Amanda Knox's secret prison diary

During her four years behind bars, the woman dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” kept a journal that’s now worth millions.

As Amanda Knox’s jubilant family hung out the Welcome Home signs and global media began scrambling for her exclusive story, details emerged of a secret prison diary kept by the US student during her four-year ordeal in an Italian jail. The 24-year-old language student, dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” during her 2009 murder conviction – now overturned – for the sex-slaying of UK exchange student Meredith Kercher, stands to gain millions from the sale of the diary. It’s likely to be turned into a tell-all book and, possibly, a TV series or movie.

In it, Amanda repeatedly professes her innocence of the brutal murder of 21-year-old Meredith, with whom she shared a house. “I am innocent so I will be free. Free. Free. Free. Freedom. I will have freedom,” she writes. And, in another entry, “Waiting, unfairly, innocent and knowing that outside I’m seen as a sinister monster. Life passes me by. Here is no place for love.”Amanda adds a poignant poem – “Do you know me? Open your eyes and see that when it is said I am an angel, or I am a devil, or I am a lost girl, recognise that what is really lost is: the truth!”

Until last week, when she was spectacularly freed, Amanda faced another 22 years of a 26-year jail sentence. Not surprisingly, she relieved the boredom of prison life by documenting her innermost thoughts in her diary. In notes written recently she declares, “I am not the Monster of Perugia” – a reference to a horrific Italian killer dubbed the Monster of Florence.

In her journal, obtained by Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, she calls herself Foxy Knoxy and reveals that no less than 35 men wrote to her in the first two weeks after her arrest, many of them besotted by her appearance. “Write to me because I want to finally know ‘the girl with the face of an angel’,” pleaded one man in a letter. Another proposed marriage. “I will respond to all, but only when I am out of here,” Amanda writes. Among the papers is a letter to her American boyfriend, with whom she remained in contact during her time in Italy. “Dear DJ, I really feel the need to hold you in my arms right now,” she writes. “I have this knot inside and I feel as if someone really cold and strong is pressing my head. I beg you I cannot stay alone right now.”