“I know a lot of people think I’m bad, that I don’t belong to this place.”
Amanda Knox has returned to Italy for the first time since her wrongful murder conviction.
The 31-year-old spent four years in an Italian prison after being convicted of the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.
Knox was cleared of all charges in 2015, but has said that the media continued to portray her as “… a cunning, psychopathic, dirty, drugged-up whore who was guilty until proven otherwise.”
Speaking at a conference on criminal justice this weekend, she said:
“The prosecutors and the media created a story and a version of me that suited that story, on which people could attach all their fantasies, fears and moral judgments.
“The dirty, psychopathic man-eater Foxy Knoxy.”
Knox and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of murder and sexual assault in 2009. British exchange student Kercher had been found dead in the flat she and Knox shared two years before.
The pair had their convictions quashed in 2011 only to be re-convicted following a hearing in 2014. Italy’s Supreme court eventually cleared Knox of all wrongdoing one year later.
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Speaking at a panel discussion entitled ‘Trial By Media’ in Modena, Knox said that she knows that many people still think that she is “wicked.”
“To tell the truth I am afraid, afraid of being harassed, insulted, afraid of being trapped and new accusations being directed at me,” she said.
“I have come back because it was something I had to do. There was a time when I felt at home in this beautiful country and I hope one day to recapture this feeling.”
“Some have even suggested that by being here I am once again traumatising the Kercher family and profaning Meredith’s memory. They are wrong.”
This comes after the Kercher family’s lawyer said that Knox’s return to Italy was “inappropriate.”
“All these insistences and appearances are only ever done to keep the attention on herself,” he told the Guardian. “The murder is a tragic memory for the Kercher family, they lost their daughter and sister in such a terrible way.
“It’s also an injustice for them as they still don’t know the full truth.”
