- Amanda Knox recalled having her "first ever epiphany" after she was wrongly imprisoned in Italy in 2007.
- "I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home," she wrote.
Amanda Knox recalled having her "first ever epiphany" after she was wrongly imprisoned in Italy in the notorious case of the murder of her British roommate in 2007.
In a lengthy Twitter thread on Friday, Knox wrote,
"My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home."
—Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) February 24, 2023
Describing the feeling of "something deep down that I hadn't known before," she realized that she was no longer in "limbo" between the life she "should have been living" and "the life of a murderer."
Instead, she was forced to succumb and reckon with the fact that she would be "locked away for the best years of my life."
Knox's case became internationally known after her roommate Meredith Kercher was murdered during their year abroad at a university in Perugia, Italy.
Knox, and her then-boyfriend, were convicted of the crime and handed lengthy prison sentences. She was 20 years old at the time.
Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before she was definitively acquitted in 2015 after a complicated series of court decisions. A European court later ordered Italy to pay Knox about $21,000 in damages for the wrongful conviction.
Rudy Guede was later sentenced to 16 years in prison for the murder but was freed in 2021 after serving most of the time, according to the Associated Press.
—Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) February 24, 2023
Knox wrote that despite the horrors that surrounded her in prison, through her epiphany, she could make meaning out of her life, even though it was cruel and unfair.
She would ask herself, while imprisoned, "How can I make my life worth living today?" to have some control over the unjust situation. Through doing situps, walking laps, writing letters, and reading books, she was able to "walk a tightrope across a bottomless foggy abyss" with nothing but her "instinctual sense of balance."
Knox received an outpouring of support and thanks from social media users who called her writing "profound" and "remarkable.".
"This thread is one of the best descriptions of radical acceptance I've ever come across," one Twitter user wrote. As of Saturday, the post has been viewed nearly two million times.
—Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) February 24, 2023
She ended the thread with guidance and a photo of her smiling while in prison.
"Everyone is going through something, even when they're smiling. If that sounds like you, I hope reading this helps," she wrote.