Amanda Knox Was Told She Had HIV While in Prison, but Did She Actually?

Although Amanda Knox's story is almost two decades old now, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has brought renewed attention to the many twists and turns involved in the case. Among the crazier chapters in this long and winding saga was a period when, after Amanda was arrested, she was told that she had HIV.

The revelation that she had HIV was a big part of the case as a whole, but many want to know whether Amanda really did have the virus. Here's what we know.

Although she was led to believe that she was HIV positive while in prison, she does not and never had HIV. "I was crying, thinking I cannot have children," she explained, per The Guardian, after she was told that blood tests revealed that she had the virus.

Because she was told that she was HIV positive, Amanda then made a list of everyone she had slept with, and that list was eventually leaked to the media and used against her at trial.

It wasn't until two weeks later that she was finally told that the test was a false positive, and she didn't, in fact, have the virus. By then, though, the damage of the leaked list was already done, which only furthered her overall image as a reckless and promiscuous American.

The false positive was just one of many nightmarish things that happened to Amanda during and after she was arrested.

Amanda's HIV positivity was used both in court and in the media to suggest that she was particularly promiscuous, a suggestion that harmed her reputation at trial. The charge of promiscuity would (hopefully) be viewed a little bit differently in a more modern context, but at the time, her personal life was heavily scrutinized as a way of suggesting that her overall character was poor, which doesn't really have much to do with committing a murder.

While it seems like the false positive of the HIV test was an honest mistake, it was one that further damaged Amanda's reputation with the public. In the years following the trial, Amanda worked hard to regain control of her own story and help people understand how much their perception of her was shaped by things that may or may not have even been true.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is just the latest vehicle for helping people better understand what happened to Amanda, and how the death of her friend made her life a living hell for years and years. Amanda does not have HIV, but you'd be forgiven for being confused, given that she was told that she did.

In a case where everything seemed to be going against Amanda, this was just another mishap that made her life even worse during that period. Thankfully, she is now free and able to share her own version of a story that was dominated by other voices for far too long.