A court in Italy has dismissed an appeal by Amanda Knox against her conviction for slander in connection with a 2007 murder that made headlines worldwide.
Almost ten years after Knox was acquitted of the murder of 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher in the central Italian city of Perugia, an appeals court in Florence on Wednesday sentenced her to three years in prison for falsely implicating a local barman in the case.
Knox will not serve the sentence after she spent four years in prison in Italy following her initial murder trial, which was overturned in 2011.
The 36-year-old was in tears as the judges upheld her separate 2009 conviction for slander against the barman, Patrick Lumumba, who spent two weeks in jail before being freed.
"I didn't expect this. I am very disappointed," said Knox, who had returned to Italy for the trial in an attempt to finally clear her name.
The Amanda Knox case became the source of a global media storm, and has been extensively examined in several books, films, and TV series.
The American, then aged only 20, was arrested shortly after her flatmate Kercher's death in November 2007. Along with her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, she was convicted of murder in a 2009 trial, which was overturned in 2011.
Knox was freed and subsequently returned to the United States, but was convicted again in a 2014 retrial before her final acquittal by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation the following year.
Another man, Rudy Guede, was found guilty of Kercher's murder in 2008 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He was eventually freed in 2021.
Knox, now married with two children, has since written a book about her experiences and is currently developing another TV series, to be produced by Monica Lewinsky.
Seeking complete exoneration, she returned to Italy to appeal her slander conviction after a 2019 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights found that she had been improperly denied legal assistance and access to an interpreter by Italian police during initial investigations.
Knox has previously said she was under enormous stress after her arrest and felt pressurized into making the false accusation against Lumumba.
Before the judgement in Florence on Wednesday, she appealed to the court to recognize her innocence and apologized to Lumumba, saying: "I am sorry that I could not resist the pressure and that he suffered."
Knox left the court visibly upset and was surrounded by a media scrum. Lumumba's lawyer Carlo Pacelli said he was satisfied with the judgement, adding: "Amanda Knox is not a victim, but a slanderer."