Amanda Knox has broken her silence on the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome’s decision to reject her appeal of her slander conviction.

“I’m feeling just kind of f–king numb,” the author, 37, said in an impromptu episode of her “Labyrinths with Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson” podcast on Thursday, January 23. “I’m a little bit astonished because I had higher hopes for the court.”

Before the podcast episode was recorded on Thursday, Italy’s highest court upheld Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing her former boss, bar owner Patrick Lumumba, of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007.

“I’m trying to imagine how a legal expert, a panel of judges on the Supreme Court in Italy, can legally justify the decision they just handed down,” she continued on the podcast.

Knox became emotional as she thought about what the conviction meant for her, including having “a criminal record forever for something I didn’t do, and there’s nothing I can do.”

Knox was a 20-year-old exchange student living in an apartment in Perugia, Umbria, Italy, with Kercher, a 21-year-old fellow exchange student, at the time of Kercher’s murder. The Washington native called the police when she found blood in the apartment’s bathroom and Kercher’s bedroom door locked after Knox returned home from spending the night with then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Kercher was found dead at the scene.

Knox and Sollecito, 40, as well as Lumumba, were arrested for the murder. However, Lumumba was released two weeks later due to his strong alibi. Meanwhile, Knox and Sollecito were wrongfully convicted, with the former receiving a 26-year sentence in prison and the latter receiving a 25-year prison sentence in 2009.

The pair were incarcerated for nearly four years before they were acquitted. Knox and Sollecito were exonerated by Italy’s highest court in March 2015.

A man named Rudy Guede was convicted of killing Kercher in 2008. He was later released from prison in 2021.

Though Knox was cleared of the murder conviction, she was convicted in June 2024 for wrongly accusing Lumumba of her roommate’s murder during a police interrogation that reportedly lasted 53 hours. She recanted her accusation the following day in a four-page handwritten “memoriale,” according to AP. However, Knox’s former boss was still taken into custody for nearly two weeks.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Knox’s rights were violated during the interrogation, which led Italy’s Supreme Court to order a retrial. Knox argued during her June 2024 trial that she was bullied by police into wrongly accusing Lumumba.

An Italian appellate court upheld the conviction in June 2024 before the case went to the country’s supreme court.

Knox will not go back to prison for the conviction because of the time she has already served.

“I’ve been mentally telling myself there’s a way for me to not just feel defeated by this, but for it to give me momentum and to pivot around this in some meaningful and valuable way,” Knox said on her podcast. “But, God, I wish I were celebrating right now. I’m going to give myself time to grieve the decision. But I’m also going to channel this into something positive.”