New slander trial against Amanda Knox has started Italy on Wednesday, nearly a decade after her conviction for the murder of her 21-year-old British roommate was overturned by the country's highest court.
Despite the Italian Court of Cassation ruling in 2015 that Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, did not commit murder Meredith Kercher in 2007—as both had spent four years in prison—she was still critical of her slander conviction for falsely accusing a Congolese bar owner of murder. Knox sought to quash her defamation conviction due to a 2019 European Court of Human Rights ruling that her rights were violated during her interrogation.
Italy's High Court ordered a retrial on the slander charge last fall.
When the trial began Wednesday, neither Knox nor Patrick Lumumba, the bar owner she falsely accused, were in the courtroom, police said. Ansa Press Agency. Carlo Dalla Vedova, Knox's lawyer, was quoted as saying that the 36-year-old wanted to attend but could not because she was “busy taking care of her two young children, one of whom was just born.” .
Once vilified by the media as “Foxy Knoxy” when he was a 20-year-old student and accused of murder, Knox is now active in the US as an advocate for criminal justice reform , writer, podcaster and producer.
She said in December that she hoped a retrial on the slander charge would eventually exonerate her.
“On one hand, I'm glad to have this opportunity to clear my name and hopefully it will remove the stigma that I've been living with,” she said on her Labyrinths podcast.
“On the other hand, I don't know if it will happen, in a way that I'm still hurt by it,” Knox said, adding that she suspects “people will still be against me because they don't want to understand what happened, and they don't want to accept that an innocent person could have been suffocated and forced into what I went through.”
