She’s come a long way since she left prison and was cleared of all wrongdoing, and now Amanda Knox is celebrating the eight-year anniversary of the day she was released. On Thursday, October 3, the true crime podcast host took to Twitter to reflect on the milestone moment. After opening up over the past few years about the sexual abuse she feared behind bars and the regular harassment she faced, she’s celebrating the freedom she has now. And, back in the day, her fellow inmates helped her celebrate it, too.

“Today marks eight years since I walked out of Capanne prison,” she told her followers on the social media site. “I can still hear the other girls banging their pots against the bars, screaming, ‘Libertà! Libertà! Libertà!'”

On October 3, 2011, Knox and her ex-boyfriend Rafael Sollecito were found not guilty of the murder of her former roommate, Meredith Kercher — but that was far from the end of her legal drama. At the time, her slander conviction had been upheld, and, after that, the duo faced a retrial in 2013 and were found guilty in 2014 before the Supreme Court of Cassation once again acquitted them of the crime in 2015. Years later, she was also awarded damages by the European Human Rights Court, which ruled in her favor in January 2019 and ordered the country of Italy to pay her roughly $20,000.

“Today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that my slander conviction was unjust,” she wrote at the time. “I am grateful for their wisdom in acknowledging the reality of false confessions, and the need to reform police interrogation methods … [In 2007], I was interrogated for 53 hours over five days, without a lawyer, in a language I understood maybe as well as a ten-year-old … I trusted these people. They were adults. They were authorities. And they lied to me.”

View this post on Instagram

Mr. Fats is helping me read.

A post shared by Amanda Knox (@amamaknox) on

Despite everything she went through, though, Knox hasn’t let it stop her from living her life. In November 2018, she got engaged to fiancé Christopher Robinson, and in June 2019, she even returned to Italy for the first time. “Feeling frayed, so I made my own inspirational workplace poster. ‘Hang in there!’ Just imagine I’m a kitten,” she joked days ahead of the trip, during which she was scheduled to attend the Criminal Justice Festival in Modena. When she arrived, she kept her head down while walking through the airport but eventually made her triumphant debut at the event.

Have a tip? Send it to us! Email In Touch at contact@intouchweekly.com.