Amanda Knox Promises to Continue ‘Seeking the Truth’ Following Second Conviction for Slander by Italian Court

MILAN—Amanda Knox expressed her surprise on Italian TV on Thursday regarding the Florence appeals court’s decision to find her guilty of slander. This decision came despite a European court ruling that deemed the police who took her confession had violated her human rights.

“I will fight for the truth,’’ Ms. Knox stated in her first public comments since the guilty verdict on Wednesday. “It’s been 17 years that I have been unjustly accused.”

When Ms. Knox was a 20-year-old exchange student in Perugia, she and her then-boyfriend were accused of murdering her housemate, Meredith Kercher. The incident occurred on Nov. 2, 2007.

After facing multiple trials, they were exonerated in 2015. However, the slander conviction against Ms. Knox for wrongly accusing an innocent man, the Congolese bar owner who employed her part-time, remained. She served four years in prison before being released on an earlier acquittal in 2011, encompassing the three-year slander sentence.

Rudy Hermann Guede from Ivory Coast was convicted of killing Kercher and served 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

Ms. Knox was present in the Florence court on Wednesday when she was reconvicted of slandering Patrick Lumumba, who was held for two weeks on suspicion of murder before being released with an iron-clad alibi.

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Italy’s highest court ordered a retrial following a European Court of Human Rights ruling that highlighted the violation of Ms. Knox’s human rights during a night of questioning without legal counsel or a competent translator, leading to her accusation of Mr. Lumumba in two statements typed by the police.

The high court specified that the Florence appeals panel could only consider the four handwritten pages penned by Ms. Knox the next afternoon in an attempt to retract the statements, excluding the two signed documents.

“There is one document in question that we can all read, and the message of this document is, ‘I don’t know who killed Meredith.’ I thought I was extremely clear,’’ Ms. Knox articulated fluently in Italian.

Ms. Knox maintains that she implicated Mr. Lumumba under immense police pressure.

“I was abused, mistreated, psychologically tortured by the police that night,” Ms. Knox shared in the TV interview. “It was the worst experience of my life. It was worse than being convicted, to tell the truth, because they made me think I was crazy, that I couldn’t trust myself.”