What was Amanda Knox accused of?

Rather than returning home to Seattle following the discovery of Kercher’s body, Knox stayed in Italy. She was detained by Italian police for questioning and interrogated for 53 hours over five days without legal counsel or an interpreter present.

“I was hit on the back of the head, I was yelled at. Police were coming in and out of the room telling me that I was a liar,” she claimed to Nightline about the interrogation. “It was chaos. It was utter chaos.”

Knox eventually signed a confession that put her at the crime scene and implicated Lumumba, her boss at Le Chic. Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba were arrested on Nov. 6, 2007, and held on conspiracy to commit manslaughter and sexual violence.

Lumumba was released without charge two weeks later after his alibi was corroborated, while Knox was held in prison awaiting trial.

Before Knox and Sollecito’s trial began, a third individual — 21-year-old Rudy Guede, who had moved to Perugia from the Ivory Coast at age 5 — was arrested in connection with Kercher’s murder.

Guede, whose fingerprints were found at the crime scene and whose DNA was found in and on Kercher’s body, was granted a fast-tracked trial, separate from Knox and Sollecito, in September 2008, according to The New York Times. A month later, he was found guilty of murder and sexual assault and sentenced to 30 years in prison by an Italian judge.

Despite Guede’s conviction, Knox and Sollecito were still indicted on murder charges, and their trials began in January 2009. After two years in prison and an 11-month trial, an Italian jury found both Knox and Sollecito guilty on charges of sexual violence and murder.

Though prosecutors were seeking life in prison, Knox was sentenced to 26 years.

Knox and her lawyers appealed her conviction, and on Oct. 3, 2011 — nearly four years after she was arrested in connection with Kercher’s murder — an Italian appeals court overturned the most serious charges against her.

The two judges and six jurors only upheld one minor charge: defamation, for implicating her former boss, Lumumba, in her signed confession to the police. The charge was made in 2009 while she was imprisoned.

Knox was given credit for time served and released after four years behind bars. During her appeals trial, Knox took the stand to proclaim her innocence.

“I did not kill. I did not rape. I did not steal. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there at the crime,” she said during her 10-minute testimony.

While in jail, Knox told PEOPLE that she focused on being “useful.”

“I translated for people, I helped them talk to the doctor. I helped them sign their legal paperwork, write to their family members, write their love letters — which could get a little racy sometimes because you get very lonely in there,” she said in March 2025.

Following her acquittal, Knox boarded a flight home to Seattle on Oct. 4, 2011. But her ordeal was not over: In March 2013, an Italian court ordered a retrial of her case. Nearly a year later, she and Sollecito were found guilty of murder again. Knox and Sollecito were reconvicted because the nature of Kercher’s wounds indicated that Guede did not act alone, the judges explained.

Knox was sentenced to 28 ½ years in prison, while Sollecito received a 25-year sentence. However, Knox told Good Morning America that she would “never go willingly back” to Italy to serve her sentence. (The country also never attempted to extradite Knox to serve her second sentence.) “It’s not right, and it’s not fair,” she added.

Knox’s saga finally came to an end on March 27, 2015, when Italy’s highest court of appeals overturned her and Sollecito’s convictions, later citing “stunning flaws” in the investigation and a lack of evidence.

“I am tremendously relieved and grateful for the decision of the Supreme Court of Italy,” Knox said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. “The knowledge of my innocence has given me strength in the darkest times of this ordeal.”

In 2016, the Associated Press reported that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Knox’s rights had been violated during her interrogation. In response, she appealed the slander conviction, and a retrial of the case began in the Florence appeals court on April 10, 2024.

Two months later, the appellate court upheld the initial 2009 ruling and she was sentenced to three years in prison, but she won’t be serving additional jail time because of her time served, per AP.

Guede served 13 of his original 30-year prison sentence and was released for good behavior in 2021. He still maintains his innocence in Kercher’s death.

Where is Amanda Knox now?