Amanda Knox Reacts After Her Slander Conviction Is Upheld: ‘I Feel Numb’

Amanda Knox is stunned that Italy’s highest court rejected her appeal of her 2024 slander conviction, saying on her Labrynths podcast, “I’m feeling just kind of f—ing numb.”

On Thursday, Jan. 23, the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome upheld Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing her former boss, bar owner Patrick Lumumba, of the 2007 murder of her flatmate Meredith Kercher.

“I’m a little bit astonished because I had higher hopes for the court,” Knox said in an impromptu episode Labyrinths with Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson, recorded moments after learning about the ruling.

“I’m trying to imagine how a legal expert, a panel of judges on the Supreme Court in Italy, can legally justify the decision they just handed down,” she said.

Growing emotional, she said their decision “means that I just have a criminal record forever for something I didn’t do, and there’s nothing I can do.”

In 2007, Knox, then a 20-year-old exchange student in Perugia, and Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, were found guilty of killing Kercher, 21, but were later acquitted.

In 2008, a man named Rudy Guede was convicted of murdering Kercher. He was released from prison in 2021.

In June 2024, Knox was convicted once more for wrongly accusing Lumumba, of killing her roommate under aggressive police questioning. She subsequently appealed the conviction.

Knox’s “Kafka-esque” ordeal, as Robinson described it, began on November 1, 2007, when Kercher was found murdered in her bedroom with more than 40 stab wounds and a deep gash in her throat. She had also been sexually assaulted.

Knox — who was not fluent in Italian — was questioned for 53 hours by Italian police. During the interrogation, she accused Lumumba of murdering her roommate, signing statements typed up by police, the AP reported.

She recanted the accusation in a four-page handwritten “memoriale” the next day, the AP reported.

Police still took Lumumba into custody for questioning, holding him for nearly two weeks before someone provided an alibi for him, according to the AP.

The memoriale she wrote intending to absolve Lumumba of any wrongdoing “is at the heart of everything,” she pointed out.

During questioning, “There was no way I could possibly know who had murdered Meredith, and there was no way that I could know if it was Patrick or not,” she said. “And that’s why the police were able to convince me that it could have been him because I didn’t f—ing know.

“So for them to assert that … I intentionally falsely accused an innocent person is just bulls–t.”

In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Knox’s rights were violated during her interrogation, the AP reports.

Despite that, “they acted like the memoriale that I wrote immediately afterward was not an extension of those rights being violated,” she said.

Noting that she is going to give herself time to “grieve” the decision, she vowed to continue to fight for criminal justice reform.

“I’ve been mentally telling myself there’s a way for me to not just feel defeated by this, but for it to give me momentum and to pivot around this in some meaningful and valuable way. But, God, I wish I were celebrating right now.”

Despite the conviction’s three-year sentence, she does not have to spend any more time in prison because of time already served.