Amanda Knox Speaks Out After Being Re-Convicted of Slander: 'I'm Going to Keep Fighting This'

"I'm just sitting here, 17 years later with an open wound that I thought was going to be healed this time around," Knox said

Amanda Knox remains adamant about her claim of innocence, saying she plans to appeal her re-conviction for slander all the way to the Italian Supreme Court if she has to.

"I will fight for the truth," Knox said in an interview with Sky News Italy on Thursday, June 6, making her first public comments since an appellate court in Florence, Italy, ruled to uphold the conviction related to the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher.

The mother of two has been fighting to clear her name since shortly after Kercher was found dead in the apartment they shared in Perugia as exchange students. Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were falsely convicted of Kercher’s murder and spent four years in an Italian jail. Their murder convictions were reversed after three jury trials in 2011, and in 2015, the pair were officially exonerated by the Cassation Court, Italy’s highest court.

But one legal hurdle remained: a conviction for slander that came after Knox, while under coercive police interrogation, briefly wrongfully accused Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba of murdering Kercher.

It was a claim Knox made while being questioned for 53 hours by Italian police in the wake of her arrest. Though she quickly recanted her accusation, Lumumba spent two weeks in jail before his alibi was established.

Related: Amanda Knox Breaks Down in Tears as Bid to Overturn Slander Conviction Related to Meredith Kercher's Murder Fails

The real killer, Rudy Guede, was convicted of Kercher's murder in a separate 2008 trial and was given a reduced sentence. He was eventually released from prison in November 2021, per The Guardian.

Knox's appeal of her slander conviction, which came while she was still in prison in 2009, came after the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2023 that her rights were violated during her interrogation. Italy’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial. It began in April, but the conviction was upheld on Wednesday, June 5.

Though upset with the outcome, an emotional Knox told Sky News Italy that she will come back to the country as many times as it takes.

"I have been unjustly accused for 17 years," a determined Knox said in the interview, which was conducted in Italian. "I spent four years in prison as an innocent. Seventeen years, that is my entire adult life. I have been unjustly accused. From the beginning I just wanted to do the right thing and tell the truth. Sometimes I feel like there is nothing I can do. I am trying to do something. I will try forever."

She opened up more about her feelings on two episodes of Labyrinths, the podcast she hosts with her husband Christopher Robinson, which were published on Thursday, June 6.

"I was 20 years old when this happened, and I've just been living with this open wound and with this incredible stigma that comes from being accused of this crime and all of the implications that follow," she said. "I'm still living with it and I can live with it — I will survive this, and I'm gonna keep fighting it. But it's hard."

Her voice trembling throughout the episode, Knox noted how the re-conviction stirred up similar feelings to how she felt during her 2009 murder trial.

"I've been here before," she said. "I've been in front of a judge and a jury. I've poured my heart out to them before, hoping that I would be heard, and I've been torn down before, so this feeling is really familiar and it's kind of hard to describe in words because it's not just one feeling."

"I'm just sitting here, 17 years later with an open wound that I thought was going to be healed this time around," Knox said.

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She added that she was "in a state of deep confusion" by the outcome of her appeal, saying it was a "very straightforward proceeding" with just one document to review, her three-page recantation that she says stated "I do not know who killed Meredith."

"I'm back in this place of wondering why this happened because it doesn't seem to be based in the facts," she said. "And I'm just going to wait for that motivation document to see what kind of twisted logic is going to be utilized to justify interpreting what the European Court of Human Rights clearly said was a recantation, and they're going to somehow try to say it was an accusation. And I'm going to fight it."

"I think the court is patently wrong and I think ultimately what they've done is prolonged the inevitable," she said. "I will be acquitted of this, it's just going to take more time now."

Related: Where Is Amanda Knox Now? Inside Her Life After Acquittal — and Why She’s Still Clearing Her Name

Recounting once again the night of her interrogation, Knox called it the "worst night" of her life, even worse than the day she was convicted. "At the very least when I was wrongly convicted and sentenced, I knew what the truth was. ... But that night, I didn't know what was true anymore," she said on the podcast. "I felt utterly destabilized. I had no idea, and it was so scary."

"The police were people I was raised to trust and to obey," she said. "And I was already in a very terrifying situation — my friend had just been murdered, there was a killer on the loose and I was trying to help. And then to have the people that I was relying on yelling at me and hitting me and telling me that I had witnessed something horrible and I couldn't even remember it?"

And though she expressed gratitude for her legal team and her supporters, the Seattle resident had harsh words for Italian authorities.

"I really thought that everyone — and especially Italy — had learned something from this case," Knox said. "This [appeals] verdict felt like a huge step backwards into this land of fantasy that this case was for so long. It felt like Florence wanted to find me guilty of something. I couldn't be just an innocent person. Like, I had to be to blame for everything that happened to me, instead of the country taking responsibility for what it had done."

"What's happening to me is wrong. It's been wrong from the very start," a tearful Knox said. "It's been 17 years and I'm tired. But I'm not going to stop until it's right."

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