Thankfully for Knox, yet again, their convictions were overturned by the Court of Cassation in March 2015. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay €18,400 (around £15,700) in damages to Knox for that original interrogation – which she has claimed took place for 53 hours, “without a lawyer, in a language I understood maybe as well as a 10-year-old”.
Most of us, after enduring such a horrendous ordeal, would surely want to hide away and try to live a normal life. But this is where we arrive at the continuing enigma that is Amanda Knox.
Instead of retreating from public scrutiny, and from the case, Knox released a memoir about her experiences in 2013, Waiting to Be Heard, for which she received an estimated $3.8 million (£3 million) advance. Reportedly the proceeds of the book were urgently needed to cover her legal fees and debts incurred by her family.
Yet in 2021, she described as “frustrating” the charge that “I’m profiting off Meredith’s death by having a career in any way relating to my experiences”. She continued: “I exist only through the lens of Meredith’s murder in some people’s minds. They forget that I’m a human being with my own life and my own experiences and I’ve literally had nothing to do with Meredith’s murder, except that I was her roommate at the time.”
But she continues to write and speak about the murder, even shape her career around it – so it’s hardly surprising that Knox hasn’t yet, and perhaps never will, shake off that association. Does she even want to, when it’s turned her into a minor celebrity?
She has rebranded herself as a victim-turned-defender of other wrongly accused people, working with the Innocence Project. She also did a series for Facebook Watch called The Scarlet Letter Reports on the “gendered nature of public shaming”.
So far, so admirable. But Knox can’t seem to resist returning to her own case. In 2019, she went to Italy to speak at a festival about how the media had “contaminated the inquiry”. The Kercher family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, called this visit “inappropriate”, stating that Knox “should accept the verdict that she received, which was extremely positive for her, and stop embarking on initiatives which seem designed to garner publicity and attention”.
Knox also appealed against that slander conviction, which resulted in her return to court this week. You can understand her desire to be fully exonerated, but might wonder whether it is really worth all the trauma and drama involved.