Amanda Knox’s Unfiltered Memoir Confessions About Sexuality Journey, Dating Challenges and More

Amanda Knox‘s memoir didn’t just address her time in prison — she also shared many unfiltered confessions about her sexual history, challenges in her dating life and more.

Free: My Search for Meaning, out now, offers rare insight into Knox’s life after she was wrongfully convicted for Meredith Kercher’s death. Knox, 37, didn’t just break down her time behind bars, she detailed how she found a way to make peace with the past.

“Writing has always been therapeutic for me. So I’ve been writing this book for many, many years. Some of the things that I incorporated into it were from pieces that I wrote ages ago — and all of them were about processing various aspects of this experience that I went through and trying to understand what they meant — if they meant anything,” Knox exclusively told Us Weekly. “Does it mean anything that a girl had a crush on me in prison and I had to navigate that weird awkward situation? Or does it mean anything to me — or to anyone that I trusted — that someone who told me he was a wrongly convicted person turned out to be a liar and I got taken advantage of in a very dangerous situation? Was that just stupid or is there something to that?”

She continued: “Was that experience a ripple effect of a trauma that originated when a young man broke into my home and raped and murdered my roommate? All of these things and how they connected is the really beautiful takeaway for me writing this. It was me realizing the relationships that I have with people after feeling so ostracized and singled out.”

Knox made headlines after she was arrested in 2007 in Italy. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison after she and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were both convicted of the crime despite a lack of evidence.

An appellate court later found the former couple not guilty in 2011, but they were again found guilty three years later during a retrial. The Italian Supreme Court cleared Knox of Kercher’s murder in 2015, and she was exonerated. Ivorian migrant Rudy Guede was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for Kercher’s murder after his DNA was identified at the crime scene. His sentence was later reduced, and he was released from prison in November 2021.

After her release in 2011, Knox began a lengthy journey to reclaim her past instead of letting it define her. Knox said she used her experience to become an advocate for criminal justice reform and to fight for the rights of the wrongfully convicted.

“This is not a response. This is a proactive approach to me thinking about and grappling with the ripple effects of this trauma that exploded my life,” she explained to Us. “[It is about] how I grappled with owning what’s mine, recognizing the mistakes that I made along the way and really trying to address what I think is a really interesting dilemma in the true crime world. It is this idea that human beings that you hear about in a true crime context only exist within that true crime context.”

Knox pointed out that usually people in high-profile true crime cases are forgotten about over the years, adding, “You hear about the crime, you hear about their arrest, you hear about the trials, you hear about how long they spent in prison, and then when they get out of prison, they’re out. They have their first hamburger after they get out of prison, and then it is the end of the story. You don’t often hear this incredible journey that they go on afterwards to be like, ‘Oh my God, now that I’ve proven my innocence, now what is my life?’”

Free: My Search for Meaning is out now. Keep scrolling for a breakdown of Knox’s most unfiltered confessions about her dating life and more:

Concerning Situations in Her Past

An excerpt from Free: My Search for Meaning revealed that Knox was “propositioned” at age 19 to be in a “tasteful, softcore” amateur porn film. She recalled being offered $2,000 for “no sex, just showering” which came amid Knox juggling a full class load and two part-time jobs to save for her infamous study abroad trip.

Going back even further, Knox detailed an “embarrassing menstrual moment” in her algebra class as well as inappropriate comments made by her male classmates about the girls in school.

Her Experience With Sex

“I was a pretty normal twenty-year-old American girl. If anything, I was a little sheltered. I’d had sex with seven people in my entire life, but that was misrepresented in court and in the press as the number of people I’d slept with in my few weeks in Perugia,” she wrote. “Meredith was also a normal girl in her early twenties. She’d had a few boyfriends. She was casually hooking up with an Italian boy in Perugia, just as I was.”

Knox continued: “She had no shame about asking me for a condom when she and Giacomo were becoming intimate. We were entirely unremarkable for college girls, both of us closer to the naive end of the spectrum than Girls Gone Wild. And yet, while my sexuality was magnified and distorted into deviancy, Meredith’s was erased. I became the slut, and she became the virgin.”

Dating Men in Italy

After reading her mother’s copy of Under the Tuscan Sun, Knox started to think about a trip to Italy. She revealed that she “hooked up with two young men” while she was there.

“One whom I met on a train to Florence who gave me oral herpes, and another who introduced me to the Bellini but was rough with me in bed,” she shared in her memoir. “I eventually met the young, handsome sweetheart I’d dreamed about, Raffaele, but that, too, didn’t exactly go according to plan.”

Finding Pleasure in Prison

Knox opened up about how she explored masturbation while serving a sentence for a crime she didn’t commit.

“I waited until my cellmates were asleep. I moved with absolute silence, careful to not even rustle a blanket. I was clumsy at first and didn’t get anywhere near orgasm before the agente patrols,” she recalled. “They came by every fifteen minutes or so to open the small cell windows and peer inside. But like many things in life, constraints can be useful. The agente rotation forced me to figure out my body and find the right mental space efficiently. In those fleeting moments of pleasure, my body felt like my own again, but more important, I felt defiant. I was reclaiming something natural, healthy, and delightful, something my prosecutor had used as proof of my corrupt moral character.”

The prison section of the memoir also mentioned a female inmate who attempted to start a romance with Knox.

Introducing Her Ex-Boyfriends

After being released from prison, Knox returned to the U.S. and rekindled a romance with her college boyfriend, James, after they exchanged letters for years. They ultimately called it quits and Knox met a man at a bar named Mike who claimed he was also wrongfully accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

Knox’s family members “got bad vibes” from Mike, but she continued to date him despite various red flags like him taking her money. Later in the memoir, Knox recalled a moment where Mike allegedly slapped her friend in the face out of jealousy before breaking into her apartment.

“He chased me down four flights of stairs and into the street,” she recalled. “After my encounter with Mike in 2014, I was deeply shaken. I had allowed someone I didn’t know into my intimate life because I’d imagined that he was like me, that his challenges were my challenges, and we could take on the world together. My desperation to be understood made me the perfect victim for a con man.”

Following her troubling romance with Mike, Knox reconnected with a middle school friend named Colin. They got engaged after “a few months of dating” but later called it quits.

Finding The One

Free: My Search for Meaning offered highlights from Knox’s meet cute with now-husband Robin. The couple now share two kids.

“To be clear, I didn’t fall in love with Chris that night. I barely knew him. I was still engaged. He had a serious girlfriend who was lovely and whom I’d met at the reading,” she shared about their first run-in. “I fully expected that our lives were on very different tracks. But I knew deep down that, were circumstances otherwise, in some alternate universe, Chris and I might be madly in love.”

As soon as Knox and Robin became official, she knew they would get married.

“Chris and I started dating in earnest, and six months later we moved in together,” she added. “I knew even then that this man would be my husband and the father of my children.”