Court case!

Amanda Knox travels back to Italy

Today, Amanda Knox (36) works as a freelance journalist.(Bild: AFP/APA/Vincenzo PINTO)

The 36-year-old American woman spent almost four years in prison on suspicion of murder. Now, surprisingly, she is returning to the courtroom - voluntarily!

It is probably her last battle in the case of Meredith Kercher, who was murdered in 2007 - and Amanda Knox wants to fight it personally. More than twelve years after she boarded the plane back to the USA, the American is returning to Florence in Italy.

This time, however, it is not about the murder itself. The trial is about Knox falsely accusing the Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba of murdering Kercher. In 2011, she was sentenced to three years in prison for defamation. Last October, however, Italy's Supreme Court overturned the sentence. The reason: Knox had been interrogated without an official interpreter and lawyer - illegal according to the European Court of Human Rights.

Knox has now announced that she will go to the same courtroom on Wednesday where she was convicted in 2011 "for a crime I did not commit". "I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false accusations against me."

In the worst case scenario, Knox could face up to three years in prison for defamation. However, as she has already spent four years in custody, this is rather unlikely.

The background
On November 2, 2007, Meredith Kercher, Knox's roommate at the time, was found half-naked and with her throat cut in the apartment they shared in Perugia. The student's body had 47 stab wounds. She had also been raped. In 2009, Knox - dubbed the "angel with the ice eyes" by the media - and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively. In 2015, however, the two were finally acquitted due to sloppy investigations.

Since her return to the USA in 2011, Knox has built a new life for herself. She completed her studies, published her memoirs in 2013 and now works as a freelance journalist. In 2020, she married Christopher Robinson (42), with whom she has a young daughter.