Amanda Knox will return to an Italian courtroom for the first time in more than 12 and a half years to clear her name “once and for all” of a slander charge.
The American was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her 21-year-old British flatmate Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia.
The slander conviction for initially accusing a Congolese bar owner of the killing is the only charge against Knox to withstand five court rulings that ultimately cleared her over the murder of Ms Kercher in the apartment they shared in the Italian university town.
A verdict in the slander case retrial ordered by Italy’s highest court is expected on Wednesday.
Ms Kercher’s killing fuelled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarised trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic as the case drew a great deal of attention on social media, then in its infancy.
All these years later, despite Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, doubts about her role persist, particularly in Italy.
That is largely due to the accusation she made against a Congolese bar owner who employed her part-time, a claim that led to her being found guilty of slander.
Knox, now a 36-year-old mother of two small children, returns to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after four years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court that overturned the initial guilty verdict in the murder case against both Knox and Mr Sollecito.
Italy’s highest court definitively exonerated the pair of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime.
Ms Knox wrote on social media: “I will walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself yet again.
“I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”
Her day in court was set by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of questioning days after Ms Kercher’s murder, depriving her of both a lawyer and a competent translator.
Last autumn, Italy’s highest Cassation Court threw out the slander conviction that had withstood five trials, ordering a new trial, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform allowing cases that have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are found.
This time, the court has been ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1.45am and 5.45am as she was held for questioning overnight into November 6 2007.
In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Ms Kercher scream, and pointed to Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she worked, over the killing.
Hours later, still in custody at about 1pm, she asked for pen and paper and wrote her own statement in English, questioning the version that she had signed earlier.
“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote.
Whatever the outcome, Knox risks no more jail time. The four years she served before the first acquittal covers the three-year slander sentence.
Patrick Lumumba is the Congolese bar owner who employed Ms Knox part-time. He was arrested and held as a suspect in the murder based on the overnight interrogation of Knox, and despite her hand-written statement later recanting the accusation.
Due to the notoriety of the case, Mr Lumumba has left Italy and is living in eastern Europe with his family.
Mr Lumumba has joined the current prosecution as a civil party, as is allowed by Italian law.
Rudy Hermann Guede was convicted of Ms Kercher’s murder in a fast-track trial that carries a lesser sentence. An Ivorian drifter who was living in Perugia, Guede was arrested in Germany where he fled after the murder.
He initially told a friend in a wiretapped call that Knox had nothing to do with the crime, but after being returned to Italy he blamed Knox and denied involvement.
Guede was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year term that included a ruling that he did not act alone.
