Amanda Knox reportedly broke down in an Italian courtroom on Wednesday as the court upheld a slander conviction against her stemming from the infamous 2009 murder trial that saw her jailed and later exonerated.
Knox, 36, had hoped to clear her name after her conviction in the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher was overturned in 2015. Even after that conviction was quashed, she still carried a slander conviction for accusing a Congolese bar owner of involvement in the murder under questioning by police.
She testified in court that anything she told investigators at the time had been said under duress.
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“When I couldn’t remember the details, one of the officers gave me a little smack on the head and shouted, ‘Remember, remember!’” she said. “And then I put together a jumble of memories and the police made me sign a statement. I was forced to submit. It had been a violation of my rights.”
But the court found that she had in fact accused an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, who spent several weeks in jail despite having an alibi. The slander conviction carries a three-year sentence, but Knox will not have to serve any time because she already spent four years in jail before she was acquitted on the murder charge.
Only 20 years old at the time she was thrust into a police interrogation room when 21-year-old Kercher was found brutally murdered in the Perugia apartment the two foreign exchange students both shared, Knox has long maintained that she was bullied by police.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,” she told the panel of judges and jury members. “I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”
Now a mother of two living in Seattle, Knox had not set foot in Italy for more than a decade. But she appeared in the same courtroom where she had been wrongly convicted as she found herself at the center of an international media frenzy back in 2009. Both she and Raffaele Sollecito, her former Italian boyfriend who was also wrongly convicted and jailed in the murder, had welcomed the slander retrial.
Sollecito told NewsNation last fall that he was “delighted” she’d have the chance to clear her name.
“To me, it’s clear that there are many doubts about this conviction,” he said at the time.
