Amanda Knox had read Harry Potter years earlier when she was home in the United States, lost in the magic of its world. But while she was confined to an Italian prison cell, the book became a lifeline.
More than a decade after being released from prison, Knox has revealed in her new memoir Free: My Search for Meaning how finding the familiar book written in Italian gave her purpose and helped her grasp a language to ensure she survived her nearly four-year imprisonment for murder.
Knox was a 20-year-old student studying abroad in the Italian city of Perugia when her British roommate Meredith Kercher was found stabbed to death on November 2, 2007, in the apartment they shared with two other women.
The case made global headlines. Suspicion quickly fell on Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, a man she had only recently been seeing. Knox was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison before being cleared of the crime in 2011 with an appeals court citing errors in the forensic investigation.
Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was eventually convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021 after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
But Knox’s story was far from over.
Knox’s 2013 memoir Waiting to Be Heard tells the story of her legal nightmare, but her new book, Free, set to be released on March 25, explores how she survived her time in prison and her reintegration back into society once back home in Seattle.
While behind bars for nearly four years, trapped in a legal system she barely understood, Knox turned to something she did – Harry Potter. The words were both foreign and familiar.
With a dictionary at her side, she painstakingly translated every line that she did not know, teaching herself Italian, one chapter at a time.
As Knox mastered the language, she became a translator for her fellow foreign inmates. She helped them understand legal documents and communicate with guards, and eventually, advocated for herself in a fight that would last years.
The murder
In 2007, Knox was an exchange student living in Perugia, Italy, when her roommate Meredith Kercher was found dead in her bedroom. Kercher’s throat had been slit, she had been sexually assaulted, and knife wounds suggested she may have been tortured.
As media descended on the small central Italian city from around the world, a daily drumbeat of salacious front page stories quickly formed an unflattering narrative around Knox, who was dubbed “Foxy Knoxy.”
Giuliano Mignini, a powerful local magistrate with a fixation on conspiracy theories involving satanic rituals, turned the investigation, quite literally, into a witch hunt as he painted her as a sexual deviant and cold-blooded killer.
In her new book, Knox revealed how she struck up an unlikely relationship with Mignini, the man who locked her up, when she started emailing him after she had been freed from prison.
Knox would later recount how she was not provided a lawyer or an interpreter by police after her arrest and would later tell how she was subjected to physical and verbal abuse.
After almost two years in jail and an 11-month trial during which she was portrayed as a promiscuous “she-devil,” Knox was convicted of murder and sexual violence. Her family’s attorneys immediately appealed, citing faulty DNA evidence, a botched investigation, and the overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards her in Italy. After a court-ordered review of DNA evidence, she was acquitted in 2011 and returned to the US.
In 2013, Italy’s highest appeals court set aside the acquittal and ordered a second trial. Knox was found guilty in absentia for a second time in 2014.
The verdict would be overturned in 2015, with a five-judge panel blaming the prosecutor’s “glaring errors” and “investigative amnesia” in a damning denouement to Knox’s eight-year ordeal.
Surviving an Italian prison
When Knox was first arrested, she recalled being ordered to strip naked by a guard.
“A male doctor minutely examined my neck, my hands, my genitals and pointed out details for a photographer, reassuring me that they were only looking for signs of sexual violence,” she wrote in her new book.
As Knox was being portrayed as a “sex-crazed” villain by the tabloids on the outside of the prison walls, she tried to make herself invisible. She became quiet and withdrawn, wore baggy sweat suits, and chopped off her hair.
Despite these efforts, she recalled how one officer would hover over her in a private office and make comments about her body.
“He interrogated me about my underwear, my sex life, and propositioned me for sex,” she wrote.
Another cornered her in a bathroom, grabbed her by the waist, and tried to kiss her.
While she was in prison and even after her release and return to the US, Knox received countless letters – some were love letters, some were marriage proposals, but many were death threats.
One man wrote to her, describing how he would torture and kill her. He was eventually tracked down by the FBI and was given a “stern warning.”
Knox’s slander case
Earlier this year, Italy’s highest court upheld a slander conviction against Knox for accusing Patrick Lumumba of Kercher’s murder.
Knox had appealed the conviction based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling that said her rights had been violated by police failure to provide a lawyer and adequate translator during a long night of questioning just days after Kercher’s murder.
The ruling seemingly ends the 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in Kercher’s brutal murder before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.
The slander conviction against Knox survived multiple appeals, she was even re-convicted on the charge after the European court ruling cleared the way for a new trial.
Knox called it a “surreal” day in a post on X.
“I’ve just been found guilty yet again of a crime I didn’t commit,” her post said. “And I was just awarded the Innocence Network Impact Award, ‘created to honor an exonerated person who raises awareness of wrongful convictions, policy issues, or assists others post-release.’”
Her defense team says she 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.
Knox does not risk any more time in jail. She has already served nearly four years during the investigation, initial murder trial, and first appeal. But Knox had continued the legal battle to clear her name of all criminal wrongdoing.
Where is Amanda Knox now?
Knox, now 37, is married to Christopher Robinson; they have two children, a daughter and a son.
Since her release, she has advocated for criminal justice reform and media ethics.
According to her website, Knox sits on the advisory council for the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, serves as an Innocence Network Ambassador, and is on the Innocence Center Board of Directors. She was also the recipient of the 2024 Innocence Network Impact Award.
She also hosts several podcasts, including Labyrinths, with her husband.
Knox’s second book, Free: My Search for Meaning, will be released on March 25.
