Amanda Knox was born July 9, 1987, in Seattle, Washington, the eldest of three daughters born to Edda Mellas, a mathematics teacher originally from Germany, and Curt Knox, a vice president of finance for Macy's. Knox and her sisters were raised in West Seattle. Her parents divorced when she was 10 years old, after which her mother remarried to Chris Mellas, an information technology consultant.
Amanda Marie Knox (born July 9, 1987) is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy following her wrongful conviction for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation.
Knox first travelled to Italy on a family holiday at the age of 15. During that first trip to Italy, she visited Rome, Pisa, the Amalfi Coast, and the ruins of Pompeii. Upon reading Under the Tuscan Sun, which was given to her by her mother, Amanda's interest in the country increased.
Knox graduated from the Seattle Preparatory School in 2005 and then studied linguistics at the University of Washington. In 2007, she made the dean's list at the university. She worked at part-time jobs to fund an academic year in Italy. Relatives described the 20-year-old Knox as outgoing but unwary. Her stepfather had strong reservations about her going to Italy that year, as he felt she was still too naïve.
Police arrested Knox, Sollecito, and Patrick Lumumba on November 6, 2007. They were taken into custody and charged with the murder. Customers who Lumumba had been serving at his bar on the night of the murder gave him an alibi, and Lumumba was released. Chiacchiera, who thought the arrests were premature, dropped out of the investigation soon afterward, leaving Napoleoni in charge of a major investigation for the first time in her career.
Guede fled to Germany shortly after the murder. During a November 19, 2007 Skype conversation with his friend Giacomo Benedetti, Guede did not mention Knox or Sollecito as being in the building on the night of the murder. Later his account changed and he indirectly implicated them in the murder, which he denied involvement in. Guede was arrested in Germany on November 20, then extradited to Italy on December 6. Guede opted to be tried in a special fast-track procedure by Judge Micheli. He was not charged with having had a knife. He did not testify and was not questioned about his statements, which he had changed compared to what he originally said.
In October 2008, Guede was found guilty of the sexual assault and murder of Kercher, and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. His prison sentence was ultimately reduced to 16 years. He was later given an early release in December 2020 and authorized to finish his sentence with community service. Amanda Knox was dissatisfied with his early release and spoke publicly against it.
In 2009, Knox and Sollecito pleaded not guilty at a Corte d'Assise on charges of murder, sexual assault, carrying a knife (which Guede had not been charged with), simulating a burglary, and theft of €300, two credit cards, and two mobile phones. There was no charge in relation to Kercher's missing keys to the entry door and her bedroom door, although Guede's trial judgement said he had not stolen anything. There was a separate but concurrent trial of Knox with the same jury as her murder trial in which she was accused of falsely denouncing her employer for the murder. Knox's police interrogation was deemed improper and ruled inadmissible for the murder trial, but was heard in her nominally separate trial for false denunciation.
In their initial trial, in 2009, Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. Pre-trial publicity in Italian media, which was repeated by other media worldwide, portrayed Knox in a negative light, leading to complaints that the prosecution was using character assassination tactics. A guilty verdict at Knox's initial trial and her 26-year sentence caused international controversy, as US forensic experts thought evidence at the crime scene was incompatible with her involvement. A prolonged legal process, including a successful prosecution appeal against her acquittal at a second-level trial, continued after Knox was freed in 2011. On March 27, 2015, Italy's highest court definitively exonerated Knox and Sollecito. However, Knox's conviction for committing defamation against Lumumba was upheld by all courts. On January 14, 2016, Knox was acquitted of defamation for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation.
On December 5, 2009, Knox, by then 22, was convicted on charges of faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence, and murder, and was sentenced to 26 years imprisonment. Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. In Italy, opinion was not generally favorable toward Knox, and an Italian law professor remarked: "This is the simplest and fairest criminal trial one could possibly think of in terms of evidence."
A number of US experts spoke out against DNA evidence used by the prosecution. According to consultant Greg Hampikian, director of the Idaho Innocence Project, the Italian forensic police could not replicate the key result, claimed to have successfully identified DNA at levels below those an American laboratory would attempt to analyze, and never supplied validation of their methods. Knox was indicted in 2010 on charges of defamation against the police for saying she had been struck across her head during the interview in which she incriminated herself.
A Corte d'Assise verdict of guilty is not a definitive conviction. A Corte d'Assise d'Appello reviews the case in what is essentially a new trial. The appeal (or second grade) trial began November 2010 and was presided over by Judges Claudio Pratillo Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. A court-ordered review of the contested DNA evidence by independent experts noted numerous basic errors in the gathering and analysis of the evidence, and concluded that no evidential trace of Kercher's DNA had been found on the alleged murder weapon, which police had found in Sollecito's kitchen. The review found the forensic police examination showed evidence of multiple males' DNA fragments on the bra clasp, which had been lost on the floor for 47 days, the court-appointed expert testified the context strongly suggested contamination. On October 3, 2011, Knox and Sollecito were found not guilty of the murder.
In May 2011, Hampikian said forensic results from the crime scene pointed to Guede as the killer and to his having acted on his own.
On March 26, 2013, Italy's highest court, the Supreme Court of Cassation set aside the acquittals of the Hellmann second level trial on the grounds that it had gone beyond the remit of a Corte d'Assise d'Appello by not ordering new DNA tests and failing to give weight to circumstantial evidence in context, such as Knox's accusation against the bar owner in the disputed interviews. A note Knox composed in the police station (not mentioning Guede) was regarded by the Supreme Court as confirmation that she and Guede were present in Via della Pergola 7 while Kercher was attacked. A retrial was ordered. Knox was represented, but remained in the United States.
Judge Nencini presided at the retrial, and granted a prosecution request for analysis of a previously unexamined DNA sample found on a kitchen knife of Sollecito's, which the prosecution alleged was the murder weapon based on the forensic police reporting that Kercher's DNA was on it, a conclusion discredited by court-appointed experts at the appeal trial. When the unexamined sample was tested, no DNA belonging to Kercher was found. On January 30, 2014, Knox and Sollecito were found guilty. In their written explanation, the judges emphasised Guede's fast-track verdict report was a judicial reference point establishing that he had not acted alone. The Nencini verdict report said there must have been a cleanup to remove traces of Knox from the building while leaving Guede's. The report said that there had been no burglary and the signs of one were staged. It did not consider the possibility of Guede having been responsible for faking a break-in.
On March 27, 2015, the ultimate appeal by Knox and Sollecito was heard by the Supreme Court of Cassation; it ruled that the case was without foundation, thereby definitively acquitting them of the murder. Her defamation conviction was upheld, but the three-year sentence was deemed served by the time she had already spent in prison. Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of involvement in the murder.
On September 7, 2015, the Court published the report on the acquittal, citing "glaring errors", "investigative amnesia", and "guilty omissions", where a five-judge panel said that the prosecutors who won the original murder conviction failed to prove a "whole truth" to back up the scenario that Knox and Sollecito killed Kercher. They also stated that there were "sensational failures" (clamorose defaillance) in the investigation, and that the lower court had been guilty of "culpable omissions" (colpevoli omissioni) in ignoring expert testimony that demonstrated contamination of evidence.
Knox subsequently became an author, an activist, and a journalist. Her memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, became a best seller. In 2018, she began hosting The Scarlet Letter Reports, a television series which examined the "gendered nature of public shaming".
On January 24, 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Italy to pay compensation to Knox for violating her rights in the hours after her arrest in Perugia. Italy was ordered to pay Knox €18,400 (about US$20,800) for not providing her with either a lawyer or a competent interpreter when she was first held in custody.
After returning to the United States, Knox completed her degree and worked on a book about her case. She was often followed by paparazzi. Her family incurred large debts from the years of supporting her in Italy and were left insolvent, the proceeds from Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir having gone to pay legal fees to her Italian lawyers. Knox has been a reviewer and journalist for the then West Seattle Herald, later subsumed into Westside Seattle, and attended events of the Innocence Project and related organizations. In a 2017 interview, Knox said she was devoting herself to writing and activism for the wrongfully accused. She hosted The Scarlet Letter Reports on Facebook Watch, a series which examined the "gendered nature of public shaming". Knox also hosts a podcast, The Truth About True Crime. She has been a featured speaker at fundraising events for non-profits, including the Innocence Project. In June 2019, Knox returned to Italy as a keynote speaker at a conference on criminal justice, where she was part of a panel titled "Trial by Media".
Knox, aged 20 at the time of the murder, called the police after returning to her and Kercher's apartment following a night spent with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and finding Kercher's bedroom door locked and blood in the bathroom. During the police interrogations that followed, the conduct of which is a matter of dispute, Knox allegedly implicated herself and her employer, Patrick Lumumba, in the murder. Initially, Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were all arrested for Kercher's murder, but Lumumba was soon released due to his having a strong alibi. A known burglar, Rudy Guede, was arrested a short time later following the discovery of his bloodstained fingerprints on Kercher's possessions. He was later found guilty of murder in a fast-track trial and was sentenced to a 30-year prison sentence, later reduced to 16 years. In December 2020, an Italian court ruled that Guede could complete his term doing community service.
Knox is married to the author Christopher Robinson, who is connected to the Robinson Newspapers. In October 2021, Knox announced the birth of their daughter in an interview with The New York Times. In September 2023, Knox gave birth to their second child, a son.
Based on the ECHR's ruling that she should have been provided with a lawyer and a competent interpreter during the "obsessively long" and implicitly violent police interviews (Knox had been acquitted of defamation for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation), Knox appealed her conviction for defamation of Patrick Lumumba, since the statement that he was involved was made during those interviews, at the same time that it was claimed that she had implicated herself. This was her only remaining conviction, and the appeal was enabled by a reform to the code of criminal procedure made in 2022. On 13 October 2023, the Court of Cassation ordered a retrial of this matter.