Your prosecutors painted me as a psychopath, Knox tells Italians
AMANDA KNOX broke down in tears as she told an audience in Italy that she was portrayed as a “dirty, psychopathic, man-eating whore” during an eight-year legal process in which she was convicted and then acquitted of the murder of Meredith Kercher.
On her first visit to Italy since being acquitted of the 2007 murder of the British exchange student, Ms Knox said many people had told her she was “crazy” to return.
An emotional Ms Knox, 31, took to a stage in the northern city of Modena to address a conference about miscarriages of justice and trial by media.
“Many people think I’m crazy to come here, that it would not be safe. Even now, I’m afraid of being molested, derided, framed.”
But she said she was determined to tell “my version of the facts”. She broke down in tears on several occasions as she spoke about her conviction and the four years she spent in prison.
Italian prosecutors portrayed her as a ruthless, sex-obsessed she-devil, a narrative eagerly picked up by British and US tabloid newspapers, she said.
“I was not the defendant. I was the dirty, psychopathic, man-eating whore. I was christened ‘Foxy Knoxy’. It was an absurd and false story. But it meant it was impossible for me to have a fair trial. The jury was corrupted.”
Ms Kercher, from south London, was 21 when she was found dead with her throat cut in the cottage she shared with Knox and two Italian women in Perugia, a hill-town in Umbria that is popular with foreign students.
Rudy Guede, a drifter and small-time drug dealer, was jailed for 16 years, with DNA evidence linking him to the sexual assault and murder of Ms Kercher. But suspicion also fell on Ms Knox and her then boyfriend, Italian student Raffaele Sollecito with prosecutors claiming they had acted with Guede, knifing Ms Kercher to death after a sex game turned violent.
They were convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison. The convictions were overturned in 2011 and Knox immediately returned to the US. In her absence, the acquittals were thrown out by an appeals court, only to be upheld by the supreme court in 2015.
“The truth is that Raffaele and I did not kill Meredith,” Knox said. “I had zero motivation to kill my friend.”
Speaking in fluent Italian, Knox said: “I was alone, frightened, deprived of sleep and these were people in authority who were twice my age. I signed a confession but retracted it hours afterwards. They ignored me. For them, it was an orgy that went horribly wrong.”
She also addressed the false accusation of murder she made against Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese barman in Perugia who was arrested and held in custody despite having nothing to do with the crime, saying she was browbeaten into accusing him of the killing.
Knox admitted that she remains “a controversial figure” and acknowledged that critics have said her return to Italy will only revive the trauma of the Kercher family.