Knox tells of staring into the 'abyss'

(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 22 - In an article published by The Free Press on March 20, Amanda Knox wrote candidly about "staring into the abyss" during her time in jail in Italy in connection with the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, a crime for which she was eventually acquitted.
    "The abyss never leaves. It's always there. And anyone who's stared into it, as I have, knows the strange comfort of carrying it with you," she wrote in the article 'The Life I refused to Surrender'.
    "After I was convicted of murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison ... I had my first ever epiphany," continued Knox, adding that it was "cold".
    The epiphany consisted in the realization that she was not waiting to get her life back.
    "No matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now," she wrote.
    She told how she began to imagine "alternate realities", various future scenarios including committing suicide.
    "I imagined all of those futures in vivid detail so that they no longer felt like shadows creeping over me from the realm of unconscious nightmares. And that allowed me to see my actual life for what it was, and to ask myself: How do I make that life worth living?", Knox wrote.
    The now 35-year-old American from Seattle was accused of murdering British student Meredith Kercher together with Raffaele Sollecito in Perugia on November 1, 2007.
    The pair were arrested five days later and convicted by a court of first instance, but this conviction was subsequently overturned.
    The appeal sentence was then thrown out by the Court of Cassation, Italy's supreme court, which ordered a new trial on appeal leading to their re-conviction in 2014.
    Knox and Sollecito were eventually acquitted definitively by the supreme court the following year.
    Rudy Guede, an Ivorian, was convicted and sentenced to 16 years for the murder. He was released from prison in November 2021 after serving 13 years. (ANSA).