Latest news with #RudyGuede
Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Amanda Knox says she is GRATEFUL she was wrongly convicted of Meredith Kercher's murder - because it helped her 'know herself' better
Amanda Knox has insisted in a new interview she actually feels gratitude for being wrongly convicted of murdering student flatmate Meredith Kercher. The US writer and broadcaster, 37, who served four years in an Italian prison for the British student's killing, made the claims while promoting her new memoir - saying she now feels she knows herself better. Ms Kercher, a 21-year-old from Coulsdon in south London, was found stabbed to death in her bedroom at the apartment she shared with Ms Knox in the Italian hilltop town of Perugia on November 2 2007. American student Ms Knox, 20 at the time, and her Italian boyfriend Sollecito, who was 23, were arrested four days later and went on to be convicted at trial twice. Both convictions were overturned due to a lack of any evidence linking them to the crime and the pair were ultimately exonerated by Italy 's highest court in 2015. Police also arrested Rudy Guede, who ran a local bar - and his bloody fingerprints and DNA found at the crime scene ensured his conviction for murder, before he served 14 years of a 30-year prison sentence then was freed in 2021. Ms Knox has now written a new memoir, called Free: My Search for Meaning, that she has been publicising. And she opened up about her feelings about her experiences on former newspaper editor Andy Coulson's Crisis, What Crisis? podcast. He highlighted a phrase in her new book saying: 'I wouldn't wish my wrongful conviction on anyone, but nor would I trade it for the world.' Ms Knox expanded further by quoting ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, as she replied: 'I am who I am today because of what I went through. 'And there's this great stoic saying by Seneca where he says, basically paraphrasing, "I have pity for you if you have never gone through misfortune, because you do not know what you are capable of". 'And so I know as a result of having gone through this experience, both my greatest weaknesses and my greatest strengths. 'I know myself in a way that I would not have otherwise been able to know myself. And for that, I am grateful.' Ms Knox also told how she felt lucky to be alive, crediting her then-relationship with Mr Sollecito for being away from her student property when Guede broke in and attacked her flatmate. She said: 'I'm grateful to be alive today because, you know, if I had not met my at the time boyfriend and then eventually co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito five days before this crime occurred, I would have been home when this person broke into our house and I might have been raped and murdered too. 'So the very fact that I'm alive today to tell the tale, that I survived my own study abroad is a result of some fluke luck. 'And the fact that I spent four years in prison instead of 40 - I know people who have spent longer in prison as an innocent person than I have been alive. 'The fact that I get to have a family and have children when so many women who are wrongly convicted come out and it's too late and they lost that opportunity.' She met her now-husband Christopher Robinson in 2015 and they have two children - daughter Eureka, born in 2021, and son Echo, born in September 2023. Ms Knox added: 'There are so many things that I have that at one point in my life I thought I had lost - and just the experience of gratitude is kind of overwhelming 'It's not something that I have to remind myself of when I'm feeling down - it's very present in my life. 'And that's another reason to feel grateful, that I just have the kind of disposition that makes feeling gratitude for what I have in my life easy for me - that is not necessarily easy for other people.' Ms Kercher's family and their lawyers have been critical of Ms Knox and she acknowledged their antipathy - while also praising her student friend. Ms Knox told the podcast: 'This was a person I knew, who was kind to me, who I had pizza with and who I went dancing with and baked cookies with. And she was a very, very lovely person.' A dedication in the new book states: 'To Meredith, rest in peace, whose legacy I will never stop honouring, and her family, because I still hope we can share our grief one day.' Ms Knox said in the Crisis, What Crisis? podcast interview about Ms Kercher's family: 'I don't push. I've not pursued aggressively a relationship with them, because I know that they have to confront a lot of trauma just to even think about me, much less have a relationship with me or communicate with me or meet with me. 'So I try to be very sensitive to that. At the same time though, the day that Rudy Guede broke into our house and raped and murdered Meredith, all of our lives were destroyed, mine too, and we have a lot more in common than I think they realise. 'And I blame the prosecution and the media and especially their attorney, who I think has been extremely irresponsible, for making it impossible for that kind of connection to happen.' Ms Knox has previously released a bestselling memoir called Waiting to Be Heard, in 2013, and five years later started hosting a television series which examined the 'gendered nature of public shaming'. A Netflix series was also released in 2016 telling her story and she has been working on an upcoming show, Blue Moon, with Monica Lewinksy, to air on Hulu. Ms Knox described in her latest podcast appearance how she has tried to explain her prison past in an 'age-appropriate' way to her three-year-old daughter. She said: 'One of those amazing consequences of sharing your story is how someone responds - and my daughter responds almost like I've told her a fairytale. 'And she'll want to play pretend when mommy goes to Italy. So when we go to the park, if there's bars somewhere, she'll get behind the bars and be like, "Look, I'm mommy. Let me out".' Earlier this year Ms Knox broke down in tears after her conviction of slandering her former boss was upheld by Italy's highest court. She was found guilty of slander after she wrongly accused her then-boss Patrick Lumumba of murdering Ms Kercher - and in January lost her appeal to have the slander charge overturned, leaving her with a permanent criminal record in Italy. Ms Knox, who did not attend court but followed the hearing from the US, shared a video of herself weeping after the conviction was upheld, saying it was 'disappointing' that she will have a 'criminal record forever for something I didn't do'. Her defense team said she only accused Lumumba, a Congolese man who employed her at a bar in Perugia, during a long night of questioning and under pressure from police, who they said fed her false information. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided a translator who acted more as a mediator. Reached by telephone following the latest court decision in January, Mr Lumumba said he was satisfied with the verdict. He added: 'Amanda was wrong. This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life.' In March this year Ms Knox revealed details about her unlikely friendship with the Italian prosecutor who convicted her of murder - revealing she sees it as a form of 'therapy' that helps the other feel 'absolved'. Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and Knox forged a bond in the years after her conviction was overturned, with the lawyer stating previously he now has a 'good opinion' of her. The former adversaries have grown close despite Mr Mignini believing Knox was at the scene of the crime and declaring that Ms Kercher 'did not get justice'. Ms Knox's correspondence with Mr Mignini began when she wrote him letters, delivered by go-between priest Don Saulo Scarabattoli, before moving to the messaging platform WhatsApp and eventually meeting again. They now share personal news, family photographs and send holiday greetings to each other, after developing a friendship. Ms Knox told the Guardian: 'As much as I want him to absolve me, I think he wants me to absolve him more. 'The one time in my life where I felt unstoppable was when I realised that it wasn't about what I was going to get from him, it was about what I was going to give him.'
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
From ‘Foxy Knoxy' to Amanda Knox: How I regained control over my story
I wrote my memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, a year after I was released from prison, at the age of 25, while I was still on trial. There were already thousands of news articles, dozens of books, and even a TV movie about what people thought had happened to me in Italy. A chorus of strangers had been authoring my experience for years, and I thought by adding my lone voice to that chorus, I might finally be able to move on. I was done being a tabloid staple, eager to return to my life as an anonymous college student. If I'm consistently good at anything, it's being naive. Waiting to Be Heard was my attempt to dispel the big lie – created by my prosecutor and furthered by the media– that I was a sexual deviant who had murdered my roommate, Meredith Kercher. But I've realised, as the years have passed and that haunted feeling has remained, that Waiting to Be Heard still wasn't really my story. It was the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did. The problem was, back then, I hadn't done much. Or at least, that's what it felt like. I had survived prison – that's no small thing. But in the world of 'freedom', I stumbled a lot trying to reintegrate, knowing 'Foxy Knoxy', the false version of me in the public imagination, was walking into every room before I entered. I still didn't feel like the protagonist of my own story. My life was still the product of other people's mistakes. No matter what I did, the world treated me like a killer or dismissed me as tabloid trash. I was lost. I was stuck in a tragic narrative that afforded me only two possible roles: villain or victim. And I feared that nothing I would ever do could define me more than the worst thing that ever happened to me. I just wanted my old life back, but that life no longer existed. I didn't feel 'free'. What I've only recently realised is that freedom is not a state of being. It's a practice. And for the last few years, I've been making meaning out of my misfortune. I've been creating my own freedom. If Waiting to Be Heard answered the question 'What?!', Free answers the question 'So what?' It is a roadmap of my personal evolution as I directly confront the existential problems I've faced ever since I was first arrested and charged for a terrible crime I didn't commit: could I ever be anything more than 'the girl accused of murder'? Would I ever be truly 'free'? Trying to answer those questions led me to study stoicism, Zen Buddhism, and research on resilience and post-traumatic growth. And it led me to do something terrifying, risky, and complicated: to extend an olive branch to the man who sent me to prison, Giuliano Mignini. To travel back to Perugia and meet him face to face, to see if the man who had been my greatest adversary could become an ally. That journey helped me to truly understand how to transform my greatest trauma into a source of strength, how to find agency in this long saga, and finally do something that truly speaks to who I am. I know that my experiences are extreme, but you don't have to be stuck in a prison cell to feel trapped in your own life. I hope that my readers will come away feeling less alone and better equipped to handle the inevitable misfortunes and injustices they encounter. I hope they feel more peaceful and optimistic about the world. I see people feeling more disconnected and ill at ease than ever, and while it's true that terrible things can happen at any time to any of us, and we must carry our grief and trauma for the rest of our lives, it's also true that the world is full of positive potential. I've learned that if you treat people as bad as you think they are, they will rarely surprise you, but if you treat them as good as you hope they can be, they often rise to the occasion. I hope readers come away from this book pleasantly surprised with who I am, and with who they can be. I hope it helps them to feel more free.
