Amanda Knox speaks out on reconviction for slander

A day after she was reconvicted of slander in an Italian courtroom, Amanda Knox spoke out on her podcast Thursday.

The one remaining conviction related to the 2007 homicide of Meredith Kercher, Knox was sentenced to 3 years for slandering Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar proprietor, in a written assertion following the homicide of her roommate. She will not be anticipated to serve time, since she already served about 4 years earlier than her homicide conviction was overturned.

In an episode of her podcast, “Labyrinths,” Knox mentioned the reconviction introduced her again to how she felt throughout her 2009 homicide trial.

“I have been right here earlier than — I have been in entrance of a choose and a jury, and I’ve poured my coronary heart out to them earlier than, hoping that I’d be heard, and I have been torn down earlier than,” she mentioned.

In 2019, the European Courtroom of Human Rights dominated that Italian regulation enforcement officers violated Knox’s rights whereas interrogating her, which prompted the slander conviction to be tossed out and a brand new trial ordered.

By way of a trembling voice on Wednesday, Knox addressed a Florence courtroom in Italian, talking about why she wrote a press release to police naming Lumumba as her roommate’s killer. She did not intend to harm Lumumba, who was “not solely her employer” but additionally a buddy who consoled her after her roommate’s loss of life, however named him whereas exhausted and confused throughout intensive police questioning, she mentioned.

In her podcast on Thursday, Knox mentioned she was “confused” by the end result of what she thought can be a “very simple continuing,” and vowed to maintain combating.

“I, by no means, knowingly and willingly accused an harmless man. I used to be psychologically tortured by the police,” she mentioned. “And even within the rapid aftermath of that, I tried to do the suitable factor and I tried to recant, and the police did not hearken to me.”

Knox mentioned Wednesday’s reconviction was a “large step backwards” and felt like regulation enforcement officers simply “wished to search out me responsible of one thing.”

“I could not be simply an harmless particular person — like, I needed to be guilty for every little thing that occurred to me, as a substitute of the nation taking accountability for what it had executed,” she mentioned on her podcast.

Knox mirrored on being interrogated in 2007, saying it was the “worst night time” of her life — even worse than the day she was convicted.

“I used to be already in a really terrifying state of affairs. I imply, my buddy had simply been murdered, there was a killer on the unfastened and I used to be making an attempt to assist, after which [there were] people who I used to be counting on yelling at me and hitting me and telling me that I had witnessed one thing horrible and I could not even keep in mind it,” she mentioned.

“On the very least once I was sentenced … I knew what the reality was. I knew that I used to be harmless and that this was incorrect,” she mentioned. “However in that night time, I did not know what was true anymore, and I felt totally destabilized.”

Knox mentioned she feels grateful to her attorneys for standing by her, however expressed how painful it’s to nonetheless be combating for her innocence over a decade later.

“I used to be 20 years previous when this occurred, and I’ve simply been residing with this open wound and with this unimaginable stigma that comes from being accused of this crime, and the entire implications that observe, and I am nonetheless residing with it,” she mentioned. “And I can dwell with it; I’ll survive this, and I am gonna hold combating it. But it surely’s onerous.”