If ever true crime had a “household name,” that name might be Amanda Knox. Forever immortalized as an inadvertent yet infamous media darling, Knox has weathered the storm of being tried, convicted, imprisoned, freed, retried, and ultimately found innocent of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher.
Knox, a Seattle native, was just 20 when she briefly lived with Kercher and two other roommates in the idyllic cliffside house in Perugia, Italy, where Kercher was murdered. Despite a glaring lack of evidence against her from the start (and overwhelming evidence against the man who actually did it), Knox became a publicly reviled figure who still generates suspicion across two continents. Since her exoneration, she’s chosen to meet that suspicion head-on, participating in a documentary, writing memoirs, and speaking out about how the media demonized her and how the justice system nearly failed her.
All of this has led to her newest project, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an eight-episode Hulu docudrama created by K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us) and co-produced by Knox, retelling her story from her perspective. While true crime biopics are everywhere these days, there’s something particularly strange about this one, which sees Grace van Patten as a wide-eyed, winsome, fourth-wall-breaking Amanda. The show’s director, Michael Uppendahl, deliberately plays with tonal shifts, seesawing between the quirky, twee aesthetic of Amelie, the film Knox and her boyfriend were watching the night of the murder, to the claustrophobia of interrogation rooms and grief of tearful family meltdowns. The result is something that feels almost unholy — like The Staircase meets Fleabag, two things that should probably never meet!
Twisted Tale takes a granular approach to its storytelling, canvassing a huge amount of detail even as the narrative spans years. It also takes on a very close point of view through Amanda’s perspective — which may explain why the narrative glosses over one of the most well-known aspects of this case: If this tale is twisted, who exactly twisted it?
The problem of centering Amanda Knox
The series' center is Amanda, the wrongly accused. This is a bit of a problem because of how much the focus on her obscures the actual victim — Meredith Kercher — but it's also a problem because Amanda herself is a complicated character.
On the one hand, the decision not to water down her tendency to be flippant, glib, or socially awkward at the worst times is a smart one, since this is exactly what the media attacked her for to begin with.
On the other hand, she’s a frustrating ingénue. Her knowing looks at the camera start out annoying and have diminishing returns. Her family members ultimately seem more fazed by her imprisonment than she does. By the time she finds herself on a mystical visit to the Innocence Project, where an encounter with fellow exoneree Antoine Day leads to her awakening as a justice advocate, you can be forgiven if, while wallowing in sympathy, you are just a little tired of this girl.
The decision to present Amanda directly to the viewer without the filter of a damning media lens is arguably a smart choice — but it creates a gap in Amanda’s version of the story. After all, the way the press chose to cover the case at home and abroad may have played a bigger role than anything else in putting Amanda in prison.
Missing from the story are the people who put her there
To understand the real impact the media had on the trial of Amanda Knox, it’s crucial to understand that Italian juries aren’t sequestered during the trial proceedings. That means that both before and during the trial, they have access to the media’s coverage of the case. Experts close to the case have argued that this media exposure was the single biggest reason for Knox and Raffaelle Sollecito, Knox's short-term boyfriend, being convicted.
We do see one such journalist in action, but only after Knox has finally been cleared of guilt — when she sits down for a 2013 CNN interview with Chris Cuomo, who proceeds to challenge her innocence and hound her about why Italian investigators were so convinced she’d been involved in sex games. Because this comes after Knox is free, it doesn’t speak to the real role of the media; it fails as a clue to how we got here.
Contrast this with the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox, in which prolific Daily Mail journalist Nick Pisa proudly gave a master class in villainy. Pisa was the one who coined the nickname “Foxy Knoxy”; in the doc, he compared his front-page bylines about her to having sex. He was blithe about never fact-checking the things he wrote about her before sending articles off to his editors, and gave quotes on the record that would leave any reputable journalist open-mouthed.
“I think now, looking back, some of the information that came out was just crazy really, it’s just completely made up,” Pisa stated at one point.
In one interview years after her first trial, Pisa brought up a purely innocent incident on Knox’s part — she wore a Beatles T-shirt to trial — as a reason why prosecutors and “the media” painted her as suspicious. He failed to mention that he had been the one writing about the T-shirt to begin with.
By keeping all of that irresponsible scheming at bay, we miss a vital piece of the convoluted puzzle that led to Knox and Sollecito becoming such easy targets. It wasn’t just that prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was “prey to delirium” or that the police had an anti-American bias. It was that Amanda herself was vulnerable to a media that craved a villainess. She was “creepy,” “weird,” “inappropriate.” Above all, she was the one thing an innocent girl is never allowed to be: easy.
“It wasn’t the crime itself,” Frank Bruni wrote for the New York Times in 2013. “It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn’t be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison.”
It’s understandable that the media might have been squarely in the periphery of Amanda's perspective as she experienced the events that unfolded in Perugia, and that this might shape her version of the story. But if she wasn’t focused on them, they were certainly focused on her. Without their influence, this Twisted Tale might have untangled itself much sooner.
