Where Is Amanda Knox Now? Inside Her Life After Exoneration — and Return to the Country That Wrongfully Imprisoned Her By Lynsey Eidell and Emily Blackwood

Amanda Knox has accomplished a lot in the decade since she was exonerated of murder.

Using the high-profile 2007 case — in which she and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while studying abroad in Italy — as a platform, the exoneree has advocated for criminal justice by continuing to share her story.

She launched a podcast with her husband, Christopher Robinson, with whom she shares two children, titled Labryinths with Amanda Knox in 2020, wrote two books and collaborated on multiple documentaries and dramatizations about her own conviction, which was first overturned in 2011.

“I had changed,” she told PEOPLE in March 2025 of returning home. “I was now the girl accused of murder. For better or for worse, that was forever my legacy.” 

In 2022, she returned to Italy to meet face-to-face with the prosecutor who had sent her to prison for four years. That meeting was chronicled in the 2026 Hulu documentary Mouth of the Wolf: Amanda Knox Returns to Italy.

From life before her wrongful conviction to everything that’s happened since her exoneration 10 years ago, here’s an in-depth look at where Amanda Knox is now.

Who is Amanda Knox?

Born on July 9, 1987, Amanda Knox is the oldest child of Edda Mellas, an elementary school math teacher originally from Germany, and Curt Knox, a finance executive. Edda and Curt had a second daughter together, Deanna, before divorcing in 1989 when Knox was a toddler, according to The Seattle Times.

Knox grew up with her mother and Deanna in a middle-class neighborhood in West Seattle. (She also has two younger half-sisters, Ashley and Delaney.) She earned a scholarship to attend Seattle Preparatory School, where she performed in school plays and excelled at soccer, according to Vanity Fair.

It was on the soccer field as a child that Knox was given the now-infamous nickname “Foxy Knoxy” because she was quick like a fox. After graduating from Seattle Prep in 2005, Knox attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied creative writing, German and Italian, according to The Guardian.

While a college student, Knox worked three jobs to save $10,000 to study abroad in Perugia, Italy, during her junior year, as her parents told The Seattle Times.

Who was Meredith Kercher?

Meredith Kercher was a 21-year-old British exchange student who shared a ground-floor, four-bedroom apartment in Perugia with a then-20-year-old Knox and two Italian women, Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti.

While Kercher attended the University of Leeds, Knox studied Italian at the University for Foreigners and held a part-time job at a bar called Le Chic. Amid her studies and work, Knox began dating a 23-year-old Italian man named Raffaele Sollecito.

On Nov. 2, 2007, after spending the night with Sollecito, Knox claimed she returned to the apartment to find the door slightly ajar, drops of blood in her bathroom, feces in the toilet and Kercher’s door locked. She made a call to Kercher’s phone, which went unanswered, and to her mother back in Seattle.

“She said, ‘Mom, I’m okay, I’m home, but I think somebody might have been in my house,’ ” Mellas told The Seattle Times.

According to Knox’s account of the morning, she then took a shower and returned to Sollecito’s home. The two came back to the apartment together and attempted to open Kercher’s door. When they couldn’t gain entry, Sollecito called the Italian military police.

Officers quickly arrived, but not the ones Sollecito had called — two postal police had found two phones in a nearby garden and traced them to the home.

When the postal police, who handle communications-related crimes, refused to knock down the door, a friend of Romanelli’s kicked down Kercher’s door, according to Rolling Stone. They found Kercher dead, her throat slashed and her partially clothed body covered by a duvet.

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.

How long was Amanda Knox in prison?

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.

Why was Amanda Knox acquitted?

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?

In her post-prison life, Knox completed her undergraduate degree in creative writing at the University of Washington, began writing an arts column for the West Seattle Herald and, in 2013, she penned a memoir about her ordeal titled Waiting to Be Heard, which became a New York Times bestseller.

She also hosted a podcast called The Truth About True Crime, which shed light on cases involving wrongful convictions and media sensationalization, in 2019.

After two years of debate, Knox agreed to participate in a Netflix documentary titled Amanda Knox. The project premiered in October 2016 and was nominated the following year for two Primetime Emmy Awards.

After seeing the documentary for the first time, Knox told PEOPLE she was “incredibly relieved” with the result and thankful for the directors, Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn. It also inspired a new mission in her life: to help prevent wrongful convictions, as she revealed to PEOPLE in 2017.

As part of that mission, Knox returned to Italy in 2019 as the keynote speaker at a criminal justice conference hosted by the Italy Innocence Project. She’s also worked as a journalist and debuted an unscripted series on Facebook Watch called The Scarlet Letter Reports in 2018 to give high-profile women who had been publicly shamed — including Mischa Barton and Amber Rose — a chance to tell their stories.

“It’s humbling to be here in the position I’m in now, where I can help other women reclaim their narrative,” Knox told PEOPLE. “When at a certain point in my life I thought I was going to live the better part of my life in prison labeled something I was not — with no chance at ever reclaiming my life.”

In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay Knox nearly $21,000 in damages, costs and expenses, The New York Times reported.

The damages were the result of Italian police failing to provide Knox with legal assistance and an interpreter during her 53 hours of questioning following Kercher’s murder. However, the court did not find that Knox had sustained “inhuman or degrading treatment” as she had claimed.

In 2022, Knox returned again to Italy, this time to Perugia, to meet with the prosecutor in her case, Dr. Giuliano Mignini, and found that she was able to forgive him.

“Forgiveness is a natural consequence of realizing how fragile and precious another human is,” she told PEOPLE in March 2025. “I immediately sort of stepped into mom mode, and I was like, ‘I’m not just forgiving you. I’m holding you. I care about you.’ And that changed everything.”

Knox released her second book, Free, in 2025 and served as an executive producer on the Hulu limited series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, in which Tell Me Lies actress Grace Van Patten played her.