For those wondering why Amanda Knox suddenly seems to be all over the internet once more, it’s all thanks to a new TV show.
Called The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, it’s streaming now on Disney+ and tells the infamous story of how British student Meredith Kercher was murdered while living in the Italian city of Perugia.
At the time, Knox was arrested and convicted of her murder, before being acquitted of the crime several years later. Now, she has teamed up with Monica Lewinsky and several others to produce her own version of what happened in 2007.
But what happened to Knox, and where is she now? Here’s what we know.
Wrongfully convicted
In 2007, Knox – an American foreign exchange student – and Kercher were living together in the same flat.
On November 1, Kercher’s body was discovered. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed, and suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her new boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito. The pair had visited the house earlier in the day and found Kercher’s door locked, and had returned later in the afternoon with friends who ultimately broke down the door and found her.
She and Sollecito were questioned by police for several days without a lawyer. Knox spoke little Italian, but implicated the owner of the bar where she worked, Patrick Lumumba.
He spent two weeks in prison before he was cleared, but once this happened, authorities thought Knox had accused him to divert attention away from herself and her ‘conspirator’.
The pair were charged with murder on November 6, and shortly after, the real killer, Rudy Guede, was arrested on November 20. He was a drug dealer who had grown up around Perugia. He had interacted with the girls before (he had visited the flat downstairs from where they lived) and his DNA had been found at the crime scene, but the police still refused to drop charges against Knox and Sollecito.
This was the start of a media frenzy around the pair. Knox in particular suffered, with details like her having left her vibrator out in the flat – as well as her relationship with Sollecito – coining the moniker ‘Foxy Knoxy’.
The trial progressed, and in 2009, the pair were charged with murdering Kercher, and committing the crime along with Guede. Among the police’s arguments for why the pair were guilty was a fair amount of circumstantial evidence: a knife found in Sollecito’s apartment, which was believed at one point to be the murder weapon, had DNA from both Knox and Kercher on it.
The pair were found guilty. Knox was sentenced to 28 and a half years in jail, and Sollecito to 25.
They appealed in 2010, and in the case, forensic experts argued that there was no trace of Knox’s DNA at the murder scene – and that the evidence had been contaminated due to poor police procedure.
Eventually, the courts backed them up, and the pair were acquitted in 2011. Guede was sentenced to thirty years. He was released in 2021.
Knox today
After she was freed, Knox returned to America, where she continued her studies at the University of Seattle, and worked for a while as a journalist and reviewer at the West Seattle Herald.
In 2011, she met Christopher Robinson. He was an author, and while they were initially friends, they married in 2019 and have two children: a girl and a boy, who were born in 2021 and 2023.
Unsurprisingly, Knox has become an advocate for justice in the legal system. She has a podcast, called Labyrinths with Amanda Knox, and has written two books about what she went through, called Waiting to Be Heard and Free: My Search For Meaning, in which she goes over her experiences.
She also talked about Kercher in a People interview she did around the book’s release. Knox has said she felt “haunted by Meredith" but "not in that bad way that people project onto me". Rather, Kercher "keeps reminding me of this valuable life and the privilege it is to live."
"When I came home, I was rudely awakened to the fact that life no longer existed for me, not just because of these external forces like paparazzi chasing me down the street, stalking me where I lived, receiving death threats and all of that, I had changed too,” she added.
“I was no longer an anonymous student; I was Amanda Knox, the girl accused of murder. That was my legacy, and I had to grapple with that."
In a Sky documentary, Knox said that a fair trial was “impossible” due to the way that the media had portrayed her.
"They convicted that doppelganger [Foxy Knoxy]. That person was sentenced to 26 years in jail," she told the documentary. The verdict fell upon me like a crushing weight. I could only suffer in silence from my prison cell."
Interestingly, as well as being an author, Knox has also said she wants to write and perform stand-up comedy in the future.
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is streaming now on Disney+
