Amanda Knox 'Barbed Wire' Trial: First Interview (VIDEO)
"I want to be reconsidered as a person," Amanda Knox said during a recent interview in which she broke her silence for the first time. Knox is facing a retrial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, her roommate during an abroad trip that would forever change her life.
Knox was convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Meredith Kercher in 2009. Four years before, at the age of 19, Knox had traveled to Perugia, Italy to study abroad. Kercher, a student from England who was also studying in Italy, and two other women would become Knox's roommates.
On October 3, 2011 after spending years in prison, a second-tier Italian court overturned the conviction against Knox. She was 24 years old. The acquittal would not last, however, and in March of 2013, the Italian court ordered a retrial.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"I felt like after crawling through a field of barbed wire and finally reaching what I thought was the end, it just turned out that it was the horizon," Knox told ABC's Diane Sawyer during a Tuesday night interview, recalling the moment she discovered she would be retried. "And I had another field of barbed wire that I had ahead of me to crawl through."
During the interview, Knox recounted the troubling times that she suffered while being held as a murderer in an Italian prison. She said: "for all intents and purposes, I was a murderer; whether I was or not. And I had to live with the idea that that would be my life."
Throughout that time, Knox was also being put through a different type of trial in the media. She was frequently called names and accused of being detestable things. The name-calling did not end in the media, though.
"I was in the courtroom when they were calling me a devil. It's one thing to be called certain things in the media, it's another thing to be sitting in the courtroom, fighting for your life while people are calling you a devil," she told Sawyer.
Knox released her memoir "Waiting to Be Heard" on Tuesday.
"What happened to me, hit me like a train and there was nothing I could do to stop it," Knox said. But "it could have happened to anyone."
