Convicted murder suspect Amanda Knox has revealed she had an ‘epiphany’ during her time in prison reflecting on other ‘realities’ where she might have been murdered or committed suicide.
Knox, who was acquitted in the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher due to lack of evidence, posted a bizarre Twitter thread on Friday detailing how she came to terms with her initial conviction.
The 35-year-old lamented being “locked up for the best years of my life” and “deprived of opportunities”, calling her life “small, cruel, sad and unfair”.
But Knox, dubbed ‘Foxy Knoxy’ by the tabloids, said she suddenly realized she had to stop ‘waiting’ for her life to begin and calmly accept her sentence by finding joy doing sit-ups, writing letters and reading.
He went on to say that he considered ‘alternate realities’ in prison about his murder instead of Meredith and another in which he killed himself.
Knox uploaded a photo of herself smiling in prison on Friday as she detailed her ‘epiphany’ while serving what she thought would be a 26-year sentence.
Amanda Knox (pictured speaking in 2019, file photo) told her 128,000 followers that she would spend her days in prison doing crunches, spinning, and reading and writing.
She wrote: ‘What if I had been home that night, not Meredith, and Rudy Guede had killed me instead?
‘What happens if I am acquitted and released in five years? In ten?
What if I served my full sentence and came home at age 40 a barren and bereft woman? And if I commit suicide…?
He said he examined these thoughts in “vivid detail”, a process that prevented them from “seeping into” his nightmares.
But Knox explained that her “default emotional settings remained firmly stuck on sad” during her time in prison, adding: “I woke up sad, spent the whole day sad, and went to sleep sad.”
However, he found meaning through ‘squatting, walking, writing a letter, reading a book’.
“I was slowly and deliberately walking a tightrope through a bottomless chasm of mist,” he wrote.
“In many ways, though I am now free, legally vindicated, a woman with a career in the arts (as I always dreamed), an advocate for justice (as I never dreamed), a wife with a loving husband, a mother with a child happy… I’m still walking a tightrope,” he added.
Knox closed the thread with a photo of herself smiling in prison, writing, “Everyone is going through something, even when they’re smiling.”
Many Twitter users praised Knox’s “insightful” thread, though others accused her of self-obsession.
The user wrote: ‘And yet it’s ALL about you. Please go away and shut up! A daughter and a sister were killed and she is the most important person in this horrible event, not you.
Leeds University student Meredith, 21, was found stabbed to death with her throat slit in her bedroom in the apartment she shared with Knox in the Italian hilltop town of Perugia.
Meredith Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was murdered just three months after moving to Italy for a study abroad program at the prestigious University of Perugia (Pictured: In an undated photo released November 2007)
Knox was found guilty of killing Kercher with her then-lover Raffaele Sollecito. In the photo, they meet in Italy 15 years after his arrest.
Knox, who was 20 at the time, and her Italian boyfriend Sollecito, then 23, were arrested four days later when prosecutors alleged the murder was part of a sex game gone wrong.
They were convicted of raping and killing Kercher twice in an Italian court.
The couple spent nearly four years in prison before their convictions were overturned due to a lack of evidence linking them to the crime.
A court ruling ordered the Italian state to pay Knox $21,000 in damages.
Instead, Rudy Guede, 34, was found guilty after his DNA was discovered on Kercher’s body despite his claims that he was in the bathroom listening to music when she was killed.
He was released from prison after serving 13 years of a 30-year term.
Upon his release, he said that Knox “knows the truth and I know the truth.”
Since then, Knox has rebranded herself as an activist, writer, and podcaster.
She married novelist and poet Christopher Robinson, 39, and the couple share a daughter, named Eureka.
On Twitter, Knox revealed how her mother worried that she was depressed in prison, though she added that she knew “deep in my bones that I would survive.”
She started the thread by saying she felt ‘the earth fell out from under me and global shame fell on me’, after she was convicted of Kercher’s murder in 2009 and sentenced to 26 years in prison.
Rudy Guede, pictured in 2007, is the only person convicted of Kercher’s murder. He was released from prison after 13 years.
Last year, Guede, 34, after his release from jail, pointedly suggested that Knox, 35, “knows the truth and I know the truth.” Pictured in 2020
The house where Kercher in Perugia, Italy, was murdered pictured in 2007
“My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed during my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back,” he wrote.
He was not a lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and the prison was my home.
“I thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living) and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer). I was never had been.
‘The conviction, the sentence, the prison cell—*this* was my life.
‘There was no life I *should* have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me.
She said the revelation gave her ‘clarity’, making her realize ‘As small, cruel, sad and unfair as this life was, it was *my* life.’
“Mine to make sense of, mine to live the best I can,” he added.
‘There was no more waiting. There was only now.