Amanda Knox went back to an Italian court to clear her name. Now she's facing a new conviction.

In 2007, after the discovery of her roommate's body in her Italian apartment, Amanda Knox was interrogated by police for 53 hours.

She couldn't speak fluent Italian and in the early hours of the morning during an intense round of questioning, 20-year-old Knox signed statements implicating her boss—bar owner, Patrick Lumumba—in a murder he didn't commit. 

Later that same day, she recanted the accusation in a handwritten note. 

Watch the trailer for the Netflix doco on Amanda's story.

The American exchange student likely forgot about this detail in her case, as her fight turned to clearing her own name. Pretty soon she was the police's main suspect, and she and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito went on to be sentenced to 26 years and 25 years in prison for murdering Meredith Kercher.

The ruling was overturned in 2011, she was convicted of murder again in 2014, and then after four years in prison, both Sollecito and Knox were declared innocent in 2015 by Italy's highest court. 

But within all of those court proceedings, she was fighting another fight. In 2009, Knox was convicted of slandering Lumumba and received a three-year sentence. 

In 2023 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the interrogation the charges were based on, violated her rights. A retrial was ordered.

In June, 2024, the now 36-year-old was once again convicted of slander. 

With time already served, she won't be returning to prison but appearing in-person, a devastated Knox could be seen crying as she left the very same courtroom she was originally convicted in. 

"I didn’t expect it, I’m very disappointed," she said, as reported by Italian news agency Ansa.

She'd hoped this court appearance would clear her name altogether. Her lawyer told journalists outside court he was surprised by the court’s decision, and did not rule out launching an appeal against the verdict.

How Amanda was convicted of murder.

In Italy on exchange, Knox returned home to the apartment she shared with Kercher and two others in early November 2007, to find the front door open and drops of blood in the bathroom. Kercher's bedroom was closed, and Knox assumed she was sleeping. 

After she took a shower, she noticed more strange things. Faeces unflushed in the toilet, more drops of blood, and a broken window. Her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, tried to break down Kercher’s door with no success, so they called police. 

Kercher's body was found with multiple stab wounds. She was naked from the waist down, had been sexually assaulted, and her walls and floor were streaked in blood. 

Miranda Kercher. Image: Facebook.

Knox, her boyfriend Sollecito and her boss Patrick Lumumba were all initially charged with murder.

Lumumba spent two weeks in jail and was released only after a witness came forward with an alibi for him.

By the time Sollecito and Knox went to trial, someone had already been convicted of Kercher's murder—Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native, who opted for a fast-track trial in a closed session after his fingerprints were found at the scene, and his DNA was found inside the victim. 

During a nearly year long trial that followed in 2009, Italian prosecutors argued that Knox, Sollecito and Guede had viciously attacked Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. 

The prosecution’s main evidence against Knox included tiny traces of hers and Kercher's DNA on a knife discovered at Sollecito’s home. They originally also said a bloody footprint found on a bathmat had to be Sollecito's and claimed more DNA from the couple was found on Kercher's bra clasp.

Knox and Sollecito during their murder trials. Image: Getty/Franco Origlia.

In the media, Knox was given the nickname "Foxy Knoxy," painted as a promiscuous sexual deviant. Despite being charged alongside her boyfriend and another man, she was the focus of all the coverage. 

During their appeal, the original DNA evidence was unreliable. The footprint was found to be incorrectly measured, and the DNA on the clasp was deemed contaminated. 

While Knox and Sollecito were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, Guede served 13 years of a 16-year sentence and was released in 2021. 

Amanda Knox's life now.

Image: Instagram

Since leaving prison Knox has written a memoir about her experience, Waiting To Be Heard, appeared in a documentary called Amanda Knox for Netflix and hosts her own podcast called The Truth About True Crime With Amanda Knox. 

She also works with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to putting an end to wrongful convictions.

Knox is passionate in talking about the media's role within court cases, telling a criminal justice panel in 2019, "To the world, I wasn’t a suspect innocent until proven guilty, I was a cunning, psychopathic, dirty, drugged-up w*** who was guilty until proven otherwise", according to Reuters.

In 2018, she released a series on Facebook Watch called The Scarlet Letter Reports, giving high-profile women who had been publicly shamed — including Mischa Barton and Amber Rose — a chance to tell their stories.  

She married her husband Christopher Robinson, a poet and author, in 2018 and they have two children together; a daughter, Eureka, born in October 2021 and a son, Echo, born in August 2023.

They live in Seattle and on Instagram Knox gives little glimpses into their life together, choosing to on the whole keep her family life private. 

Feature image: AAP/Antonio Calanni.