Amanda Knox arrives at Linate airport in Milan, Italy. Photo / AP
Amanda Knox arrives at Linate airport in Milan, Italy. Photo / AP
Amanda Knox, an American who was exonerated in a 2007 murder, went back to the country where her legal drama unfolded to speak about wrongful convictions and how journalists cover cases like hers.
Amanda Knox, the American woman whose sensational murder case in Italy slalomed from conviction to her ultimateacquittal, returned on Thursday to the country where it all started.
A flurry of reporters greeted her in Milan when she arrived at the airport. It was the first time that Knox had travelled to Italy since being released from prison there eight years ago.
Accused along with her Italian boyfriend at the time of the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student, Knox was held in Italian custody for four years before her 2009 conviction was overturned. In 2015, Italy's highest court fully exonerated her and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
The murder case captured headlines worldwide for years, fueling debates over sexism, the Italian criminal justice system and international law. In 2016, Netflix released a true-crime documentary about the case, Amanda Knox.
In May, Knox announced that she would return to Italy to speak at the Criminal Justice Festival in Modena, an event hosted by the Italy Innocence Project. She is scheduled to speak on a panel about wrongful convictions and how the news media covers cases like hers.
Three days before her trip, Knox posted on Instagram about it, acknowledging that she was "feeling frayed."
Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Christopher Robinson talk with a guest as they attend a cocktail for the opening of the Innocence Project conference, in Modena, Italy. Photo / AP
And on Wednesday she wrote on Medium about her reasons for the trip, citing her work with her fiancé on a podcast about people who are the subjects of true-crime coverage and pointing to a need for more thoughtful news coverage around such cases.
"Media can be compassionate," she wrote. "It can be brave. It can treat its subjects like the human beings they are. It can acknowledge, up front, the difficulty of capturing a complex human being in 800 words. Do I really think our media can shift en masse in this direction? No, not really. But if some outlets change, even a little, that's progress."
In November 2007, Kercher was found dead on her bedroom floor in the apartment in Perugia that she shared with Knox. Both were exchange students.
Knox and Sollecito were arrested a few days later. Rudy Guede, a Perugia resident, was also arrested. The three were all convicted of the murder, with prosecutors contending that they had killed Kercher after a drug-fueled sex game went awry.
Guede's DNA was found both on Kercher's body and in the bedroom, but there was no biological trace of Knox or Sollecito, according to court documents.
In October 2011, when the original conviction was overturned, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted and released from prison.
When released, Knox "fled the country in a high-speed chase, paparazzi literally ramming the back of my stepdad's rental car," she wrote in the Medium post.
Knox moved back to the Seattle area and Sollecito re-established his life in Italy. Guede is still serving a 16-year sentence.
In January, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italian authorities had failed to provide adequate legal assistance during Knox's initial, nightlong interrogation in 2007.
