MODENA – Amanda Knox last week blamed the media’s portrayal of her as a ‘dirty maneater’ for the way she was treated during her trial, in a tearful speech during her first return to the country since acquittal. She held the media, which had branded her “Foxy Knoxy,” responsible for her initially being found guilty of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher.

 Ms Knox, 31, who is originally from Seattle in the U.S., gave an emotional speech at the Criminal Justice Festival in Modena. She condemned the “fantasy of the tabloids” and reiterated her innocence in a crime for which she spent four years in prison.

"Today I fear being harassed, laughed at and framed - and I fear that new charges may be brought,” she said. She went on: "It was impossible to have a fair process. Public opinion is not accountable to anyone, there are no rules - only that sensationalism wins: in the court of public opinion, you are not a human being, but a consumer item."

 Knox was a language exchange student in Perugia when she was arrested in 2007 for the murder of her housemate, 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher, along with her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Ms Kercher’s throat had been cut and she had been sexually assaulted.

 Knox and Sollecito were initially found guilty and served four years of their sentence, before an appeal overturned the verdict. Knox she returned to the U.S. in 2011. A retrial found them guilty once again in 2014 but this was subsequently overturned in 2015 by Italy’s highest appeals court on the grounds of “reasonable doubt.”

 Knox is considerably better known that Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, who was found guilty of the murder in 2008 in a separate trial. Upon her return to the U.S., she wrote her bestselling memoir Waiting to Be Heard (2015).

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