In 2015, Amanda Knox was exonerated in the 2007 murder of her study abroad roommate, Meredith Kercher — but a sensationalized trial meant she was already scorned by the global media. Even now, the case remains in the public eye.
In February, Italy’s highest court upheld her slander conviction despite Knox and her lawyers arguing she was pressured by Italian police into wrongfully accusing her boss of her roommate’s murder.
Nearly 20 years after Kercher’s murder, K.J. Steinberg’s Hulu series “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” dramatizes the case and its surrounding media storm. And with Knox as an executive producer, she seeks to reclaim her story.
Based on her 2013 memoir “Waiting to Be Heard,” the series divulges Knox’s (Grace Van Patten) aggressive prosecution and her subsequent character assassination in mainstream media. But it also stresses her humanity. We watch her initial excitement to be in Perugia with her roommates and her new boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico), before sitting in on her 53-hour interrogation. We see that the prosecutors refuse to understand her; a lack of sympathy for the Italian language barrier and bias contribute to the 20-year-old being coerced into confessing that she was in the house at the time of Kercher’s murder.
Monica Lewinsky executive-produced the show along with Knox, a partnership that came out of the two meetings in 2017. At the series premiere, Lewinsky explained what drew her to the show and reflected on their commonalities as women who were under immense public scrutiny at a young age.
“I saw a young woman who was in a lot of pain, and it was a kind of pain I recognized,” Lewinsky said. “We were in this time where we’re starting to revisit a long of young women’s stories that had been in the news and looking at them through a new lens.”
“The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” shows the prosecution’s creation of a false narrative about Knox from the second they enter the crime scene. They scoff at her displays of affection toward Raffaele and dissect her bag of toiletries containing a vibrator and fixate on calling the murder a sex game gone wrong, ignoring the lack of evidence to support that theory.
As Knox’s trial plays out in “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” so does a 2022 confrontation between Knox and her prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, where she seeks to understand his beliefs about her case. At the premiere, Knox explained the decision to suspend the show between these two timelines and exercise a new kind of control over her story.
“I made a choice for the first time in my life to not just react to a bad thing that happened to me, but to be guided by my own vision of what I needed to accomplish,” Knox said. “I had never felt unstoppable until the day that I walked in to speak with [him].”
The two-episode premiere of “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” is now streaming on Hulu.
(Feature photo courtesy of Disney; L to R: Monica Lewinsky, Grace Van Patten, Amanda Knox)
