Amanda Knox compared her upcoming retrial in Italy to “crawling through barbed wire” in a new interview set to air tonight.
Knox, who was acquitted in the 2007 sex attack and murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, is facing a new fight after being freed following four years in an Italian prison.
“I felt like after crawling through a field of barbed wire and finally reaching what I thought was the end, it just turned out that it was the horizon,” Knox told ABC’s Diane Sawyer. “And I had another field of barbed wire that I had ahead of me to crawl through.”
Italy’s Court of Cassation, its highest court of last resort, threw out her 2011 acquittal and ordered a new trial last month.
“I was in the courtroom when they were calling me a devil. It’s one thing to be called certain things in the media, it’s another thing to be sitting in the courtroom, fighting for your life while people are calling you a devil.
Knox is not required to return to Italy for the new proceedings and will not be extradited, according to the report. Her lawyer told ABC that he expects the new trial to begin next year.
If she doesn’t attend, she would be tried in absentia.
Knox said that “for all intents and purposes, I was a murderer; whether I was or not. And I had to live with the idea that that would be my life.”
Knox called her trial and conviction “surreal” but cautioned “it could have happened to anyone.”
Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were sentenced to more than 25 years in jail in 2007 for killing Kercher in what was described as a drug-fueled sex attack in Perugia.
Kercher, 21, was found half-naked with her throat slashed in a pool of blood in her bedroom in the house she shared with Knox. Knox’s conviction was overturned in 2011.
“It’s not fair that there is not a satisfactory answer for what happened to Meredith, and the attention that’s been taken away from her and what happened to her is not fair,” Knox said.