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Wednesday, June 05, 2024

Amanda Knox Must Pay Up Black Italian She Defamed!

Amanda Knox and her husband were in Italy trying to get the court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit from a Black Italian man she accused of murdering Meredith Kercher.

The American woman who became a celebrity for being the "good girl gone bad" is back in Italy. She was ordered to pay a Black man for defaming him in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a British national.

Amanda Knox escaped a 25 year bid in the iron college after the law determined they didn't have substantial proof she had any involvement in the stabbing death of Kercher.

Knox, aged 20 at the time of the murder, called the police after returning to her and Kercher's apartment after a night spent with her then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and finding Kercher's bedroom door locked and blood in the bathroom. During the police interrogations that followed, the conduct of which is a matter of dispute, Knox allegedly implicated herself and her employer, [Diya] Patrick Lumumba, in the murder. Initially, Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were all arrested for Kercher's murder, but Lumumba was soon released because he had a strong alibi. A known burglar, Rudy Guede, was soon arrested, after his bloody fingerprints were found on Kercher's possessions. He was convicted of murder in a fast-track trial and was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment, later reduced to 16 years. In December 2020, an Italian court ruled that Guede could complete his term by doing community service.

In their initial trial, in 2009, Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. Pre-trial publicity in Italian media, which was repeated by other media worldwide, portrayed Knox in a negative light, leading to complaints that the prosecution was using character assassination. A guilty verdict at Knox's initial trial and her 26-year sentence caused international controversy, because American forensic experts thought evidence at the crime scene was incompatible with her involvement. A prolonged legal process, including a successful prosecution appeal against her acquittal at a second-level trial, continued after Knox was freed in 2011. On March 27, 2015, Italy's highest court definitively exonerated Knox and Sollecito. However, Knox's conviction for committing defamation against Lumumba was upheld by all courts. On January 14, 2016, Knox was acquitted of defamation for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation.

Patrick Lumumba with wife.

Knox later became an author, an activist, and a journalist. Her memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, became a best seller. In 2018, she began hosting The Scarlet Letter Reports, a television series, which examined the "gendered nature of public shaming".

Knox was sued by Lumumba. She was once employed at his nightclub and used his name as an alibi to escape murder charges. Knox was granted compensation for having an incompetent lawyer who barely spoke English and wrote her confession without her being present.

In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Italy to pay compensation to Knox for violating her rights in the hours after her arrest in Perugia. Italy was ordered to pay Knox €18,400 (about US$20,800) for not providing her with either a lawyer or a competent interpreter when she was first held in custody. Lumumba lost his nightclub, got death threats, threats of deportation and was a meme on white supremacist websites.

Yeah, her white tears almost put an innocent man in the iron college.

The defamation lawsuit was granted and Knox tried to appeal it.

Knox asked the eight Italian judges and jury members Wednesday to clear her of a slander charge but was found guilty again of wrongly accusing Lumumba, the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked part-time, in Kercher’s stabbing death, The Associated Press reported.

Meredith Kercher did not deserve to die.

“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,’’ Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement, according to the AP. She told them: “I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”

Knox was convicted in 2009 of slander for falsely accusing Lumumba of murdering Kercher in the Italian city of Perugia. An appellate court in Florence upheld that conviction on Wednesday, CNN reported.

Knox spent several years in jail but was acquitted in 2015 of the killing of her housemate in Italy when both were foreign-exchange students in Perugia.

Knox signed two statements prepared by police regarding the accusation against Lumumba, CNN reported, but a handwritten note she later wrote contradicted the statements.

Rudy Guede was released from the iron college after serving 15 years.

She was convicted of slandering Lumumba and sentenced to three years in prison. She had already served the three years while she was awaiting her trial on charges she murdered Kercher.

Wednesday’s verdict will not result in her serving jail time but may include a fine.

Writing on social media on Monday, Knox said she hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me.”

Knox told the court that she wrongly accused an innocent man under intense police pressure, The New York Times reported.

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