Former exchange student Amanda Knox returned to Italy on Thursday for the first time since she was acquitted in the 2007 slaying of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher.
The 31-year-old is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion on wrongful convictions.
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Knox, who hails from Seattle, was the subject of a sensational murder case in the Italian university town of Perugia after suspicion fell on Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
According to investigators, Kercher, 21 at the time of her death, was found nude under a blanket in her locked room. Her throat was slit, and it was apparent she had been sexually assaulted.
Knox and Sollecito were both found guilty and received 26- and 25-year prison sentences, respectively. The pair were first acquitted in 2011, but a long legal process led to multiple flip-flop rulings. They weren’t definitively acquitted until 2015.
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But Knox’s slander conviction for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner for the crime still kept her in prison for about four years. An Ivorian immigrant, Rudy Guede, is serving a 16-year murder sentence for Kercher's slaying.
Knox has since been active in raising awareness around wrongful convictions. In an essay titled "Your Content, My Life," Knox wrote about the upcoming panel discussion for the Italy Innocence Project and how media scrutiny and social media amplification influenced the case and her public image.
"While on trial for a murder I didn't commit, my prosecutor painted me as a sex-crazed femme fatale, and the media profited for years by sensationalizing an already sensational and utterly unjustified story," Knox wrote. "It's on us to stop making and stop consuming such irresponsible media."
Associated Press reports were used in this story.
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