Amanda Knox, an American who was convicted and then exonerated of murdering her housemate while they were studying in Italy, appeared in an Italian court on Wednesday to defend herself against slander charges related to the 2007 killing.
Speaking to a packed courtroom in Florence, Ms. Knox described “the worst night of my life,” and said that she was bullied by the police into accusing an innocent man of murder.
Ms. Knox was defending herself on charges that she had slandered Diya Lumumba, also known as Patrick, by unjustly accusing him of killing her 21-year-old housemate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007. She was convicted of the slander charge in 2009 and it was upheld by various Italian courts. Mr. Lumumba ran a bar called Le Chic where Ms. Knox worked part time.
“I was a 20-year-old who had been tricked and was psychologically destabilized,” Ms. Knox told the court in Italian, her voice cracking at times. She said couldn’t understand why the police, “who I had been raised to trust,” were pressuring her to admit to something that was not true and sign a document that was little more “than a mix of incoherent memories.”
The hearing on Wednesday is the latest turn in a legal journey whose echoes continue to reverberate nearly 17 years after the murder of Ms. Kercher, a British student, elicited headlines around the world and turned Ms. Knox into a tabloid staple.
But a European court ruling and a change in Italian law allowed a new appeal by Ms. Knox, and Italy’s highest court in October ordered a retrial, which began in April in an appellate court in Florence.
For Ms. Knox, an acquittal could mark the end of a long ordeal. Writing on social media on Monday, Ms. Knox said she hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me.”
Ms. Knox became a household name in 2007 when she was arrested with her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, then 23, for the murder of Ms. Kercher during what prosecutors described as a sex game gone wrong. All three were studying in the picturesque central Italian city of Perugia.
Ms. Knox was convicted in 2009 of the killing by an Italian court but acquitted on appeal. She returned to the United States in 2011 while her case bounced between various courts until she and Mr. Sollecito were exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
Ms. Knox, arriving early at the courthouse on Wednesday with her husband, Christopher Robinson, had to navigate a crowd of camera operators waiting for her to appear. One of her lawyers said that she had been inadvertently struck in the forehead by a camera.
Speaking to the court, recalling the events that led her to accuse Mr. Lumumba, Ms. Knox said that Ms. Kercher had been the “victim of horrible violence.” In the days after Ms. Kercher’s death, Ms. Knox said that she had been “under shock and exhausted” and had never felt “so vulnerable in my life.”
It was at that point, she said, that the police pressured her into naming Mr. Lumumba, with whom she had exchanged some text messages that night. She said one officer had slapped her.
In a handwritten statement the morning after the interrogation, she recanted her statements and wrote of her confusion: “I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion.”
Mr. Lumumba, who now lives in Krakow, Poland, did not attend Wednesday’s hearing and has not responded to requests for comment.
Since returning to the United States, Ms. Knox, now 36 and a mother of two, has become an advocate for people incarcercerated for crimes they did not commit and a campaigner for criminal justice reform.
Rudy Guede, a Perugia resident with a police history of break-ins, was tried separately and convicted in the murder case. He served 13 years of a 16-year-sentence and was released in 2021, recently making headlines after a former girlfriend accused him of physically abusing her. His lawyer said this week that the case involving the former girlfriend was still being investigated.
Although Ms. Knox recanted her statements accusing Mr. Lumumba, he was arrested, held in prison for two weeks and released only after one of his clients provided an alibi.
Mr. Lumumba sued for slander, and Ms. Knox was found guilty and sentenced to three years, which she served during her four years in prison.
In a December 2023 episode of “Labyrinths,” the podcast she hosts with her husband, Ms. Knox said the slander conviction still disturbed her.
For some, she said, it was “proof that I am a liar and I am an unsavory person and that I have something to hide and I’ve never told the full truth about what happened to Meredith and only somebody who was involved in the crime would ever even make statements that implicated themselves and others.”
There are no recordings of the interrogations that night, and Italian police officers sued Ms. Knox for slander for her depiction of the interrogation. She was tried and acquitted on those charges in 2016.
In 2019, Europe’s top human rights court ruled that Ms. Knox had been deprived of adequate legal assistance while being interrogated, violating her right to a fair trial, and ordered Italy to pay her 18,400 euros, or about $21,000 at the time, in damages, costs and expenses. The court also raised questions about the role of Ms. Knox’s interpreter, and said that Ms. Knox’s statements during the interrogation “had been taken in an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure.”
At the April hearing related to the slander case, the Italian prosecutor and Carlo Pacelli, Mr. Lumumba’s lawyer, argued that Ms. Knox had knowingly accused the bar manager to deflect attention from herself and derail the investigation.
Ms. Knox had been ordered to pay damages to Mr. Lumumba, but Mr. Pacelli said she had never given any money to his client. Because of the accusation, Mr. Lumumba lost his business, and he left Italy with his family.
“I am sorry I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of the police and that he suffered,” Ms. Knox said.
