Amanda Knox is speaking out after the man convicted in the assault and rape of Knox's former roommate, British exchange student Meredith Kercher, was set free from prison.
Rudy Guede, 34, the only person still serving a sentence in Kercher's death, was granted permission this month by an Italian court to finish the rest of his sentence with community service. Knox was a year-old college student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when she and Raffale Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, were accused of murdering Kercher in November They spent close to four years in an Italian jail while the court proceedings unfolded.
After the long judicial ordeal, which involved two appeal court trials and two Supreme Court decisions , Knox and Sollecito were finally acquitted of murder in Wish us, 'Buon viaggio! View this post on Instagram. Read More. I was painted as a 'sex-crazed femme fatale'. Ahead of her return to Italy, Knox revealed she was "feeling frayed" in another Instagram post.
In the photo, Knox seemingly hangs from a cliff edge, accompanied by the caption, "3 Days till I return to Italy for the first time since leaving prison. In an essay published on her Medium account , on Wednesday, Knox also spoke of the intense media scrutiny of her case, having last fled Italy "in a high-speed chase, paparazzi literally ramming the back of my stepdad's rental car.
Knox said that while on trial "for a murder I didn't commit," the prosecutor "painted me as a sex-crazed femme fatale, and the media profited for years by sensationalizing an already sensational and utterly unjustified story.
Trial by media. Guido Sola, one of the festival's organizers, told CNN that Knox "is the icon of trials that the media carry out before the trial in court is conducted. Knox and Sollecito were eventually acquitted, but only after they were twice convicted and spent years in jail over a nightmare of a case that covered the better part of a decade and failed to satisfy the families of both the accused and the victim.
The cottage, already occupied by Kercher and two Italian women in the upstairs apartment and four male students in the one below , is said to be in a " bad neighborhood ," with drug dealers lingering at the nearby basketball court.
Following Kercher's early departure, Knox begins talking to the shy, year-old computer science student she described as an "Italian Harry Potter.
After Knox returns to the cottage in the late morning to find her roommate's door locked and an unflushed toilet in a bloody bathroom, Italian postal police break down the door to discover a semi-naked Kercher under a blanket, her throat slashed. Following a night of grueling interrogation, Knox signs a confession which she admits to being in another room of the cottage while her Le Chic boss, Lumumba, killed her roommate. Along with the confession, Knox and Sollecito's problems are complicated by their changing accounts of the night in question — at first they claimed they were together all night, then they said they were apart for a few hours, then they couldn't remember — and the seemingly carefree attitude they displayed in the murder's aftermath by going lingerie shopping.
November 15, An incriminating kitchen knife is reported to have been found at Sollecito's home. Sollecito later writes that he had once "accidentally pricked [Kercher's] hand" while the three of them were cooking. Guede, a year-old student Perugia, is pulled from a train in Germany after investigators find his DNA on bloody prints at the crime scene and inside Kercher's body. Guede says that he had consensual sex with the victim that night and that he was in the bathroom when an unidentified man entered and killed Kercher.
Meanwhile, Lumumba is released from custody, though he remains a suspect. The clasp , retrieved from Kercher's room nearly seven weeks after the murder, bolsters the prosecution's assertion that the suspects engaged in a dangerous sex game with the victim, though it also supports the defense's criticisms of a sloppy investigation and contaminated crime scene. October 28, Guede is sentenced to 30 years in prison; Knox and Sollecito are ordered to stand trial.
There, Knox met a year-old Italian computer engineering student named Raffaele Sollecito. Knox and Sollecito began dating soon afterward.
On November 1, , Knox was supposed to work at a pub called Le Chic, where she had a part-time job. After her boss, Patrick Lumbumba, sent her a text message saying that she wasn't needed, Knox went to Sollecito's apartment for the night.
Knox and Sollecito reportedly returned to her apartment the next day around 12 p. Knox called Kercher's phone, but there was no answer. She then called their third roommate. Finally, Knox called her mother in Seattle, who told her to call the police. Two officers soon appeared at the scene; they were postal police officers, used to investigating postal crimes, not murder investigations.
They entered the apartment to investigate, and kicked down the door to Kercher's bedroom. Inside, they found Kercher's body on the floor, covered in a duvet that was soaked in blood. Knox and Sollecito were taken to the police station, and for five days, they were interrogated. Later, Knox would say that no interpreter was present. Though her mother urged her to flee the country, Knox chose to stay in Perugia, wanting to meet Kercher's family.
Knox later said that she was bullied and beaten while in police custody. Finally, Sollecito admitted that Knox could have left his apartment at night while he was sleeping. When detectives presented this to Knox as an accusation, she broke down. Knox signed a confession saying that she had returned to her apartment on the night of November 1, , and had been standing in the next room while Lumumba stabbed Kercher to death.
On November 6, , Italian police announced that Kercher's killers had been found, and Knox and Sollecito were arrested. Lumumba had an alibi — he was seen bartending at Le Chic on the night of the murder. Two weeks later, a forensics lab reported the results of its examination of DNA evidence taken from the crime scene. The evidence didn't point to Knox or Sollecito — it pointed to someone else: Rudy Guede, a friend of the Italian men who lived in the apartment below Knox's and Kerchner's apartment.
Guede had been accused of several burglaries but didn't have any convictions on his record. He was immediately arrested in Germany, and admitted to being at the murder scene, but stated that he didn't kill Kercher.
He also stated that Knox and Sollecito were not involved. Guede opted for a fast-track trial.
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