Ex: Amanda Knox's Story 'Hallucination'

A major turnaround in the Amanda Knox case: For years, she and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have faced authorities as a pair, and both had their more than 20-year sentences upheld by an appeals court in January. But Sollecito has increasingly been distancing himself from Knox, as part of what CNN describes as a new defense strategy begun in February with an eye on his final appeal in 2015. Perhaps the boldest salvo in that about-face came at a news conference in Rome today, during which Sollecito himself called Knox's story on the morning Meredith Kercher was found "imagination and hallucination."

Knox spent the night with him, but not the full evening, his lawyers now say, per the Local: "For the entire first part of the evening, they were not together. It’s this first part of the evening that’s new [to his defense]." Still, Sollecito said, "I'm not here to change my story," and added, "Amanda and I still believe she is innocent." A lawyer for the Friends of Amanda Knox responds, per mynorthwest.com: "It's stunning, because we've been hearing consistently Raffaele Sollecito had been corroborating Amanda Knox's account, essentially an alibi"—even in his memoir, Honor Bound. "Maybe he's been advised to distance himself from Amanda Knox, but he can't deviate from what the truth is." (More Raffaele Sollecito stories.)