Amanda Knox will keep to a planned schedule for releasing a book about her ordeal next month, despite an Italian court’s decision to quash her murder acquittal, her publisher said Wednesday.
HarperCollins is due to release the US student’s memoir “Waiting to be Heard” on April 30, when she will give her first interview to television network ABC’s Diane Sawyer in the United States.
The 25-year-old described as “painful” a court’s ruling Tuesday that she will be retried in Italy for the 2007 murder of her British housemate Meredith Kercher.
But her publisher, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., said the ruling would not change her book release plans.
“As planned, HarperCollins will publish Amanda Knox’s book .. on April 30, 2013, and will move forward with the interviews that we have scheduled,” said Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for the publisher.
Knox and her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito — originally sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison for killing Kercher — were acquitted on appeal in 2011 after four years behind bars.
Both now face a retrial in a Florence court after judges upheld a prosecution appeal against their acquittals, although no date has yet been set.
Knox said the news was “painful” and insisted in a statement Tuesday that “the prosecution’s theory of my involvement in Meredith’s murder has been repeatedly revealed to be completely unfounded and unfair.”
“No matter what happens, my family and I will face this continuing legal battle as we always have, confident in the truth and with our heads held high in the face of wrongful accusations and unreasonable adversity,” she added.
Knox returned to the United States immediately after her release in 2011 and will likely be tried in absentia. If she is convicted definitively, Italy may seek her extradition.
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