Amanda Knox has responded to leaked journal entries stating she had seven sexual partners by the age of 20. The entries date from the Italian police investigation into the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, Knox’s roommate.
“After years of being vilified as a deviant sex monster”
In an X post, Knox affirmed the diary entries are real, and in a follow-up post, stated, “After years of being vilified as a deviant sex monster, I couldn’t help but internalize some of that shame, despite the fact that I knew there was nothing wrong with my sexuality (which was actually quite vanilla).”
Reportedly, Knox listed her former partners at that time in response to false claims that she had somehow contracted HIV. “I don’t know where I could have gotten HIV from,” Knox wrote. “Here is the list of people I’ve had sex with in general.”
Referring to the old writings in a follow-up comment, Knox continued, “I cut my long hair down to a bob, I donned nerdy big glasses, I wouldn’t dare wear a short skirt or a bikini to the beach. I felt like I had to suppress any desire to look pretty in public lest I be accused of being that femme fatale the media painted me as.”
The Amanda Knox case
Knox was an American exchange student in Perugia, Italy, in 2007 when she became the center of an international firestorm after the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested and charged with Kercher’s killing.
Italian prosecutors claimed the murder resulted from a drug-fueled sex game gone wrong, despite inconsistencies in the evidence and a confession Knox later said was coerced during an intense overnight interrogation.
Another man, Rudy Guede, was later convicted of the murder based on DNA evidence and served the majority of his sentence, yet Italian authorities continued to pursue charges against Knox and Sollecito.
The “Foxy Knoxy” nickname
During the legal proceedings, Knox became known as “Foxy Knoxy,” a nickname originally from her childhood soccer days that the press repurposed to insinuate promiscuity and cunning. Tabloids and TV outlets ran salacious headlines painting her as either a femme fatale or a naïve girl caught in a nightmare.
This portrayal fueled public fascination and condemnation, particularly in the U.K., where sympathy for Kercher ran deep, a dynamic she has since openly criticized in her advocacy for criminal justice reform and media accountability.
The Knox case drew enormous global attention, especially from American and British media outlets. A major point of controversy was the quality of the forensic evidence, which independent experts later described as flawed and mishandled.
Knox was convicted in 2009, acquitted on appeal in 2011, re-convicted in a retrial in 2014, and finally exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015. Critics accused Italian prosecutors of mishandling the case and relying on moralistic assumptions rather than hard evidence, while others believed Knox had evaded justice due to international pressure.
Published: Jul 16, 2025 02:56 pm