Amanda Knox has said she feels haunted by Meredith Kercher’s “benevolent spirit” and struggles with survivor’s guilt over the murder she was wrongly convicted of.
In an interview with People, Knox reflected on coming to terms with her “legacy” of being linked to the 2007 murder of Kercher, her roommate while studying abroad in Italy.
“There’s always this subtext, like ‘Look at Amanda living her life while Meredith is dead,’” she said. “Any expression of life in my life is seen as an offense to the memory of my friend who got murdered.”
Knox, 37, spent four years in an Italian prison after being wrongly convicted of the fatal stabbing of Kercher, a British college student with whom she shared an apartment. Prosecutors in the 2009 trial portrayed Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito as deviants who had killed Kercher in a botched sex game.
After signing a statement implicating herself in the murder, allegedly under pressure from the police, Knox and her then-Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of Kercher’s murder in the widely-publicized trial. Upon a later appeal, however, they were acquitted in 2011. Another suspect, Rudy Guede, was then convicted of Kercher’s murderer.
Now a criminal justice advocate, Knox spoke to People about how the ordeal has shaped her outlook on life.
“I’ve described it as feeling haunted by Meredith, but not in that bad way that people sort of project onto me...” Knox continued, explaining she sees Kercher’s presence in her life as a “benevolent spirit,” serving to “(remind) me of the value of life, the privilege it is to live and the privilege it is to fight for your life. Because she fought for hers.”
She told People that she still receives angry messages from people who blame her for Kercher’s death, acknowledging the inescapable connection between her name and the tragedy.
Last November, Kercher’s family denounced Knox for continuing to publicize the case, after it was announced that Knox would serve as executive producer on a Hulu series dramatizing the events.
“We’ve already spoken about this case too much and at a certain point you have to close the chapter,” the family’s lawyer Francesco Maresca told The Times. “However, Knox does not want to close the chapter.”
“So many people only ever heard about her through that context. And so in their mind, my existence and her death are married.. I don’t necessarily think that that’s a crazy thought, because I’ve had it, in how I am experiencing survivor’s guilt and how I’ve come to process Meredith’s death in terms of my life.”
Knox is promoting her new book Free: My Search for Meaning, in which she recounts reintegrating into society after her release from prison and reflects on the “search for meaning and purpose.”
