(News Nation) — Amanda Knox will return to an Italian courtroom this week to try fight a defamation suit against them.

Knox is facing trial for the first time in more than 12 years. She and her then-boyfriend were previously convicted in 2009 of killing their 21-year-old roommate, with whom Knox lived while studying abroad in Italy. Those convictions were eventually overturned, reinstated and overturned again in a series of trials over the next few years.

Now Knox is trying to overcome one final legal hurdle: a defamation suit for falsely accusing the bar owner of murder.

Knox returns to the same courtroom where she was resentenced on Wednesday.

“On June 5, I will enter the same courtroom where I was again convicted of a crime I did not commit, and this time I will have to defend myself again,” Knox wrote on X“I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false accusations against me. Wish me luck. Crepi il lupo!”

Amanda Knox' trials

Knox was a 20-year-old student living in the university town of Perugia when her roommate Meredith Kercher was found dead in her apartment in 2007. Kercher's murder attracted worldwide attention, and the media resorted to sensational images of Knox and her then-boyfriend. Raffaele Sollecito.

The two spent four years in prison after their first conviction for murder until they were acquitted by Italy's highest court in 2015.

Rudy Hermann Guede, a drifter who lived in Perugia, was later convicted of Kercher's murder in a summary trial that carries a lesser sentence. Although he was sentenced to 16 years in prison, which included a finding that he did not act alone, Guede was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years. He was recently ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and not leave his house at night after an ex-girlfriend accused him of physical and sexual abuse.

The accusation of defamation

Patrick Lumumba, the bar owner who employed Knox part-time, was arrested and held as a suspect in the Kercher murder following Knox's questioning by police. Lumumba has since left Italy and is living with his family in Eastern Europe, according to the Associated Press, but has joined the current prosecution as a civil party.

The libel conviction Knox now faces is the only charge against Knox that has withstood five court rulings. It is based on two police typed statements that Knox signed after a lengthy interrogation in Italian without a lawyer or competent interpreter. At her first trial, Knox said police pressure led her to charge an innocent man. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the conditions of Knox's interrogation violated her human rights.

For this reason, Italy's highest court overturned the defamation conviction, ruled that the two police statements were inadmissible and ordered a retrial. This time, the court could only examine Knox's handwritten statements for elements that could support defamation.