Yes, Amanda Knox was maligned and mistreated – but you still won't like her

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18 hours ago

'It is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose,' said Meredith Kercher's sister, Stephanie, when The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (Disney+) was announced last year. It is a fair summary of this wayward drama, a luridly stylised, queasily whimsical and aggressively didactic recounting of the events that began in November 2007 with Kercher's murder. Save for a superb central performance from Grace Van Patten, the series offers little but a litany of reasons to feel sorry for Knox, who was wrongly found guilty of the crime. At times, it has the feel of a bad TV movie.
KJ Steinberg's eight-parter is based so closely on Knox's memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, that it's a surprise that Knox is credited only as executive producer. This is, soup to nuts, the Amanda Knox show. It begins in 2022, with Knox huddled in the back of a car, secretly revisiting Perugia with her mother, husband and baby daughter, to confront Giuliano Mignini, the public prosecutor who put her behind bars. The scene, which bookends the series, shows us Knox's ability to forgive those who have wronged her, as well as providing the sort of narratively neat moment of closure that Kercher's family will never be able to have.
On Nov 2, 2007, Kercher's body was found at her flat in Perugia. The 21-year-old British exchange student had been raped before having her throat cut. Suspicion instantly fell on Kercher's American housemate, Knox, a 20-year-old student from Seattle, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian 'boyfriend' (the pair had met only eight days previously).
During questioning, Knox, whose Italian was relatively poor, implicated herself and her employer, a local bar owner named Patrick Lumumba, while Sollecito removed his initial alibi for Knox. On Nov 6, all three were arrested on suspicion of murder, though Lumumba was released following a strong alibi.
Instead, the bloodstained fingerprints of another man, Rudy Guede, were found on Kercher's bed and he was charged with murder alongside Knox and Sollecito. The prosecution alleged that the killing happened during a violent sex game instigated by Knox. Despite fleeing the country, Guede was arrested and, in 2009, found guilty. In 2021, Guede was released from prison, having served 13 years of his 16-year sentence.
In 2009, Knox and Sollecito went on trial, with a second (bizarrely concurrent) trial taking place regarding Knox's false accusation against Lumumba. By this point, the public idea of 'Foxy Knoxy' had taken hold, with the American publicly painted as a sex-crazed sociopath.
Knox and Sollecito were found guilty of faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence and murder, with sentences of 26 and 25 years respectively. In 2011, after having spent four years in prison, an appeal court found them not guilty of murder, with serious doubt having been cast on the DNA evidence that tied them to the scene and to the whole police investigation. The false accusation against Lumumba was upheld, but as Knox had already served adequate time in prison, she was free to return home to America.
Knox did not only have to endure frenzied media and public interest, but, in 2013, another trial. Italy's Supreme Court set aside the acquittal and ordered a retrial, for which Knox did not have to return to Italy. In 2014, a verdict of not guilty was returned, although the case was not definitively finished until March 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent. A more recent appeal to overturn the defamation of Lumumba was dismissed.
The Disney+ drama shows its hand from the start, with Knox telling her fretting mother (Sharon Horgan, struggling with the accent in a leaden role) that 'there's no way we're going back'. Only she isn't looking at her mother, she is looking straight down the camera, with a smirk on her face, at us.
'Well,' announces Van Patten's bouncy voiceover, 'maybe we'll go back a little', before the show treats us to a misguided David Copperfield-esque montage involving a crow hitting Magnini's office window in 1986 and Meredith Kercher's first steps. Knox's initial weeks in Perugia are marionetted in front of us as a mix of Emily in Paris and Amélie. To add to that unpleasant taste at the back of your throat – the night Kercher was violently raped and murdered, Knox and Sollecito were watching Amélie.
The best work is done early on, with the horribly throat-tightening scene in which Knox and Sollecito slowly begin to realise something is wrong, as Kercher does not answer her phone or open her locked bedroom door. This is compounded in the hellish first few hours in the police station, with Knox pressed and cajoled by detectives who she barely half understands. The show makes a good fist of portraying the Kafkaesque nightmare that Knox lived through and Van Patten is truly believable, capturing Knox's oddball goofiness and brittle ego.
Yet the thing that holds it back is Knox herself, as the show borrows the memoir's propensity for vaguely philosophical mulch, allowing the voice-over to indulge in gnomic blabber such as 'does truth exist if no one believes it?' or 'in the haze of tragedy, I was a deer in the headlights'. Everything is shown through Knox's filter – the police are cruel dunderheads, the media are braying hyenas, Kercher's British friends are pearl-clutching prudes.
Worst of all is how those who cared for Kercher are portrayed. Sollecito is a lovelorn artist, unable to live if he does not have her devotion. The prison chaplain is a saintly grandfather figure who adores her and, at one stage, implores her to sing. (Yes, in the Amanda Knox Story, Amanda Knox gets a song.)
It's an oppressively solipsistic work, with various characters speaking Knox's truth for her. The chaplain tells her that people don't see her, rather they see 'something they fear in her'. Knox's sister Deanna (Anna Van Patten), chastises their parents for making Amanda see the world the way they do. Steinberg has failed to translate the earnestness of a memoir on to the screen, and moments that should be powerful come across as plain cheesy. When Knox is freed from prison, everyone, from inmates to guards, all but bear her aloft on their shoulders, cheering and crying. At one point we get a literal trapped bird metaphor. It's just bad art.
It's all rather astonishing. To take a story in which an innocent 20-year-old is not only found guilty of a murder she did not commit but is also portrayed globally as a conniving slut, and somehow make her slightly unsympathetic is some achievement.
So much of what the drama tells us is true – Knox was maligned and mistreated, she was wronged and slandered, she had her life ripped away from her and transformed into something beyond her control and was courageous throughout it all. And yet by shoving these ideas down our throats, by turning her accusers into pantomime villains or bungling idiots, the drama does Knox a disservice.
It would be wrong to say that the series forgets about Kercher. But The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox makes her a sideshow to Knox's act of redemption and forgiveness. 'Telling your own story is a sticky, tricky thing,' says Knox. You can add icky to that, on this evidence.
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is available on Disney+ now
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