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.
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