'Gaslighting': Amanda Knox Slams Italian Court's Reasoning for Upholding Her Slander Conviction

Amanda Knox is speaking out after an Italian court released a 35-page document detailing its decision to uphold her previous conviction for slander.

The re-conviction is tied to an investigation following the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, whom Knox, 37, roomed with while studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, at the age of 20. Kercher was found dead in their shared apartment, and Knox was questioned for over 53hours by police, during which she signed statements wrongfully accusing Congolese bar owner and her boss Patrick Lumumba of murdering Kercher.

According to the Associated Press, although Knox later recounted her statements expressing that "they were made under the pressure of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion," the Florence appellate court said in new court documents that "the manuscript was written spontaneously and freely, as the accused confirmed in the course of her examination."

Regarding the latest developments in the case, Knox wrote a lengthy thread on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday, Aug 14, alleging that "the Italian justice system has been gaslighting me for 17 years now."

"It began during my interrogation, and it continues in the courts, most recently in the legal motivation released on August 8th which explains why they found me guilty of slander back in June," she wrote.

"This gaslighting is upsetting and triggering—hearing a judge offer illogical arguments, present falsehoods as facts, and label me a liar—but it also inspires me to keep fighting, because the police should be held accountable for their abuses of -

Scott’s Picks the Day Before the S,...

power," continued Knox.

Speaking about the interrogation and reasoning behind her written statements, Knox continued, "After hours of being psychologically tortured, I was finally left alone, and I began to realize that the statements I’d been pressured to sign were likely not true. I tried to tell the police, but they ignored me. So I asked for a pen and piece of paper."

After stressing that she was not involved in Kercher's murder, Knox invited people to listen to her podcast,Labyrinths with Amanda Knox,and wrote, "Rest assured: I’m headed back to the Court of Cassation to fight this."

Knox was first convicted of slandering Lumumba in 2009, before the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the interrogation had violated her rights. She then appealed the slander conviction, and a retrial of the casebegan in April 2024. The appellate court upheld the initial 2009 rulingtwo months later.

While she and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, ended up being falsely convicted of Kercher’s murder and spent four years in an Italian jail, their murder convictions were reversed after three jury trials in 2011.

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The pair were officially exonerated by the Cassation Court, Italy’s highest court, in 2015, and Rudy Guede, Kercher's killer, served 13 years in prison before being released in November 2021.

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