Italy’s highest court on Thursday upheld the slander conviction of Amanda Knox, an American who was first convicted and then acquitted of killing her housemate in 2007, for accusing an innocent man in the case.
The court ruling could put an end to a legal saga that has riveted followers in Europe and the United States. It has lasted more than 17 years and has gone through various Italian and European-level courts. The court upheld Ms. Knox’s 3-year prison sentence, but she will not have to serve any more time, as she already spent four years in prison, from 2007 to 2011.
Ms. Knox, now 37, who lives near Seattle, was not present at the hearing on Thursday. One of her lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova, spoke to her after the verdict and said she was “very, very disappointed.”
“She had been hoping to close this chapter,” he said.
Ms. Knox has been trying to remove the last legal stain from her name, 10 years after Italy’s highest court definitively acquitted her of killing Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British student.
In November, 2007, the Italian authorities arrested Ms. Knox, then 20, and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, then 23, for the death of Ms. Kercher, who was found lying on her bed with her throat slashed; all three were studying in the picturesque central Italian city of Perugia. The involvement of privileged and attractive young people from multiple countries, and what prosecutors described as a sex game gone wrong, fueled intense international interest in the case.
Initially convicted in 2009 of the killing but acquitted on appeal, Ms Knox returned to the United States in 2011. Her case bounced between various courts until, in 2015, when Italy’s highest court threw out charges it said had been marred by flimsy evidence and a rush to judgment.
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.
The slander case involved Diya Lumumba, also known as Patrick, who in 2007 ran a bar called Le Chic where Ms. Knox worked part-time.
Ms. Knox and her lawyers have argued that she was pressured by police into accusing Mr. Lumumba after a nightlong interrogation during which she said she was slapped. Mr. Lumumba was arrested, held in prison for two weeks, and released only after one of his clients provided an alibi.
Ms. Knox was initially found guilty of slandering him in 2009, and sentenced to three years in prison, in a conviction that was upheld by various Italian courts.
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 her statements during the interrogation “had been taken in an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure.”
Italy’s high court ordered a new slander trial based on that ruling, but she was convicted again by a Florence court last year. Her appeal was rejected on Thursday by the Rome-based Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court.
During the hearing on Thursday, Mr. Dalla Vedova, had said that Mr. Lumumba had “not been a victim of Ms. Knox but alongside Ms. Knox.”
Luca Lupária Donati, another of her lawyers, said they would wait to read the court’s reasoning before deciding whether to appeal again to the European human rights court. “We’re curious to read what they say,” he of Thursday’s ruling, as it “diminished what the European court had ruled.”
“This is something I find very unjust for Amanda,” he said.
Ms. Knox has spoken frequently on her podcast, Labyrinths, of the psychological and emotional toll that the conviction has taken on her. There have also been practical effects — she wrote on X this week that she recently had to cancel a trip to Australia as she was unable to get a visa because of her “criminal” background.
Since returning to the United States, Ms. Knox, now a mother of two, has become an advocate for people unjustly incarcercerated and a campaigner for criminal justice reform. She is also co-producing a Hulu series about the case that is currently being shot in Italy and Hungary.
Because of the accusation, Mr. Lumumba lost his business, and he left Italy with his family. He now lives in Krakow, Poland, where he runs an import-export business, but he misses his life in Perugia, he said at the courthouse on Thursday.
He, too, said he could not wait to put the case behind him. The never-ending trials “always bring to mind that morning when they came to arrest me, and the days in prison,” he said.
Carlo Pacelli, his lawyer, said Thursday that not only had Ms. Knox never apologized for falsely accusing his client, she had never offered to make financial amends.
In Florence last year, Ms. Knox offered an apology of sorts, saying: “I am very sorry I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of the police and that he suffered for it.”
After the verdict, Mr. Pacelli said his client could use the sentence to ask for damages, but that there could be insurmountable obstacles, “because Amanda lives in the United States and it’s not easy to pursue.”
