For Amanda Knox’s entire adult life, her story has been authored by other people, whether that be tabloid magazines — who labeled her “Foxy Knoxy” at the time of her wrongful arrest for the murder of Meredith Kercher — or by true crime podcasts or other media retellings leading up to and following her 2015 acquittal.
To some extent, Knox has found the desire to latch on to her story valid, admitting that “it says something bigger about justice and media and human frailties,” and doesn’t begrudge other people for finding a “philosophical or emotional truth” from her lived experience. That said, it was time for Knox to do the same with her story in “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.”
“Like many artists, we take what we have lived or what we’ve experienced and we turn it into art for the same reason that any of these other storytellers are doing it with my own story — something about what happened to me, what happened to Meredith … resonates with people, and then they try to make meaning out of it,” Knox told TheWrap. “And I’m doing the exact same thing, it just happens to be much more intimately personal to me.”
Knox added that her lived experience enabled her to find new insight into the story that doesn’t just come from a “supposedly objective outside view” that most retellings claim to embody.
“You can actually be in the story,” she continued, “really embedded in the story, and have a global view of it. It is very possible.”
It’s Knox’s involvement in the Hulu limited series that paved the way for the finale, which Knox wrote alongside showrunner K.J. Steinberg. The episode tackled Knox’s covert meeting with her prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, years after her acquittal — and Knox noted this very scene is the reason the show exists.
“It didn’t really feel like my story to tell until I made that choice to go back to Italy, until I started making decisions that only I could make, and that were informed by my personal experience of this journey that I had been on,” Knox said, adding that she needed to go to Italy to confront the life she could’ve had, the life Kercher could’ve had.
Even with Knox attached as an executive producer, she wasn’t initially slated to write the finale, but as Steinberg conceived the final episode — which she imagined as a one-act play between Grace Van Patten’s Amanda and Francesco Acquaroli’s Mignini — it only seemed right for Knox to be involved in the interaction’s televised telling.
“In the past, in other relationships and with journalists, she had been told, ‘trust me, this will be good for you,’ and been let down,” Steinberg told TheWrap. “I wanted to make a gesture to her, to say, ‘your voice is celebrated here and it is needed here.’”
The conversation between Knox and Mignini, which took place 15 years after she was first arrested for Kercher’s murder and in the wake of correspondence between them, saw the prosecutor not back down from placing her at the scene of the crime, but, instead, offer a subtle acknowledgement of her innocence.
In the scene, Knox chose to accept the breadcrumb, as she acknowledged the internal conflict that Mignini had been reckoning with.
“Maybe … she was looking for some absolution that he could deliver,” Steinberg said. “If he were to say, ‘you are innocent, I was wrong. I’m sorry,’ and shout it to the world from a mountaintop, of course, it would have changed her life. But ultimately, what ended up happening, I think, is that she got the absolution he was looking for — maybe not consciously looking for — from her, and she was able to provide a certain portion of redemption.”
Knox noted that the final episode gave him credit for showing up and standing his ground, while also sharing deeply personal things that were illuminating for both parties involved. In essence, the episode gave Mignini the benefit of the doubt Knox was never granted.
“Because I did not receive that benefit of the doubt, and I was dehumanized, I did not want to reciprocate in that same way. I wanted to break the chain and do justice to the human frailty of it all,” Knox said. “Nobody is this static thing that we just judge — everyone is an evolution. Everyone is a process. We are always learning from each other and and by coming into conflict and being challenged by each other, we turn the mirror around on ourselves.”
Following the conversation with Mignini, Knox hoped to honor her other relationships in the finale, including with her mother, Raffaele Sollecito, and last but not least, Kercher, whose name Steinberg noted has often been yolked with Knox’s.
“The media seems to want to amplify Amanda’s name over anybody else’s, and I thought it was only right to return to honoring the life and the potential of the life,” Steinberg said. “The montage really is a reflection of her joy and her youth and her promise, and in considering the life of Amanda, and Amanda’s case, it can’t be without honoring Meredith.”
All episodes of “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” are now streaming on Hulu.
