Amanda Knox spent four years in prison in Italy after being wrongly convicted over the murder of her friend Meredith Kercher. Before being definitively acquitted in 2015, with the eyes of the world’s media on her, she had to draw deep to survive. Since then, Knox has shown resilience, courage and the capacity to forgive.

“When mama was young, mama went to Italy, and somebody hurt her friend. And then mama went to jail, and was sad for a long time, but then mama came home, and fell in love.”

Not the typical story you’d tell a three-year-old, but then little about the past 17 years of Amanda Knox’s life comes anywhere close to ordinary.

The future Knox imagined as she set out on her European adventure almost two decades ago was swept away when, alongside her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, she was convicted of the brutal murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. Prosecutors claimed the couple, along with Ivory Coast drifter Rudy Guede, had killed Kercher in a sex game gone awry. The media had a field day.

Although the passage of time and Knox’s eventual acquittal have tempered the feeding frenzy that cast her as a sinister femme fatale and made her one of the most reviled women on the planet, the mud has stuck.

Recounting an age-appropriate version of her tumultuous past to her daughter, Eureka, is just one way Knox – now 37 – is reclaiming her narrative. She’s also trying to harness its power to heal both herself and others, while drawing on three key strategies that have proved instrumental to her: Stoicism, Zen Buddhism and meditation.

“Part of me has had to come to peace with the idea that it’s a thing that happened to me – not a thing that I did – that defines me,” says Knox, speaking to Positive News from her home on Seattle’s Vashon Island.

“I would have to cure cancer on the moon to be known for something else besides this case. But with the people who matter to me, that is not the defining thing that I am – especially with my daughter and my son. Yes, they want to hear the story of when mommy went to Italy, but more than that, they just want to be held by me, they want honey toast, and they want to watch Bluey with me. That’s who I am.”

Motherhood felt like a distant pipedream as Knox grappled with the reality of serving a 26-year prison sentence in Perugia’s Capanne prison. She’d spent the previous two years on remand, awaiting her trial and convincing herself she was the victim of a terrible mistake which would soon be righted. She trusted in the process, that “the adults in the room would do the right thing”.

It would have been easy to give in to despair when, in December 2009, those adults returned a guilty verdict. Instead, the crushing existential crisis was served with a side dish of awakening. Knox embraced it: “I was not living somebody else’s life by mistake. This was my life – and it was unfair and it was sad – but it was mine to live,” she says.

I’d have to cure cancer on the moon to be known for something else besides this case. But with the people who matter to me, that is not the defining thing that I am

She dabbled with meditation and delved into the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’ musings on Stoic philosophy. Accepting her fate and focusing on what she could control – her thoughts and actions – became key to Knox’s resilience over the following two years. “I took a new level of responsibility for making my life feel like it was worth living on a day-by-day basis,” she says.

In part, that meant belting out The Beatles’ classic Let it Be at the top of her voice, and also finding inspiration for resilience in the pages of Harry Potter books. “His strength in pushing back against all of these forces that were against him just resonated with me so much,” she remembers.

More fundamentally, it meant finding moments– however small – of self-determination. “Prison really hones down what it is that you ultimately have control over – which is your own mind, your own ability to interpret your experience, and the immediate, present moment,” Knox says.

“I grasped on to the idea, in quite a rebellious way, that they couldn’t take that from me. “I told myself:‘ I’m really going to hang on to this moment, when I can do some sit ups, or I can write a letter to my mom, or I can read a book’.”

An appeal in October 2011 tore the police investigation to shreds, but Knox and Sollecito’s freedom came at a cost. Knox had spent two years fantasising about returning to life as an anonymous college student. There was the inevitable lucrative book deal, but otherwise she was eager to move on. The rest of the world, however, had other ideas. It mattered little that Guede was still serving 16 years for Kercher’s murder: the stain of accusation refused to budge.

“I was the girl accused of murder, and that was never, ever going to go away,” Knox says. “I was suddenly understanding a new emotion, which was anger, the feeling that my identity had been stolen from me in a way that I didn’t fully realise in prison –because in prison, you’re just a number.”

Prison really hones down what it is that you ultimately have control over – which is your own mind, the immediate moment

It didn’t help that the ensuing legal to-and-fro would keep the case in the limelight for another four years. Knox and Sollecito were tried and re-convicted in 2014, before being acquitted again and the case definitively closed a year later.

Might that full stop have been a time for Knox to withdraw from the attention surrounding the case, and maybe one day return to the anonymity she had longed for?

“Somebody once asked me: ‘Why don’t you just change your name and pretend that you’re someone else so you don’t have to deal with all the baggage that comes with being Amanda Knox?’

“It doesn’t mean the baggage goes away,” she answers. “It just means I’m putting it in a box in my mind – and who knows what it’s going to be doing to me in there.”

Knox chose instead to face down her monsters. “I’ve found that you would be amazed what happens when you look directly at the thing you’re afraid of, or the thing that is hurting you. It shrinks, and you’re able to look at it from an objective standpoint and feel some kind of power over it.”

It’s a decision that Knox says has not only proved cathartic, but that has also led to her advocating for other victims of miscarriages of justice. One defining moment came in Portland, Oregon, in 2014, at a conference organised by the Innocence Network, a coalition of organisations that support victims of wrongful conviction.

Knox admits to being ‘mortified’ on arrival, fearing a repeat of her prison experience where fame and her having family support had prompted envy among fellow inmates. “Most of these people were men from poor backgrounds, men of colour, and I thought they were going to resent me. It was the exact opposite. It was like, ‘Amanda, thank God you’re here – a little white college girl from the Seattle suburbs who got wrongly convicted! No one believed us that this was happening’.”

When you look directly at the thing you’re afraid of, you’re able to look at it from an objective standpoint and feel some kind of power over it

Knox had originally moved to Italy to pursue her ambition of working as a translator. She had relished the idea of using language to connect cultures and experience, but believed her future as a bridge builder was now ‘crushed and gone forever’. The conference, however, revived her dream.

“Those men made me realise I can still be that bridge,” says Knox. “I’m just a translator of a certain kind of experience to people who would never think the criminal justice system could ever impact them.”

Since then, Knox has become a vociferous champion for the wrongly accused as an Innocence Network ambassador. Her Labyrinths podcast– co-hosted with her husband, the novelist Christopher Robinson – explores other stories of trauma and recovery. She uses her own platform to campaign for criminal justice reform.

Cognitive biases, such as the tunnel vision that can seep into investigations and convince law enforcement they have the right suspect, are recurring themes in her speaking and writing, asa re the kinds of coercive interrogation techniques that led Knox to admit – falsely – that she had been in the apartment the night Kercher was murdered. She may be some way off performing miracle cures in space, but her voice is saving lives nonetheless.

“I’ve had people tell me that I stopped them from committing suicide,” she says. “That matters, and that is healing for me.”

That sense of responsibility is evident, too, in her work with the media. Knox has spoken with derision about the press depicting her as ‘Foxy Knoxy’ – a man-eating murderer. Carving out a career in an industry that damned her before she’d even set foot in a court room might seem an odd fit, but Knox is eager for her experience to inform a more ethical approach to true crime journalism.

“People have stopped asking hard questions about actual facts, about what these stories mean,” she suggests. “Instead, they fit people into pre-written morality narratives,” she says. “I like to see those being questioned.”

In 2022, this scrutiny – Knox’s determination to understand what happened to her and why – took her back to Italy for a remarkable face-to-face meeting with Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor who secured her conviction. Until their meeting, she had felt a tumult of emotions towards him, anger among them. She came away forgiving.

“It wasn’t something that I set out to do,” she says. “But I found that a natural and inevitable consequence of recognising the humanity of the person who hurt you is forgiveness.”

In recent years, she’s immersed herself in Stoic philosophy, joined a Zen Buddhism centre and become an avid fan of the meditation app Waking Up. “These three practices have really helped me reintegrate into ‘free’ life in such a way that I actually felt ‘free’,” Knox says. “Grounding ourselves firmly in reality opens us up to possibilities we wouldn’t recognise when we’re focused on the obstacles that make us feel helpless and trapped.”

I found that a natural and inevitable consequence of recognising the humanity of the person who hurt you is forgiveness

For now, she’s looking forward to homeschooling Eureka and her one-year-old son, Echo. Her new book, Free, comes out in March. Meanwhile, filming began in November on Blue Moon, a dramatised re-telling of Knox’s pursuit of justice.The project, which Knox is co-producing, has drawn criticism, not least from Kercher’s family.

“I really hope that when people see it, they will be surprised in a good way at how much intention has gone into it,” Knox says. “It’s not gratuitous for the sake of it. It’s very intentional.”

She’s asking us not to jump to conclusions, perhaps the biggest lesson of all from her experience in Perugia and the years since. “There is so much more to people than what you hear in the news,” she says. “To this day, I feel like I’m one voice against a chorus, but I’m learning that my voice does matter.

“I’m reliving, in a way, for other people the worst experience of my life. But I’m doing so in a way that I feel is socially responsible and also personally healing – and I feel good about that.”

Photography: Meron Menghistab for Positive News