A new slander trial against Amanda Knox began in Italy on Wednesday, almost a decade after her conviction for the murder of her 21-year-old British roommate was tossed out by the country’s highest court.
Despite Italy’s Cassation Court finding in 2015 that Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had not murdered Meredith Kercher in 2007—for which both had spent four years in prison—she has still taken flak over her slander conviction for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner of the murder. Knox has sought to have her slander conviction dropped in light of a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 2019 that found her rights had been violated during her interrogation.
A retrial for her slander conviction was ordered by Italy’s top court last fall.
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As that trial began Wednesday, neither Knox nor Patrick Lumumba, the bar owner she wrongly accused, were present in the courtroom, according to the Ansa news agency. Carlo Dalla Vedova, a lawyer for Knox, was quoted saying the 36-year-old had wanted to attend but could not, as she is “busy taking care of her two young children, one of whom was born recently.”
Once vilified in the media as “Foxy Knoxy” when she was a 20-year-old student and accused murderer, Knox is now active in the U.S. as an advocate for criminal justice reform, writer, podcaster, and producer.
She said back in December that she was hopeful the slander retrial would finally vindicate her.
“On the one hand, I am glad I have this chance to clear my name, and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,’’ she said on her Labyrinths podcast.
“On the other hand, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way I am still traumatized by it,” Knox said, adding that she suspects “people will still hold it against me because they don’t want to understand what happened, and they don’t want to accept that an innocent person can be gaslit and coerced into what I went through.”
