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Meredith Kercher “will always be remembered for her own fight for life”, the sister of the murdered British student has said as filming began in Italy on a controversial TV series co-produced by Amanda Knox about the case.
Filming of the eight-episode series, Blue Moon, has coincided with the 17th anniversary of the murder, for which Knox was twice convicted before being definitively acquitted in 2015.
The series is also being co-produced by Monica Lewinsky, who was at the centre of a 1990s media storm after an affair with the then US president, Bill Clinton, and focuses on Knox’s legal battle. It is being shot in the Umbrian hilltop town of Orvieto this week before moving to Perugia, the university town where Kercher, 21, was murdered in the house she shared with Knox. Kercher’s body was found in her bedroom, partly undressed and with multiple stab wounds. She had been sexually assaulted.
Her sister Stephanie Kercher said Meredith’s “strength and love remains strong after 17 years” and that she “will forever hold a lasting legacy in friendship and kindness that no media can change”.
Kercher said her family had been through a lot and found it “difficult to understand” how the series served any purpose. “Meredith will always be remembered for her own fight for life, and yet in her absence, her love and personality continues to shine,” she said. “We will forever feel this indescribable void but we live by Meredith’s standards with dignity.”
Knox was convicted of the murder along with her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. The pair spent four years in prison before being released in 2011.
They were convicted again in 2014 by an appeals court in Florence, which ruled that the multiple injuries inflicted on Kercher’s body proved that Rudy Guede, an Ivorian man who served 13 years for the murder, could not have acted alone. Italy’s highest court overturned the decision against Knox and Sollecito in a ruling in 2015, because of what it described as “stunning flaws” in the investigation that led to the convictions.
The Kercher family rarely respond to the publicity generated by Knox, who reportedly earned about £3.5m for her memoir, took part in a Netflix documentary about the case in 2016 and has been the subject of other books and films.
In June this year, a Florence court upheld a slander conviction against Knox for wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba, who owned a bar in Perugia, of murdering Kercher. Knox, 37, had asked for the conviction to be dropped on the basis of a ruling by the European court of human rights in 2019 that found her defence rights had been violated during police questioning in 2007. She said she had returned to Italy in the hope of clearing her name “once and for all of the false charges” against her.
She had been handed a three-year jail term for wrongly accusing Lumumba, which she served during the four years she was imprisoned before being found not guilty of Kercher’s murder on appeal in 2011.
Lumumba spent two weeks in jail in 2007 and was released only after a witness came forward with an alibi for him.
Guede, the only person definitively convicted of the murder, was released from prison in November 2021 after completing 13 years of a 16-year sentence.