CNN
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Italy’s High Court has upheld the remaining conviction of American Amanda Knox, who was jailed and then acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher.
Knox was found guilty of slandering her former boss Patrick Lumumba by falsely accusing him of Kercher’s murder. Knox, 20 at the time, signed two police-prepared statements regarding his accusation against Lumumba. She later wrote a handwritten note questioning his false accusation.
Lumumba was arrested after Knox’s accusation and spent two weeks in prison until police released him due to lack of forensic evidence. He attributes this arrest to the loss of his club Le Chic, which closed shortly after.
In a long-running legal saga, Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty of Kercher’s murder after her body was found in the student apartment she shared with Knox in Puglia. Both men were acquitted, then reconvicted before being finally acquitted in 2015.
However, the defamation conviction remained. Knox petitioned the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in 2023 that his rights had been violated during the 2007 interrogation that led to his false accusation against Lumumba.
In June 2024, a court in Florence upheld the defamation conviction, leading to a High Court hearing on Thursday.
Knox, who attended the June 2024 hearing but did not attend Thursday’s High Court hearing, posted a lengthy thread on police “have never been held accountable for the crimes they committed against me behind closed doors. .”
She also wrote: “I will have more to say about this tomorrow and Friday, as I analyze what is happening, whether I will ultimately be acquitted or whether Italy will continue to blame me for the abuse of the Perugia police. Stay tuned.”
Lumumba, who attended Thursday’s hearing, told reporters as he entered court that Knox “never apologized to me.”
Speaking outside the court after the verdict, Lumumba said he was “very satisfied” with the ruling, according to the Reuters news agency. “Amanda did wrong, this sentence must accompany her for the rest of her life. I had a good feeling since the afternoon. It is with great honor that I salute Italian justice,” he declared.
At the June hearing, Knox told the panel of two judges and six jurors that she was sorry for not trying to drop the charge against Lumumba sooner, but insisted that she was ” a young person in existential crisis” when she accused him. “I didn’t know who the killer was,” she told the court.
Knox faces no additional prison time.