinised, to a normal 30-something woman who hung out with her friends and family, loved her cat and enjoyed travelling and taking photos of her food.

In 2018, Knox released a five-part series, The Scarlet Letter Reports, through Facebook Watch. In the series she spoke to other women who have withstood intense public scrutiny.

“While on trial for a murder I didn’t commit, my prosecutor painted me as a sex-crazed femme fatale with magical powers to control men,” she said in a statement. “The tabloids loved that story. So did the public. So did the jury. I lost years of my life to prison because of two-dimensional and misogynist stereotypes. In The Scarlet Letter Reports, I’m hoping to re-humanize others who have been similarly shamed and vilified, and elevate the standard for how we think and talk about public women.”

In June 2016, Knox began dating Seattle author Christopher Robinson. They later moved in together and openly spoke about their future.

On Sunday, Robinson proposed to Knox with a sci-fi themed proposal, which involved a “meteorite”, ominous music, a black light and a smoke machine.

In the video which was posted to Instagram, Knox is sewing when the couple hear a loud noise from outside.

 

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It was just your average Sunday night, when suddenly… This is just the first minute of the video. To see the whole thing, go to the link in my bio.

A post shared by Amanda Knox (@amamaknox) on Nov 16, 2018 at 10:42am PST

“What are you doing?” Knox asks. Laughing, she goes to investigate what Robinson called a “meteorite” and finds a tablet that tells the story of their love and the “the Knox-Robinson Coalescence”.

“I don’t have a ring,” Robinson says. “But I do have a big rock.”

Knox, of course, said yes.

“I very much love Chris and feel like he is my partner and he would be a wonderful dad,” Knox told People in 2017.

“And we talk about it all the time, so I look forward to that part of my life that I had always taken for granted growing up and then had to let go of in prison, and then suddenly find myself with that as an actual opportunity again.”