Why Amanda Knox Forgave Italian Prosecutor Who Painted Her as a Deviant Sex Criminal and Put Her in Prison (Exclusive)

When Amanda Knox was stuck in an Italian prison cell after being convicted of a murder she didn't commit, she never thought that one day she'd be on friendly terms with the lead prosecutor on her case — a man who had painted her as a cold-blooded killer and sexual deviant in the sensational trial.

"As a victim of his choices, one of the questions that I just was always plagued with was, "Why? Why me? What was happening here that you saw, in me, the devil?" Knox, now 37, tells PEOPLE of Dr. Giuliano Mignini, who worked tirelessly to get Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito locked up for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher.

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In Knox's new memoir Free: My Search For Meaning (March 25), she describes how, many years after she was exonerated (after DNA proved a sole drifter named Rudy Guede committed the crime), she eventually formed a relationship with Mignini via email, despite her family's protest.

"I never set out to forgive him," she says of their correspondence, which began slowly.

"I think that's an important point to make as I'm not a person whose faith, for example, compels them to forgive. That was not my goal. My goal was to understand him... there was this deep curiosity in me to try to understand this person who decided that I was a dangerous person, who deserved to spend the most years of my life in prison."

As the two began emailing back and forth, Knox described her life back home, which wasn't easy. In part, she says she wrote to him because wanted him to know who she truly was, and what his accusations had done to her.

"Whether directly or indirectly, he kept being a presence in my life because he was the one who portrayed me as this girl gone wild, who out of the blue murdered her roommate," she says.

"And that rippled through my life. And he was, for so long, this very big, scary sort of omniscient presence that just had power over my life and who had sort of diminished me into a pawn in his game. And so, I felt like I didn't have agency in my life primarily because of him, Dr. Giuliano Mignini."

She adds, "He was this boogeyman figure in my life."

As the two formed an unlikely friendship, she says his power over her diminished, and he was able to admit that maybe he'd been wrong about a lot of things during her trial.

"He was a real person," she says. "He wasn't this dark, dark, mythical figure. He was a real human being who had real feelings and real thoughts, not a boogeyman. And as soon as I saw that, I could empathize with him. And as soon as you empathize with someone, you have compassion for them."

In 2023, Knox took their friendship a step further and went back to Perugia, Italy to meet Dr. Mignini in person, and she says the moment changed everything for her.

"Forgiveness is a natural consequence of realizing how fragile and precious another human is," she says. "I immediately sort of stepped into mom mode, and I was like, 'I'm not just forgiving you. I'm holding you. I care about you.' And that changed everything."

She adds, "And I think the real trick and the real cool flip is how I went from being a pawn and powerless in his story and him having all of this agency over my well-being, as soon as we met, that flipped. And suddenly I went from feeling utterly powerless to a superhero, and no one could stop me. And that has felt so good. That is being free."

Free: My Search for Meaning is out Tuesday, March 25.