Amanda Knox said she will continue to “fight for the truth” and planned to appeal her re-conviction on slander charges tied to the police investigation into the infamous 2007 murder of her roommate.
In an interview with Sky News Italy, Knox said, “I have been unjustly accused for 17 years. I spent four years in prison as an innocent. Seventeen years, that is my entire adult life, I have been unjustly accused. From the beginning, I just wanted to do the right thing and tell the truth. Sometimes I feel like there is nothing I can do. I am trying, I will try forever.”
Earlier this week, an appellate court in Florence, Italy, upheld Knox’s slander conviction for wrongly accusing an innocent man of killing of Meredith Kercher. Knox herself was wrongfully convicted of murdering Kercher and spent four years in prison before she was released in 2011.
The slander charge stemmed from comments Knox made under intense police interrogation. She said that Patrick Lumumba — the owner of a bar where Knox worked while in Italy — had broken into the apartment she’d shared with Kercher, sexually assaulted Kercher and then killed her.
While Knox recanted just a few hours later, Lumumba was still arrested and spent two weeks in custody before his alibi was eventually established (he was bartending at the time). Additionally, authorities still decided to pursue a slander case against Knox, prevailing with a conviction in 2009 while she was still in prison for murder.
Last year, the European Court of Human Rights said that Knox’s rights were violated during her interrogation, and Italy’s Supreme Court called for a retrial. During the new trial, Knox admitted to falsely accusing Lumumba, but argued that her comments should not be taken as slander because of the circumstances of her interrogation.
She reiterated this in her new interview Sky, saying she was “psychologically tortured, abused, and mistreated” by the police during her interrogation. “It was the worst experience of my life,” she said. “They made me think I was crazy.”
Knox went on to call the verdict “unfair,” adding that she was “really disappointed” and “upset” with the ruling. Still, she was “determined” to keep fighting the charge, insisting, “I didn’t slander Patrick; I didn’t kill my friend [Meredith]. I will come back here as many times as I have to fight against this injustice.”