(Florence) “I didn’t know who the killer was, they said I was a liar”: American Amanda Knox, exonerated of the murder of her roommate in Italy after a very long legal saga, told a court on Wednesday Italian, where she responds to defamation, the night of interrogation which led her to denounce an innocent man.
Arriving around 8:30 a.m. (2:30 a.m. Eastern) with her husband at the court in Florence, Tuscany, she took her place on a bench in the front row of the courtroom. Although she is not formally required to do so, she decided to explain the circumstances that led her to denounce Patrick Lumumba, a friend and Congolese bar owner, of the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007.
“It was the worst night of my life,” she testified, suppressing sobs. “I was in shock, exhausted, homeless. The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language I barely knew, without an interpreter or lawyer.”
“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my brain had blocked it,” but “I didn’t know who the killer was.” “In the end, I mixed up inconsistent memories from different days and the police drew up a report which I had to sign.”
“I am terribly sorry for not having been strong enough to resist the pressure of the police,” she said again on the stand.
Seattle native Amanda Knox was 20 when she and her then-Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested for the sordid murder of Meredith Kercher, 21, in the apartment they shared in Perugia, in the center of the country, where they studied.
Convicted at first instance in 2009, they were acquitted on appeal, then retried and finally exonerated in cassation in 2015. The American spent four years in prison in Italy.
For having denounced Patrick Lumumba, who was quickly exonerated, she was sentenced in 2011 to three years in prison for defamation, without however being sent back behind bars.
Last October, however, the Court of Cassation overturned this conviction and ordered a new trial, and it is this aspect of the case which is currently being retried in Florence.
Mr. Lumumba, absent from the hearing, was “deeply marked” by this affair, his lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, said on Wednesday when he arrived at court. “He became known as the monster of Perugia and lost his job, his bar was sealed for months,” he argued. “The family and personal harm he has suffered is significant.”
In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Amanda Knox did not benefit from adequate legal protection or a professional interpreter during her interrogation and that her treatment had “compromised the fairness of the procedure as a whole.”
Meredith Kercher was found half-naked and stabbed 47 times with signs of sexual assault.
Rudy Guede, an Ivorian immigrant whose DNA was found at the crime scene, was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years in prison for murder and sexual assault, a sentence that was later reduced to 16 years.
He was granted early release in November 2021.
This murder involving young students, sex and marijuana aroused the interest of the media around the world at the time.