(NewsNation) — Amanda Knox will return to an Italian courtroom this week to try to fight a slander charge against her.
Knox is back on trial for the first time in more than 12 years. She and her then-boyfriend had previously been convicted in 2009 for killing her 21-year-old roommate, who Knox had been living with while studying abroad in Italy. Those convictions were eventually overturned, reinstated and then overturned again in a series of trials over the ensuing years.
Now, Knox is trying to clear a final legal hurdle: a slander charge for wrongly accusing a bar owner of the murder.
Knox is returning to the same courtroom where she was reconvicted on Wednesday.
“On June 5th, I will walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself yet again,” Knox wrote on X. “I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck. Crepi il lupo!”
Amanda Knox’s trials
Knox had been a 20-year-old student living in the university town of Perugia when her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was found dead in their apartment in 2007. Kercher’s killing grabbed attention worldwide, with the media seizing on sensational images of Knox and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito.
The two ended up spending four years in prison after initially being convicted of the murder before finally being exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
Rudy Hermann Guede, a drifter who was living in Perugia, was later convicted of Kercher’s murder in a fast-track trial that foresees a lesser sentence. Although he was given a 16-year prison term that included a ruling he did not act alone, Guede was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years. Recently, he was ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and not to leave his house at night after being accused by an ex-girlfriend of physical and sexual abuse.
The Slander Charge
Patrick Lumumba, the bar owner who employed Knox part-time, was arrested and held as a suspect in Kercher’s murder, based on Knox’s interrogation by the police. Lumumba has since left Italy and is living in Eastern Europe with family, according to the Associated Press, though he has joined the current prosecution as a civil party.
The slander conviction facing Knox is the only charge against Knox that was able to withstand five court rulings. It is based on two statements, typed by police, that Knox signed after extended questioning in Italian without a lawyer or competent interpreter. At her first trial, Knox said police pressure had caused her to accuse an innocent man. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the conditions of Knox’s interrogation violated her human rights.
Because of this, Italy’s highest court threw out the slander conviction, ruled the two police statements were not admissible and ordered a new trial. This time, the court was only able to examine Knox’s handwritten statements for elements to support slander.