Italy’s Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon upheld Amanda Knox’s criminal conviction for slandering her former boss, Patrick Lumumba, nearly two decades ago.
An Italian court on Thursday afternoon upheld Amanda Knox’s criminal conviction for slandering her former boss nearly two decades ago, when she was wrongly accused of murdering her fellow foreign exchange-student roommate.
The Supreme Court in Rome found Knox, a 37-year-old former Italian exchange student, guilty in June 2024 of wrongly accusing bar owner Patrick Lumumba of murdering her 21-year-old English roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007 and decided to uphold the verdict on appeal Thursday, according to Reuters.
Knox has said she was coerced by Italian police into accusing Lumumba of Kercher’s murder.
“Italy overturned this conviction and sent me back for retrial last year. They found me guilty again, and now this is my final bid to clear my name once and for all,” Knox wrote on X before the verdict came down. “I am not a liar. I am not a slanderer. I was not present at my house when Meredith was murdered.”
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Lumumba said he was “very satisfied” after Thursday’s ruling, Reuters reported.
“I am very satisfied. Amanda did wrong, this sentence must accompany her for the rest of her life. I had a good feeling about this since the afternoon. I hail Italian justice with great honour,” Lumumba said.
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Knox’s lawyer, Luca Lupària Donati, said her defense team “cannot believe it.”
“A totally unjust decision for Amanda and unexpected in our eyes. We are incredulous, we take note and will read the motivations,” Donati said, according to Reuters.
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Knox was a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle when she found Kercher dead in their shared house in Perugia Nov. 2, 2007, in a case that made national headlines, dubbing the accused American exchange student various nicknames like “Foxy Knoxy.”
She and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, as well as Ivory Coast native Rudy Guede, who had no connection to Knox or Kercher, were all accused in Kercher’s murder in 2007.
Knox and Sollecito spent four years in Italian jail before they were acquitted in 2011 and eventually exonerated in 2015. Guede, whose DNA and fingerprints were found at the crime scene, was released in 2021.
The Italian Supreme Court in June sentenced Knox to three years for the slander conviction, though she did not have to return to prison due to her time already served when she was wrongly accused in Kercher’s murder.
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“I’ve been fighting this charge of criminal slander since I was first convicted in 2009. When I was acquitted of murder in 2015, this charge was upheld, so I appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in 2019, which ruled in my favor,” Knox wrote on X Wednesday.
Knox noted that her “interrogation, which Italy’s own courts deemed to be illegal, derailed everything” in her murder trial.
“Patrick [Lumumba] was detained for two weeks and lost his business. Raffaele and me [sic] were wrongly convicted and sent to prison. The real killer, Rudy Guede, got off with a light sentence. The Kercher family was deprived of certainty and closure,” Knox wrote. “The police were never held accountable for the crimes they committed against me behind closed doors.”
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Police threatened 30 years in jail if Knox didn’t remember who was there the night of the murder, Knox previously explained in a statement last year after the initial slander verdict. One officer slapped her in the back of the head and demanded she “‘Remember! Remember!'” Knox said in her statement.
Knox added that she will have “more to say about this” after Thursday’s verdict.
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She was not in Italy for Thursday’s verdict. Knox currently lives in Seattle with her husband and their two children.
