Amanda Knox said she is a “victim” who has been unfairly persecuted her entire adult life, after an Italian court upheld her conviction for falsely accusing a man of her roommate’s murder.
Knox, 36, from Seattle, appeared in Florence court on Wednesday to hear that his conviction for slander – for accusing Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba of participating in the murder of Meredith Kercher – and his sentence of three years in prison would be maintained.
Knox does not face prison time because she spent four years in prison after being convicted of Kercher’s murder, before being fully exonerated. Now she claims that she will appeal the decision and continue the fight to clear her name.
“I was wrongly accused 17 years ago. I spent four years in prison as an innocent [person]. 17 years – that’s my entire adult life, I was wrongly accused,” she told Sky News Italia on Thursday. (Sky News Italia is owned by Comcast, the parent company of NBC News.)
“I did not slander Patrick; I didn’t kill my friend. I will come back here as many times as necessary to fight against this injustice,” she said.
She added that she was surprised by the verdict and felt it was a “very clear issue”, arguing that one of the key documents in the case clearly said she did not know who killed Kercher.
“From the beginning I just wanted to do the right thing and tell the truth. Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing I can do. I’m trying, I’ll try forever,” she said.
Recalling the case, which became big news in Italy, the US and Kercher’s native Britain, Knox said she became the “most hated girl accused of murder in the world”. Referring to the nickname given to her by the British tabloids, she said: “I’m not Foxy Knoxy, I’m Amanda Knox.”
“I’m a victim,” she added.
Knox was 20 when she was sentenced to 26 years for Kercher’s murder in the apartment they shared in the central Italian university town of Perugia.
The murder made headlines around the world after Kercher, 21, was found half-naked in a pool of blood with more than 40 stab wounds on November 1, 2007. Her throat was slit.
Kercher, a student at the British University of Leeds, was beginning a year of studies in Perugia, living in a rented apartment with Knox and two Italian roommates. Her friends called her “Mez.” The youngest of four children, she grew up on the outskirts of London.
Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, then 25, whom she had been seeing for about a week, were charged with Kercher’s murder. Prosecutors claimed it was a case of rough sex turned violent.
After the two were convicted in December 2009, Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Both spent four years behind bars as the case wound its way through the Italian judicial system and, after a series of reversed verdicts, were finally exonerated by the Supreme Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, in March 2015.
Central to Knox’s case was that the evidence for her libel conviction comes from when she was in police custody, where she was interviewed without an interpreter or legal representation during 53 hours of interrogation over four days.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, ruled in 2019 that the Italian legal system should pay him $20,000. “Knox was particularly vulnerable, being a young foreigner, aged 20 at the time, having not been in Italy for a long time and not being fluent in Italian,” the court noted at the time.
Knox told Sky Italia that this experience left her “psychologically tortured, abused and mistreated”.
In a new episode of his podcast, “Mazes,” released on Thursday, Knox said, “I in no way knowingly and willfully accused an innocent man. I was psychologically tortured by the police.”
She added that authorities “wanted to find me guilty of something.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
