In 2007, Amanda Knox, then just 20 years old, made headlines when her British roommate Meredith Kercher was discovered dead in their apartment when she was an American exchange student in Perugia, Italy.
Knox was imprisoned for four years after being found guilty and reconvicted of murder before being exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.During her struggle, she was vilified by the media as “Foxy Knoxy.”
Her story of being wrongfully convicted is now being dramatized in an eight-part Hulu series. Knox collaborated with Monica Lewinsky, another lady with a contentious past, as an executive producer on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.
Actress Grace Van Patten plays Knox in the series, and in a voiceover, she states, “Many people think they know my story, but finally it’s my turn to tell it.”
The series demonstrates the impact of the incident on Knox, her family, Kercher’s family, and Knox’s ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who was also imprisoned until being found not guilty. The narrative is told from the perspective of Giuliano Mignini, an Italian magistrate whom Knox refers to as “my prosecutor.”
The real-life Amanda Knox tells NPR, “My prosecutor and I are still in communication today.” “I’ve been receiving text messages from him this morning.”
Knox is sitting barefoot on a windowsill in the sun when we first meet her at a hotel in West Hollywood. She has a small tattoo on her shoulder, her hair is tied in a topknot, and she is fresh-faced and makeup-free.
“People who have seen the series,” she continues, “their sort of immediate feedback is, whoa, it was more intense than I was thinking it was going to be.”
Knox has spent years trying to take back her story; in 2016, she was featured in a Netflix documentary and penned two memoirs. She even co-wrote the last episode of this new Hulu series.
“Ultimately, the thing that I was seeking after having been ostracized and vilified and literally imprisoned was human connection,” she explains. “I also wanted my experience to resonate with others. “I understand,” was what I wanted them to say.
Despite the fact that just one man, Rudy Guede, was found guilty of the murder, Knox says she wants to persuade those who still think she and Sollecito were involved. In 2021, he was freed from prison.
According to Knox, she gave her first public speech in 2017 after years of feeling misunderstood. She remembers, “I was afraid of saying the wrong thing.” “Or even if I said the right thing, everyone would find the wrong way of taking it, or that no one would listen to me or that I would be booed offstage.”
According to Knox, she asked Monica Lewinsky, another speaker that day, for guidance.
“She invited me up to her hotel room and gave me a pep talk and gave me some tea and checked in and just really big sister’d me through that experience,” Knox recalls.
Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky became embroiled in a public sex scandal with then-President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. Lewinsky, who is currently 52, was in her early 20s when the relationship began. Knox claims that despite their distinct situations, she and Lewinsky shared a lot in common, such as having been questioned by police when she was a young girl. (Italian police spent 53 hours over five days on Knox, while the FBI and prosecutors from the Office of Independent Counsel spent 11 hours on Lewinsky.)
“She was vilified and sexualized and made to feel like she was worthless and her only choice was to disappear,” Knox says about Lewinsky. “All of those things are also what I went through.”
Lewinsky claims she was moved by Amanda Knox’s narrative in an NPR West studio. “I just had so much compassion for what she had gone through,” Lewinsky recalls. “Look, I made a poor decision; Amanda did nothing, you know. And I completely own up to the poor decision I made.”
Lewinsky has a master’s degree in social psychology and is currently a podcaster and anti-bullying crusader. She claims that she wants people to realize the long-term harm that comes from being publicly inspected, humiliated, and sexually shamed.
“Women, especially young women, are collateral damage, when internalized misogyny gets spewed out in the newspapers or in the news or is clickbait,” she claims. “That’s important for us to remember.”
Reentering the public eye after years of seclusion, Lewinsky wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in 2014 titled “Shame and Survival.” In the subsequent year, she gave a TED Talk titled “The Price of Shame.”
The limited series Impeachment: American Crime Story for FX was then co-produced by Lewinsky. Inspired by an article in the New York Times where Knox stated that she wanted to tell her tale on television, Lewinsky created this new series after signing a production deal with 20th Television.
“I had a very bonkers narrative in my head about what had actually happened,” Lewinsky confesses before to delving into Knox’s story. “I was mistaken about a lot of the things I believed to be true. Therefore, I believe that people would be quite taken aback.”
Showrunner K.J. Steinberg claims she combed through thousands of pages of court documents, forensic files, police reports and recordings, witness depositions, and judicial rulings to create Knox’s story from multiple points of view.
According to Steinberg, she respects Knox and Lewinsky’s tenacity. She asserts, “They’re both extraordinary women,” “Where they got their strength is a mystery to me. Both of them belong to a very sad small club, and I find them to be really inspirational individuals. For all the wrong reasons, I was aware of them growing up.
Lewinsky claims that, despite their parallels, her relationship with the man whose team questioned her differed greatly from Knox’s relationship with her prosecutor.
She laughs and says, “I met Ken Starr once,” “I definitely did not want to become pen pals with him.”
Starr, who passed away in 2022, denied harassing Lewinsky while the Clinton probe was underway.
Knox is currently a board member of The Innocence Center, a charity organization that works to release innocent individuals from jail. She also presents two true crime podcasts with her husband, Christopher Robinson. They reside close to Seattle and have two small children.
“I want people to come away knowing that whatever traumatic thing that they’re experiencing, their life is not over,” she continues. “You have to carry these experiences with you in a way that makes sense to you and gives you momentum, as opposed to holds you back.”
These days, stand-up comedy is Amanda Knox’s new passion. She also occasionally performs with other people who were wrongfully condemned in a band called The Exonerees.
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