Amanda Knox: ‘I considered ways to kill myself’

Amanda Knox wants to set the record straight. Picture: AP

Knox also claimed she was sexually harassed by prison guards and considered suicide, according to the New York Times.

Writing in her memoir Waiting To Be Heard, she wrote: “Until now I have personally never contributed to any public discussion of the case or of what happened to me.

“Now that I am free, I’ve finally found myself in a position to respond to everyone’s questions. This memoir is about setting the record straight.”

According to the memoir, the police interrogated her for hours and would slap her on the back of her head.

Knox made the claims despite Italian police taking legal action against her parents for making similar allegations.

She also claimed to have been reading a Harry Potter book, smoking marijuana and watching a film at her boyfriend’s flat on the night of the murder, saying that “around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta”.

Last month, Italy’s highest criminal court overturned her acquittal for the murder of Ms Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey, in November 2007.

Knox returned home to Seattle after she was dramatically cleared following four years in jail in 2011 but now faces the prospect of returning to the country for a new trial.

However, Italian law cannot compel Knox to leave the US and a family spokesman has said it is not likely.

In the memoir, she went on: “First I showed not enough emotion; then I showed too much”.

Knox added: “The words in my journal were taken literally, and they damned me.

“It was a situation I would find myself in again and again.”

In excerpts from the book obtained by ABC Television News, Knox said she would have considered suicide if the verdict had not been overturned.

In her memoir, she said she “imagined myself a corpse” while in prison and began considering ways of killing herself if her sentence was increased to life from an initial 26 years.

“I started to understand how you could feel so locked inside your own life that you could be so desperate to escape, even if it meant that you would no longer exist,” Knox writes in her book.

In another interview with People magazine, Knox says that she is sometimes “paralysed” with anxiety stemming from the death of her room-mate and the legal proceedings that made headlines across the globe.

“Things creep up on me and all of a sudden I’m overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness and that desperation and fear to even hope,” she told the magazine. “Just that can make my heart race and makes me paralysed until I can breathe it away.”

Now studying at the University of Washington, she has been seen around town but is largely left alone by the local media.

ABC News has reported that Knox writes in her book that she penned a letter for her mother just before she was released, saying that she thought she wouldn’t get out. Knox arrived back in Seattle before her note did.