Amanda Knox (pictured on Good Morning America) will return to Italy next month for the first time since she was cleared
Amanda Knox will return to Italy next month for the first time since she was cleared of killing British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia.
The 31-year-old will speak to a conference for wrongly accused crime suspects, eight years after she left Italy when her own conviction for murder was overturned.
The event, hosted by the Italy Innocence Project in the city of Modena, will discuss ‘trial by media’ at the two-day event on June 14 and 15.
Ms Knox said: ‘I’m honored to accept their invitation to speak to the Italian people at this historic event and return to Italy for the first time.’
The American spent nearly four years in an Italian prison after she was convicted of murdering British exchange student Ms Kercher in 2007.
The body of the 21-year-old British exchange student was found by police in the flat she shared with Ms Knox in Perugia on November 2, 2007.
Officers discovered her throat was slashed and she had been sexually assaulted.
Ms Knox and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were arrested and later convicted of murder and sexual assault in 2009.
The couple maintained their innocence, insisting that they had spent the evening together at Mr Sollecito’s home watching a film, smoking marijuana and being intimate.
Ms Knox, then 21, is led from a court in Perugia after a hearing in 2008. She served four years in an Italian prison after she was wrongly convicted
Amanda Knox, left, was initially convicted of murdering British exchange student Meredith Kercher, right, in Italy in 2007 but she was later cleared of the killing
Describing her ordeal earlier this year, she said: ‘I was interrogated for 53 hours over five days, without a lawyer, in a language I understood maybe as well as a ten-year-old.
‘When I told the police I had no idea who had killed Meredith, I was slapped in the back of the head and told to ‘Remember!’
‘I trusted these people. They were adults. They were authorities. And they lied to me.’
In 2011 the Perugia Court of Appeal acquitted the pair of the more serious charges, though upholding a minor conviction for Ms Knox.
She returned to the United States that year.
Ms Knox and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito (pictured together in November 2007) were arrested and later convicted of murder and sexual assault in 2009
Heading home: Amanda Knox at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport in October 2011 as she prepared to return to Seattle following her acquittal
Italian police at the house where Meredith Kercher was murdered in November 2007
In a flip-flop series of court decisions in her absence, her murder conviction was reinstated and then finally overturned again in 2015.
In the final ruling judges cited flaws in the investigation and said there was a lack of evidence to prove their wrongdoing beyond reasonable doubt, including a lack of ‘biological traces’ connecting them to the crime.
Italy’s highest court did, however, confirm a conviction against Knox for falsely accusing a Congolese bar owner.
Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivorian, is serving a 16-year sentence for Ms Kercher’s murder.
Ivorian national Rudy Guede, pictured behind bars, is currently serving a 16-year sentence for Ms Kercher’s murder, while Amanda Knox was acquitted
Earlier this year a European court awarded Ms Knox €18,400 ($20,000 or £15,800) in damages after finding that Italian authorities had ‘violated her human rights’.
She is engaged to fiance Christopher Robinson, a novelist who proposed to Ms Knox with an elaborate sci-fi-themed display last November.
During the proposal he took her into their front yard where he had staged a fake meteor, which contained a ‘data crystal’ describing their ‘coalescence’.
They have been dating since February 2016 and Ms Knox made the relationship public with a change in her Facebook status later that year.
The couple met after Ms Knox – who became known as Foxy Knoxy during her ordeal – had reviewed Robinson’s book, War of the Encyclopaedists, on her blog.
Ms Knox and her partner, Christopher Robinson (pictured together) have been dating since 2016, having met when Amanda reviewed his novel for a local magazine
Amanda Knox, now 31, and her novelist fiance, Christopher Robinson became engaged last year. They are seen here in Leavenworth, Washington, last December