EXCLUSIVE: What really happened to Amanda Knox.

Amanda Knox is used to strangers approaching her in public. It's been almost two decades since her face was first plastered across front pages and global news bulletins, but people still recognise her often. Most of them are kind and supportive. They'll tell her they followed her murder trial, and they're glad she's free.

Others come up to her, visibly shaking, to ask for a photograph. Some want to quiz her about that day, the rumours about her conduct before and after her arrest, or her time in prison. "Are you Amanda Knox?" they ask.

"I've had the scenario where someone recognises me because I'm paying for something — my name is on my credit card. And instead of giving me my card back, they hold it hostage until they've had the chance to ask me questions," Amanda, 37, told Mamamia's No Filter podcast.

But the most unsettling encounter came when a stranger asked her a different question.

"Are you Meredith?"

Meredith Kercher was Amanda's roommate in 2007. They lived together in a sharehouse in the Italian town of Perugia where they were both studying on exchange. Meredith, 21, was sexually assaulted and murdered in her bedroom on the night of November 1, a crime for which Amanda and her then-boyfriend were wrongfully convicted. The couple spent almost four years behind bars before the verdict was overturned.

Listen to the full No Filter interview with Amanda Knox here. Post continues after audio.

The question posed by that curious stranger highlights an ongoing struggle for Amanda as she forges a life beyond the trauma of her time in Italy.

"The identity of Meredith and me is so intertwined in [that person's] mind that they don't actually know who died and who lived," she said. "We're just the same in their brain."

Amanda said she feels sadness that Meredith's death has been so tightly shackled to her name, courtesy of the judicial and media firestorm that followed.

"I have to accept that, hold that, understand that responsibility, and try to process what that means for me, on top of just trying to remember those good moments that I had with this lovely girl," Amanda said.

She reminisces about going thrift shopping, baking cookies and visiting a local chocolate festival with Meredith.

"All of those memories of her as a person are buried under a mountain of trauma," she said. "I have to put aside the crime scene photos that I've seen and the headlines about me that pitted us against each other and the ongoing sense that anything good in my life is an offence to her memory, in the eyes of some people."

Amanda said it's only in recent years that she's been able to begin wrapping her head around it all, around everything that's been lost. She calls that process "a privilege".

"The way I think about [Meredith] today is that we were two sides of the same coin, and fate just flipped the coin, and it just so happened that she came home that night, and not me," Amanda said.

The making of 'Foxy Knoxy'.

The night of November 1, 2007, Amanda Knox, 20, spent the night with Raffaele Sollecito, a local computer science student she'd started dating just five days earlier.

When she returned home the following morning, she noticed the front door had been left open. Inside, she found a small amount of blood in the bathroom. Alarmed, she went to fetch Raffaele.

They returned and together checked the bedrooms in the house. One had been ransacked, and the window was broken. Meredith's room was locked. She wasn't answering her phone. Raffaele phoned the police.

Meredith's body was found on the floor of her bedroom, covered by a duvet. Her throat had been cut. She'd been stabbed multiple times and sexually assaulted.

Amanda was taken to the police station and questioned. At first, she said, authorities told her she was their "most important witness". But when they called her back a few days later, it became clear she was one of their primary suspects.

Amanda claims that during the overnight interrogation, she had no lawyer or interpreter, was prevented from sleeping or calling her parents, and was intimidated and coerced into signing a confession, written in Italian, that also implicated Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a local bar. Amanda retracted the statement shortly after, but it was too late. The trio were arrested. (Lumumba was later released after police verified his alibi.)

Another man, Rudy Guede, a drifter from Ivory Coast, was also arrested after his fingerprints and DNA were found at the crime scene. Police insisted he couldn't have acted alone, and argued that Amanda and Raffaele were his accomplices in the crime.

The tabloid media devoured the story. Amanda became known in the worldwide press as "Foxy Knoxy". Glossy front pages painted her as a cold, calculated sexual deviant. They reported on her previous partners and closely scrutinised her new relationship with Raffaele. Images spread around the world that showed the pair kissing outside Amanda's house shortly after the discovery of Meredith's body.

Amanda said Raffaele was simply comforting her amid a shocking situation.

"I wasn't even sure what was going on in that moment, because as soon as the door was kicked down and Meredith's body was discovered, everyone started screaming in Italian, and I had no idea what they were saying.

"I could only pick up little bits and pieces. I was trying to piece everything together. I was talking to Raffale, going, 'What did they see? Can you talk to somebody? What is going on? Do they know it's Meredith?'" she said. "And so there was a moment in there where I was just in shock. And people look at that moment as evidence of me not caring."

The beautiful, young 'femme fatale' narrative was bolstered by the prosecution's salacious theories that the trio had murdered Meredith in a drug-fuelled sex attack. They later suggested the crime could have resulted from a sex game gone wrong, or a spat between the women about Amanda's untidiness. During one trial, there was testimony that Meredith had objected to Amanda keeping condoms and a vibrator in a shared bathroom.

Amanda and Raffaele were convicted of murder on December 4, 2009. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison, he to 25. Rudy Guede was convicted in a separate fast-tracked trial and sentenced to 30 years behind bars, which was later reduced to 16.

Over the next six years, Amanda and Raffaele were hauled through the Italian legal system. They were acquitted and released on appeal, retried and convicted again, then finally exonerated by Italy's Supreme Court in 2015. The court found that the pair had been twice convicted, despite "stunning flaws, or amnesia, in the investigation", and noted the lack of motive or physical evidence. It also pointed to a "sudden acceleration" in the investigation courtesy of all the international media attention.

Rudy Guede remains the only person to be found responsible for Meredith Kercher's murder. He was released in 2021, having served just 13 years in prison.

Where is Amanda Knox now?

Life after Italy proved surprisingly difficult for Amanda Knox. She said she spent many years lying low in a sort of self-imposed imprisonment in her home city of Seattle.

"I thought the entire time I was in prison that I was going to get to go back to the life I had before everything happened in Italy, and that was not the case," she said.

"That world didn't exist, and that person didn't exist. And so I spent years struggling and feeling ostracised and like I didn't belong to the rest of humanity. And then, over the course of time, little things happened that started turning it around for me."

Perhaps the most pivotal moment was meeting her now-husband, writer Christopher Robinson, in 2015. Amanda was writing arts coverage for a local paper when she approached him for an interview about his latest book.

"The lovely thing about Chris was that he didn't Google me. And he wasn't a true crime guy; he was a poetry guy. So he vaguely knew that I was a part of some sort of true crime scandal," she said.

Naturally, friends would quiz him about Amanda and question his lack of interest in her case. But Amanda said Chris preferred to get to know her as a person, rather than be led down a "Google rabbit hole".

"The idea that I could be in a room with a person who wasn't looking at me through the lens of a girl accused of murder was such a relief and such a rare and beautiful thing, and is a big reason why I fell in love with him," Amanda said.

They married in 2020 (the wedding was time-traveller themed) and now have two children, a daughter born in 2021 and a son born in 2023.

Amanda has also found purpose through work, as a journalist, podcaster (she is the host of Labyrinths and The Truth About True Crime) and advocate for criminal justice reform.

She has recently penned a second book about her experience titled, "Free: My Search for Meaning." Though she concedes in the book that she doesn't know "how to truly be free", she writes that she has learnt how to try.

Watch: Amanda Knox talks about her latest book, Free: My Search for Meaning. Post continues after video.

That involved reconnecting with Raffaele, and even meeting with the prosecutor who was instrumental in her first wrongful conviction. 

"Intuitively [I] felt like I was doing something really important. For the first time in my life, I was not just reacting to this worst experience of my life. I was being proactive. I was proving who I was by making the choice to sit down with this man who had hurt me and to tell him that I didn't hate him, and all the other things that I talk about in the book," she said. "But ultimately, it comes down to being kind."

She's also learning to extend that kindness to herself and to embrace her identity — and all that comes with it.

"My identity isn't the problem; it's the world's problem with my identity. They've imposed their bad feelings and projected their fantasies onto me, but that's not my fault. There's nothing wrong with me," she said. "And I felt like changing myself to hide from those things was almost like giving in and saying, 'You know what, you're right? There is something wrong with being Amanda. I should be ashamed, I should be hiding.' But no, I'm not ashamed, and I'm not hiding."

Keen to learn more about the life story of Amanda Knox? Read these next:

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

• Amanda Knox shares the reality of intimate relationships in prison.

• In 2007, Amanda Knox was accused of killing her housemate. Now she's crowdfunding her wedding.

Feature image: Supplied.