Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito’s lives were forever changed following the 2007 death of Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher.
Knox was attending the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy, as an exchange student when her roommate was found brutally murdered in their apartment. Police immediately suspected that Knox and her new boyfriend, Sollecito, were somehow involved in Kercher’s death, setting off an eight-year legal battle that went all the way to Italy’s Supreme Court — twice.
Knox and Sollecito were only dating for eight days at the time of their arrests, and while their romantic relationship ended shortly after, the two became trusted allies in a battle against the highest levels of the Italian justice system.
Keep scrolling for a look at Sollecito’s relationship with Knox, the two murder trials and what his life is like now:
Why Was Raffaele Sollecito Arrested?
Sollecito had nearly completed a computer science degree at Perugia University in Italy when he met Knox at a classical music concert in October 2007. Their whirlwind romance lasted just over a week before Knox and Sollecito were arrested by Italian authorities in connection with Kercher’s death.
During a 2012 interview with Anderson Cooper, Sollecito admitted it was a mistake to initially cooperate with police without hiring a lawyer.
“The police, they wanted it,” he recalled. “The detectives had their eyes on us since the beginning. I didn’t feel the need to have a lawyer, I didn’t touch anything, I didn’t get into the murder scene. It was impossible to me that I would ever be charged for a murder like that.”
Sollecito and Knox were charged with murder and sexual assault in November 2007. While Sollecito and Knox always maintained their innocence, there were contradictions in their alibis. For example, Sollecito said he was watching cartoons on his computer at his own apartment on the night of the murder, though his PC records could not verify his claim.
Knox told investigators that she was at Sollecito’s apartment on the night of Kercher’s murder, though Sollecito admitted he couldn’t be sure they were together all night. Knox and Sollecito both later conceded that they’d smoked marijuana on the night in question, so they could not entirely recall details of the evening, according to ABC News.
A third person, Rudy Guede, was arrested as well and convicted of killing Kercher in October 2008 as part of a fast-tracked trial. He was ordered to serve 30 years in prison, but was released in November 2021 after securing a reduced sentence.
What Happened in Raffaele Sollecito’s Trials?
Sollecito and Knox were convicted twice of Kercher’s murder under controversial circumstances. The pair were initially found guilty following a highly-publicized trial in 2009, only for an appeal to overturn the verdict two years later. (Knox had been serving a 26-year sentence, while Sollecito was given 25 years behind bars.)
The Italian Supreme Court took up the case in 2013 and ruled to overturn the appeals and order a new trial to take place. The following year, Sollecito and Knox were convicted a second time and ordered back to prison, according to NPR.
Knox returned to the U.S. after her first successful appeal in 2011 and, as a result, was tried in absentia. Sollecito remained in Italy and was briefly sent back to prison following the second conviction.
When Sollecito appealed the trial result once again, the Italian Supreme Court took up the case for a second time and ruled to overturn Sollecito’s second conviction, formally exonerating him in March 2015. The high court ruled that Sollecito and Knox could never again face criminal prosecution in connection to Kercher’s death.
Sollecito spoke to NBC News at the time about the end of his and Knox’s long, legal nightmare.
“Everybody was pushing me… we were in kind of a frenzy… a chaos of happiness,” he remembered. “It was great, it was really great … It feels like the air is more fresh … the air of freedom feels very nice, it smells nice!”
Why Did Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox Split?
Knox and Sollecito’s fates were tied together long after their romantic relationship ended.
Speaking to Cooper in 2012, Sollecito recalled keeping in close contact with Knox for four years after they were sent to separate prisons in 2009. He admitted his own family encouraged him to speak out against Knox in order to secure a lesser sentence.
“On the plate, there was my life or throw Amanda under the bus,” he insisted. “I cannot walk on the street being a free man realising I am to blame for a 20-year-old innocent spending the rest of her life in prison.”
The romantic aspect of Knox and Sollecito’s relationship faded before their trial, though they remained close friends. When the pair were initially released following their first appeal, Sollecito visited Knox and her family in Washington.
“When I look at her I get stuck a little bit, I was nervous,’ he told Katie Couric in a 2012 interview. “I still had the psychological wounds of this nightmare that passed in prison. Her image brought up the image of the nightmare.”
He went on, “After she hugged me, I realised that Amanda is the Amanda that I dated for that week. She’s not the Amanda that was ‘the ghost Amanda’ during those four years.”
What Is Raffaele Sollecito’s Life Like Now?
Both Knox and Sollecito moved on with their lives even as the appeals and retrial process took place in the 2010s. Knox married author Christopher Robinson in February 2020 and they now share two children.
Sollecito pursued a career as a software engineer and moved to Milan to run his own business. He later announced his engagement to his girlfriend Andreea Mihaela Burtea, though it is not clear if they are still together.
Sollecito wrote a memoir in 2012 called Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox, in which he reflected on retreating from the public eye after his first successful appeal.
“Even though Amanda and I shared the same unjust fate, the case was always about her,” he wrote. “I vanished so far from public view that I thought of myself… as Mr Nobody.”
Knox and Sollecito publicly reunited periodically over the years, most recently at the world premiere of Hulu docudrama The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox in New York City in August 2025.
The former couple posed with actors Grace Van Patten and Giuseppe De Domenico to promote the two-episode streaming series based on Knox’s book Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir.
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