‘On the world stage, I was a liar, a drug-addled slut’: Amanda Knox

In September 2007, Amanda Knox was just another American abroad. Then a 20-year-old student, Knox arrived from Seattle to study Italian in Perugia, a small city north of Rome. Two months later, she found herself in the city’s police station.

November 6, 2007, was the fourth night of questioning. “The police told me: you witnessed something so horrible that you cannot remember it, but you need to, so we can bring in the bad guys,” the 37-year-old exoneree and author explains from an apartment in Budapest, Hungary, where she’s in the middle of a filming schedule; she can’t reveal what the project is yet.

The police denied Knox a lawyer, stripped her naked, and examined her genitals for signs of sexual violence. They also slapped her and began shouting: “Remember! Remember!” Knox had been in the police station since November 2.

Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old student from the UK, was found murdered on November 2, 2007, in Via della Pergola 7, the flat she shared with Knox and two Italian law interns. Kercher’s body was discovered on the floor, under a duvet cover, with three knife wounds to the neck.

“I have very clear memories of where I was on the night [of November 1] but the police told me, no, those are fake memories your brain made up,” Knox explains. “I was trapped in this new reality that I felt I had no choice but to accept.”

In her new book, Free: My Search for Meaning, Knox provides her account of the night Kercher was murdered. She says she was at the home of Raffaele Sollecito, a 23-year-old Italian student with whom she had been in a romantic relationship for less than a week, and the couple spent the evening cooking, reading, smoking pot, having sex, and watching Amélie. On the morning of November 2, Knox says she awoke in Raffaele’s bed and returned to Via della Pergola 7 to shower and change. Kercher’s door was locked. The two other roommates weren’t home. But Knox had a feeling that something was wrong.

“I came home, and I had discovered … that my house had been broken into and eventually learned that my flatmate was brutally raped and murdered,” she says. The police interrogation that followed resulted in Knox signing a statement in Italian (of which she then only had a basic grasp) implicating herself, Raffaele Sollecito, and Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese national and Knox’s boss at a local bar, to the scene of the crime.

“Being bullied, lied to, yelled at, and gaslit by the police, alters your sense of reality,” says Knox “It makes you compliant, suggestible and vulnerable. Especially when you are already in a heightened state of stress.” In her podcast series, Labyrinths, Knox has studied the psychology of false confessions and police interrogations. “I interviewed many wrongly convicted people about their experiences of being psychologically tortured by the police,” she says. “What shocked me is how common it is.”

In December 2007, the investigation took another twist, when Rudy Guede, a petty criminal, was caught trying to board a train in Germany without a ticket. The 20-year-old became a suspect in Kercher’s murder when investigators discovered his bloody fingerprint at the crime scene. Guede was extradited to Italy and charged in 2008 with rape and murder. Then in a separate fast-track trial, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, reduced to 16 on appeal. But he was never accused of wielding the weapon that killed Kercher.

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Knox and Sollecito’s trial, meanwhile, took 11 months. “On the world stage, I wasn’t a defendant … I was a liar, a psychopath, a dirty, drug-addled slut so jealous of Meredith’s purity that I raped and killed,” Knox writes in her new memoir.

The trial’s main prosecutor, Dr Giuliano Mignini, took a similar view of Knox’s character. In the closing arguments, Mignini described a drug-fuelled orgy in Via della Pergola 7, which evolved into an assault and then finally, a gruesome murder.

“People were attracted to the sexiness of the story,” says Knox. “But the product the media were selling to their audience was a hatred of sexualised women. They also promoted the idea that women hate each other so much that they might even kill each other.”

In December 2009, Knox and Sollecito were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively for Kercher’s murder. “I became the most hated person on the planet, and I was slut-shamed,” she remembers. In prison, she contemplated suicide. The support of her family, particularly her mum, Edda, gave her the strength to keep going.

So did reading. During the near four years she spent in an Italian jail, Knox read more than 200 books. “Once I became fluent in Italian, it was easy to find my sense of purpose in prison,” says Knox. “I was a very useful resource to foreign women who couldn’t speak Italian … Being useful in prison helps you survive.”

Knox was acquitted on appeal in 2011 when independent experts concluded that the DNA allegedly linking her to Kercher’s murder was the result of lab contamination. She returned to her childhood bedroom in Seattle, bewildered and emotionally wounded. The trauma didn’t end there though – in 2015, she was retried in absentia, re-convicted of the same crime, and re-sentenced to 28½ years, which she also appealed. In March 2015, the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, acquitted Knox and Raffaele Sollecito of murdering Kercher.

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Today, though, she is still convicted of slandering Patrick Lumumba, for which she was sentenced to three years’ time served. The Court of Cassation upheld that verdict in January, and she is exploring appealing this conviction in the European Court of Human Rights.

Knox claims that the final ruling from the Court of Cassation verdict contains several falsehoods. Namely, that Kercher’s murder was committed by multiple assailants and that Knox was present the night of the murder. She also points out that Rudy Guede, who was released from prison in 2020 after serving 13 years, was never held fully accountable for his actions.

In her memoir, Knox writes that five days before Kercher’s murder, Guede was caught robbing a nursery school in Milan and arrested, but released shortly afterwards without charge. Knox was given this information by Steve Moore, a retired FBI Special Agent who helped coordinate her move back to the United States in 2011. Moore suspected, but couldn’t prove, that Guede was a criminal informant to the Perugia police.

In 2019, Knox contacted prosecutor Dr Giuliano Mignini, and the pair began an email exchange, which Knox’s memoir reproduces at length. “I was suffering when I asked that you be convicted,” Mignini told Knox, when the two met in person in 2022.

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“I’m angry that Giuliano has chosen not to share things publicly he has said in private to me about the case,” she says, bursting into tears. She speaks about forgiveness, gratitude, acceptance, stoicism and meditation techniques she has learned from her study of Zen Buddhism. She then briefly introduces me to her husband, Chris, and two small children, Echo and Eureka. “I recognise how lucky I am. So many people I have met who have been wrongly convicted, spent a lot longer in prison than I did,” she says. “And they have not had the opportunity to be free and then pursue a family in the way I have done, so I’m not taking that for granted.”

This November marks 18 years since Kercher was murdered and, lately, Knox has been thinking about the fact that she never had the opportunity to mourn her former flatmate. She’s reached out to the Kercher family several times, but they’ve never responded.

“Meredith was a year older than me, and maybe a little more shy and introverted than me” Knox concludes. “It seemed fate flipped a coin, and I just happened to survive. Today, the choices I make are often inspired by this idea that what happened to Meredith could have happened to me.”

Free: My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox (Hachette) is out now.