An Italian court has upheld Amanda Knox’s criminal conviction for slandering her former boss, Patrick Lumumba, nearly two decades ago. Knox was wrongly accused of murdering her fellow foreign exchange-student roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007.
The Supreme Court in Rome found Knox guilty in June 2024 of wrongly accusing Lumumba of Kercher’s murder and decided to uphold the verdict on appeal. Knox has maintained that she was coerced by Italian police into accusing Lumumba and has said she was not present at her house when Kercher was murdered.
Lumumba expressed satisfaction with the verdict, saying he was “very satisfied” and that Knox “did wrong, this sentence must accompany her for the rest of her life.” Knox’s lawyer, Luca Lupària Donati, said the defense team was “incredulous” and would read the motivations behind the decision.
Knox was a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle when she found Kercher dead in their shared house in Perugia in 2007. She and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, as well as Ivory Coast native Rudy Guede, were all accused in Kercher’s murder. Guede was convicted and released in 2020 after serving 13 years of a 30-year term.
Knox spent four years in Italian jail before being acquitted in 2011 and eventually exonerated in 2015. She was cleared of killing Kercher in 2015. Knox has been fighting the slander charge since she was first convicted in 2009 and had appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in 2019, which ruled in her favor.
Knox has said she will have “more to say about this” after Thursday’s verdict and is currently living in Seattle with her husband and two children.
