Amanda Knox speaks at a Criminal Justice Festival in Modena, Italy, in 2019. Photo: AP Photo/Antonio Calanni
A polarising opinion piece about an American student’s miserable experience studying in Europe has been shared on Twitter by Amanda Knox, who spent four years in an Italian prison following a wrongful murder conviction while studying abroad.“Girl, what are you talking about? Studying abroad is awesome!” Knox wrote, sharing an article published by Insider from an NYU student who wrote about hating a semester she spent in Florence.
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In the last week, people on Twitter have been tearing the piece apart, scrutinising the author’s complaints that all her flatmates went travelling around Europe every weekend while she stayed in doing online internships, or that Italians in Florence, which is deluged with international students and visitors every year, were allegedly hostile to her presence.
Knox was wrongfully convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in 2007. Kercher was murdered at the age of 21, found dead on the floor of her bedroom in the Perugia apartment she shared with Knox. Rudy Guede was convicted of sexual assault and murder under a fast-track procedure. He was granted early release in 2021.Knox and her boyfriend at the time Raffaele Sollecito were also convicted and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. After years of legal travails, their convictions were definitively annulled by Italy’s Supreme Court in 2015.Not everyone was buying Knox’s irony on Twitter.