Convicted killer Amanda Knox has won $54,500 in damages after suing the author of a book for invading her privacy and revealing details of her sex life, Sky News reported today.
Knox, who was jailed over the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, launched the civil case in Milan last year while her murder trial was taking place in Perugia.
The book, “Amanda and the Others,” was serialized in an Italian newspaper and became an instant best-seller.
Leading crime journalist Fiorenza Sarzanini used excerpts of Knox’s notebooks and diary in her book.
Knox’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova argued the publication of “Amanda’s personal and private property” was an invasion of her privacy.
In her diary Knox had written, ”So I am at the police station after a long day in which I describe how I was the first person to arrive home and find my flatmate dead.
”The strange thing is after all that has happened I want to write a song about all this.
“It would be the first song I have written and would speak about how someone died in a horrible way and for no reason.
”How morbid is all that? I’m dying of hunger. I really want to say that I could murder a pizza but that doesn’t seem right. Laura and Filomena (Knox and Meredith’s flatmates) are really upset.
”I’m angry. At the beginning I was shocked, then sad, then confused now I’m really angry. I don’t know. I never saw her body and I never saw her blood so it’s as if it hasn’t happened.
”But it did happen, right in the room next to mine. There was blood in the bathroom where this morning I took a shower.”
The book also described in detail Knox’s sex life and carried an interview with an Albanian who claimed she enjoyed wild lovemaking, but it later emerged it had been invented.
Judge Gattari ordered that the damages be paid jointly by Sarzanini and RCS Group, the publishers of newspaper Corriere Della Sera.
The amount of money awarded is the same figure that Knox was ordered to pay bar owner Patrick Lumumba after she wrongly named him as the killer and was convicted of slander.
Knox’s solicitor Dalla Vedova said his client was “delighted” by the outcome, adding that this “is the first step in the process of getting her cleared of murder in her appeal.”
He said, ”The court case is the first piece of good news for Amanda in months. She has been very, very depressed because she is innocent and she is in jail.”
Knox, 22, was given a 26-year prison sentence last December after being found guilty of murdering the Leeds University student in 2007.
The 21-year-old had been found semi-naked and with her throat cut in her bedroom in the house she shared with Knox and two Italian women in Perugia.
Knox’s former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Ivory Coast drifter Rudy Guede were also convicted of Meredith’s murder.