EXCLUSIVE: Amanda Knox reveals her fears about returning to Italy for the first time since her trial, saying that people still send messages describing how they are going to murder her
- Amanda Knox admits that she was ‘fearful’ about returning to Italy in her first interview since making the trip earlier this year
- ‘I still have people who send me messages describing how they’re going to murder me,’ says Knox
- She had not been back to Italy since she was acquitted in 2011 of murdering her British roommate Meredith Kercher, who was fatally stabbed in 2007
- Knox was initially found guilty of murder but her conviction was overturned in 2011, though she was still charged with slander
- The entire interview will air at 6:30pm on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, followed by a piece on Friday during Today
Amanda Knox spoken about her recent return to Italy for a segment that will air Thursday on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.
In the interview, Knox discusses how it felt to return to the country where she losty years of her life after being accused of murdering her British roommate Meredith Kercher.
‘We spoke on the phone shortly before you made that trip. And you sounded like you were genuinely afraid,’ notes Holt in a clip obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
‘I was genuinely afraid,’ explains Knox, prompting Holt to ask what it was that made her so ‘fearful’ about the trip.
‘The fact that I had been invited by the Italy Innocence Project and welcomed to take part in their event was tremendously important to me,’ says Knox.
‘But that didn’t change the fact I still have people who send me messages describing how they’re going to murder me.’
Fears: Amanda Knox admits that she was ‘fearful’ about returning to Italy in her first interview since making the trip earlier this year (above with Lester Holt)
Killer instinct: ‘I still have people who send me messages describing how they’re going to murder me,’ says Knox
Convict: Knox (above in 2010) was initially found guilty of murder but her conviction was overturned in 2011, though she was still charged with slander
The interview also gives Knox a chance to talk about her new podcast, The Truth About True Crime.
The latest season is focused on stories of vigilante justice.
The entire interview will air at 6:30pm on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, followed by a piece on Friday during Today.
Knox said that the media is to blame for making it appear as though she were guilty of murder during that trip to Italy.
America’s most infamous foreign exchange student had not bee back to the country since she was acquitted in 2011, four years after Kercher’s death.
She spoke during a Trial By Media panel, and told those in attendance that she was depicted ‘on the global scene as cunning, psychopath, drugged, whore, guilty.’
This all culminated with Knox breaking down as she recounted the ‘false and baseless story, which fueled people’s fantasies.’
It was actually not until 2015 that she was fully cleared in the case, which spent four years in appeals court after her acquittal.
Italy’s highest overturned the 2009 conviction in the brutal murder and sexual assault of Kercher against Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, in 2011.
The court did however uphold Knox’s slander conviction for wrongly accusing Congolese-born bar owner Diya Lumumba in the murder.
It reduced the slander sentence to three years.
Knox spent nearly four years in jail after being convicted and hadbeen sentenced to 26 years following her initial conviction.
The court battle went on for seven and a half years, with flip-flop decisions that saw her return to the United States after being acquitted only to face another trial after the acquittal was thrown out.
She then faced her second appeals trial and high court proceedings in absentia while living in Washington.
Knox is set to marry her longtime boyfriend Christopher Robinson later this year.
The two met after Knox, who was engaged to musician Colin Sutherland at the time, reviewed Robinson’s book War of the Encyclopeadists on her blog.