Amanda Knox: 'Twisted Tale' asks, 'in the wake of trauma, how do you rebuild your life?'

Before her first speaking engagement in early 2017 at a private conference in her hometown of Seattle, Amanda Knox wore a blanket of nerves.

It’d been nearly 10 years since Knox, then a 20-year-old student at the University of Washington, traveled 5,600 miles to study abroad in Perugia, Italy, about two hours north of Rome. Knox moved into an apartment, which she’d share with Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British student. The two had become friends, but police arrested Knox and charged her with murdering Kercher.

Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being acquitted in 2011. She’d be found guilty (again) in 2014 and finally exonerated in 2015. The nightmare saga and its aftermath inspired Hulu’s eight-part scripted series “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” starring Grace Van Patten as Knox. The limited series premieres Aug. 20 with two episodes, followed by weekly installments on Wednesdays.

Knox, now 38, remembers being “terrified” before that 2017 speech. “This was at a moment in my life where I still felt limited and diminished, like nothing I could say would ever bring people to believe me," she says. "I felt trapped in the identity and the story, the narrative that had been built around me, of the girl accused of murder. Even though I had been exonerated, that didn't go away.”

Among fellow speakers, Knox spotted another woman whose narrative had gotten away from her like a bouncing spool of thread, weaving an uncontrollable trail: Monica Lewinsky. The media painted the former White House intern, who had an affair with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s while he was in office, as a “little tart” (The Wall Street Journal) and “a ditsy, predatory White House intern” (The New York Times).

Lewinsky’s articles and her 2015 TED talk on shame made Knox believe “there was perhaps a path forward for me in this world.” So Knox asked to meet, and Lewinsky invited Knox to her hotel room.

“I didn't necessarily feel like someone who had so much wisdom to share about the process,” says Lewinsky, 52. She’d only attempted to regain authorship of her story a few years earlier. Lewinsky asked how Knox was doing and if she was in therapy, which Lewinsky found helpful, along with advice from a former professor.

Over coffee, Lewinsky lamented “how I couldn't find a job and how hard it was to move forward.” The professor told her that “narratives that had been created and imbued with power and by powerful people need to have a competing narrative,” Lewinsky says. “I had no competing narrative out there, not intentionally, but it had run away from me.”

When Lewinsky learned four years later that Knox wanted to adapt her 2013 memoir, “Waiting to Be Heard,” Lewinsky reached out. (She also was a producer on FX’s “Impeachment: American Crime Story” and signed a first-look deal with its studio, 20th Television.) She’s an executive producer on “Twisted Tale.”

“She held my hand through this experience,” Knox says, “because she's been a trailblazer in this regard of a woman who had her worst experience used to bury her and turn her into a punchline. And she had come back and reclaimed her sense of self and her purpose in life and didn't allow all of these external forces to diminish her.”

Lewinsky wishes she could provide an “easy three-step simple solution” to reclaiming her story, she says. “From my own experience, the first step was surviving. Holding on to the hope that things can change. It won’t be as bad as it is in the eye of the storm forever.”

“Twisted Tale” opens with Amanda’s 2022 return to Perugia to meet with prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), portrayed as one of the Italian authorities who believed firmly in Knox's guilt. After Meredith’s murder, Amanda and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico), are early suspects and eventually convicted. With a 26-year sentence looming, Amanda goes on a mission to prove her innocence with the help of her family, including her mother, Edda Mellas (Sharon Horgan). Even after being exonerated, Amanda still faces public scrutiny, despite the conviction of a man named Rudy Guede. (Guede was released in 2021 after serving 13 years.)

“It's not just a courtroom drama,” Knox says. “It's not just a tragedy that I and many others were a victim of. It's a story of, in the wake of trauma, how do you rebuild your life and reclaim a sense of agency when it was stolen from you?”

Van Patten, 28, feels honored that Knox trusted her with her story. "Of course, I felt pressure to tell her story in the right way," she says, "but I tried to do that by just asking her how she felt in the moment, moment to moment and trying to show her emotions as much as possible, as opposed to trying to do some impression of her. It was way more important to show people how she felt through it all because those are things that were not publicized."

Knox isn’t the only one affected by her circumstances. She and her husband, Christopher Robinson, welcomed their daughter, Eureka, in 2021 and son, Echo, in 2023. In Knox’s first words to Eureka, she apologized for being her mom.

Knox says that at 3, Eureka began asking questions.

“But, of course, she comes to the table with a 3-year-old’s mindset, which is used to hearing stories in the form of a fairytale,” Knox says. “And when my daughter approaches me with that kind of mindset, it's a gift for me because it allows me to take this traumatic thing that I am experiencing with such weight and to now reframe it in terms that make sense to her. So if anything, her youth and naivete and innocence has allowed me to reclaim that part of myself that I thought was gone and lost.”

The series also provides a surprise for Knox. “The unexpected thing that I discovered ... is how much making this show gave me the space to grieve,” she says. “This story is also like an elegy to these lives that were irreparably impacted by these series of events. And I have watched the show and wept because of the feeling of how much it succeeds at honoring real people and not treating them like objects in a morality tale, little caricatures, but like real people.”