Four years after being cleared of murder, a tearful Amanda Knox returned to Italy to lament her ordeal, blasting the media for casting her as a “cunning, psychopath, drug-addicted whore.”
She said she was deemed guilty of killing her roommate before ever setting foot in a courtroom.
“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,” she said Saturday.
“The dirty, psychopathic man-eater Foxy Knoxy.”
Knox, 31, was speaking at a criminal justice conference at the University of Modena in northern Italy.
She said being back in the country scares her.
“I am afraid of being harassed, of being trapped,” she said. “And I am afraid that new accusations will be made just because I have come here to give my version of the facts.”
In 2007, Knox was convicted of the brutal murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in the town of Perugia. Knox was 22 at the time.
She spent four years in prison, during which she repeatedly insisted on her innocence.
After a roller-coaster journey involving two convictions that were later thrown out, she was finally cleared of the gruesome slaying in 2015.
The convictions of her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were also overturned.
Rudy Guede, a native of the Ivory Coast, is now serving a 16-year sentence for the murder. His conviction was based on DNA evidence after his bloodstained fingerprints were found on Kercher’s bed.
Knox was awarded $21,000 in January after the European Court of Human Rights ruled she had not had a fair trial.
She once vowed never to return to Italy, but agreed to come to the conference, sponsored by Italy’s Innocence Project and the Criminal Bar Association in Modena.
“Lots of people think I am crazy to come here,” she said.
Kercher’s family questioned the invitation for her to speak. Their lawyer called her appearance “inappropriate.”
The former exchange student wept several times during her 40-minute speech, saying that the media invented a “false and baseless story” that never considered her innocent.
“It’s easy to see what we want to see,” Knox said, criticizing the media and prosecutors for reducing criminal cases to “black-and-white stories populated by demons and saints.”
With Post wires