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Rylan Clark wipes away tears as he shares heartbreaking divorce confession at BAFTA TV Awards after scooping win with Robert Rinder

Rylan Clark wipes away tears as he shares heartbreaking divorce confession at BAFTA TV Awards after scooping win with Robert Rinder

Daily Mail​12-05-2025
Rylan Clark emotionally shared a heartbreaking divorce confession at the BAFTA TV Awards after he scooped a win with Robert Rinder.
The former X Factor star, 36, and barrister, 46, took home the Factual Entertainment prize for their show Rob And Rylan's Grand Tour.
After accepting the award, Rylan, who split with his ex-husband Dan Neal in 2021 after six years of marriage, spoke candidly about what the show meant to him.
He admitted he 'wasn't fully over' the break-up and his travels around Italy with Robert and the hit BBC programme became a 'therapy' for him.
'For me, the show, it happened at a really weird time for me like I still wasn't fully over sort of the breakdown of my marriage and was flung with the judge,' Rylan confessed while he clutched his BAFTA award.
He added: 'It was the best therapy I needed, put it that way.'
After accepting the award, Rylan, who split with his ex-husband Dan Neal (right) in 2021 after six years of marriage, spoke candidly about what the show meant to him
'I think the journey, and I hate that word in telly but its so true, when you watch our series, that journey from when we meet to sort of how raw especially I was at that time,' Rylan divulged.
He described how it felt like 'being an adolescent again and starting again but with cameras there'.
Rylan and Robert captured the nation's heart with their fun-filled, historic adventures around some of Italy's most cultural cities during the first season of their show.
The TV personality hinted about the contents of the upcoming second series and said: 'We are not fully healed and so we went to India. We didn't think we would be able to top the Italy show but it is incredible.'
Rylan competed on ITV's singing talent show, The X Factor, back in 2012 and went on to have a successful TV career.
He reflected: 'Just because I finished fifth on X Factor, I should have been forgotten about by February after I had done all the gay clubs.
'You can take a different route. Slap that indicator on and go into the left lane, and it's taken me somewhere else.
'I think that's what the show showed. If you don't try these new things and do it, then you are just going to stay standing still.
'I think the little Rylan on X Factor did alright in the end.'
Rylan competed on ITV's singing talent show, The X Factor, back in 2012 and went on to have a successful TV career
Rylan and Robert forged a close friendship after sharing a divorce lawyer and through filming their BBC travel show.
Robert and his ex-husband, barrister Seth Cumming, divorced in 2018.
Both previously claimed the three-part series worked its way into being a 'heartbreak holiday'.
Having both endured painful divorces, they were ready to embrace the next chapter in their lives by throwing themselves into experiences outside their comfort zones.
2025 BAFTA TV AWARD WINNERS AT A GLANCE
Drama Series - Blue Lights (BBC One)
Limited Drama - Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV1)
International - Shogun (Disney+) - WINNER
Scripted Comedy - Alma's Not Normal (BBC Two)
Entertainment - Would I Lie To You? (BBC One)
Entertainment Performance - Joe Lycett, Late Night Lycett (Channel 4)
Strictly Come Dancing: Chris McCausland and Dianne Buswell's Waltz to You'll Never Walk Alone (BBC One)
Factual Entertainment - Rob and Rylan's Grand Tour (BBC Two)
Factual Series - To Catch a Copper (Channel 4)
Specialist Factual - Atomic People (BBC Two)
Live Event Coverage - Glastonbury 2024 (BBC Two)
News Coverage - BBC Breakfast: Post Office Special (BBC One)
Single Documentary - Ukraine: Enemy In The Woods (BBC Two)
Leading Actress - Marisa Abela, Industry (BBC One)
Leading Actor - Lennie James, Mr Loverman (BBC One)
Supporting Actress - Jessica Gunning, Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
Supporting Actor - Ariyon Bakare, Mr Loverman (BBC One)
Female Performance in a Comedy - Ruth Jones, Gavin & Stacey (BBC One)
Male Performance in a Comedy - Danny Dyer, Mr Big Stuff (Sky Comedy)
Reality - The Jury: Murder Trial (Channel 4)
Soap - EastEnders (BBC One)
Daytime - Clive Myrie's Caribbean Adventure (BBC Two) - WINNER
Current Affairs - State of Rage (Channel 4)
Shortform - Quiet Life (BBC Three)
Sport - Paris 2024 Olympics (BBC Sport)
Children's Non Scripted - FYI Investigates: Disability and Me (Sky Kids)
Children's Scripted - CBeebies As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe (CBeebies)
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Amanda Knox reveals how Monica Lewinsky helped rebuild her life as they unite on red carpet for launch of new series
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  • Daily Mail​

Amanda Knox reveals how Monica Lewinsky helped rebuild her life as they unite on red carpet for launch of new series

Amanda Knox has revealed how Monica Lewinsky became her mentor as she tried to rebuild her life after being exonerated in the death of of her roommate Meredith Kercher. The two women met at a speaking engagement in 2017, just two years after Italy 's highest court exonerated Knox and her one-time boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in Kercher's murder. Knox told The Hollywood Reporter how she was nervous and had begged the event organizers to let her speak with Lewinsky in private. The former White House intern obliged, and even made Knox a pot of tea as she shared some guidance from her years trying to move past her sex scandal with then-President Bill Clinton. 'She had a lot of advice about reclaiming your voice and your narrative,' Knox said. 'That ended up being a turning point for me.' Years later, Knox shared her desire to tell her story on screen in an interview with The New York Times - and upon seeing it, Lewinsky jumped on board. Together, Lewinsky and Knox wound up assembling a creative team, including This Is Us executive producer K.J. Steinberg and famed producer Warren Littlefield, to create 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' a limited series for Hulu. After years of planning, Knox and Lewinsky celebrated the premiere of the show on the red carpet Tuesday. The 38-year-old exoneree stunned in a lacy white and orange gown, while Lewinsky, 52, opted for a stunning gold number with dangling earrings and her hair pulled back. Just hours earlier, Knox released the latest episode of her podcast, Hard Knox, in which she and Lewinsky spoke of the importance of telling the stories of those who survived scandal. Speaking of the decision, Lewinsky noted that she does not often pay attention to a story after it fades from headlines. 'I don't think about "How is this person rebuilding their life?"' she said, her voice cracking as she apparently started to tear up. But, she said, she thinks it is important to 'understand, as my therapist calls it, the long tale of trauma - and that it's not even just the person, but the collateral damage for people's families.' 'It's not the story of like, being a person and being gutted and then building your life back. 'And having to find yourself again,' Lewinsky said, noting that both of their scandals arose when they were in their 20s. 'You think you know everything, you think you know who you are and it's then ripped away from you,' she reflected. 'It's reconfigured and reflected back to you as a monster that you never saw yourself as, that you actually aren't.' During that time, Knox said, 'it's hard to remember that you have value as a human.' That is why, both women said, it was important for Knox to tell her story herself 'I think it's a better product because I was able to share really personal and intimate things about, you know, my life that wasn't just like a Hollywood gloss over reality,' Knox said. 'Like it becomes dirtier in a good way because it has all the messy humanity and you have all these scenes that I, you know, remember being in the writer's room being like, "This is an actual thing that has happened" and they were like, "You can't make this stuff up."' But the duo also sought to play on the 'anatomy of bias,' aiming to showcase how events unfold and are perceived through different people's perspectives. 'It's the way we story tell and it's the way we process a story in our own minds that is impacted by everything we're bringing to that moment that has been shaped by bias upon bias upon bias,' Lewinsky said. 'Every interaction that we have with a person is not just a straight interaction,' Knox added. 'It is colored by the context that we all carry. 'All of us are little universes inside of ourselves and we collide with each other,' she said. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox airs on Hulu, and stars Grace Van Patten in the titular role.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox review – shockingly tense TV from Knox and Monica Lewinsky
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox review – shockingly tense TV from Knox and Monica Lewinsky

The Guardian

time2 hours ago

  • The Guardian

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox review – shockingly tense TV from Knox and Monica Lewinsky

Two things need to be borne in mind about The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a new true crime drama. The first is that Knox and Monica Lewinsky – both members of 'The Sisterhood of Ill Repute', as Knox has described them in the past – are executive producers of the show. The second is that the family of Meredith Kercher, the 21-year-old British exchange student with whose murder Knox and others were charged in 2007, were not involved in the series. Her sister Stephanie said last year to the Guardian: 'Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.' To the first point: it is undoubtedly true that the subject of The Twisted Tale is Knox and her survival of an extraordinary and extraordinarily awful experience, and while not hagiographic, it is not a warts-and-all profile either. Then again, how much warts-and-all can there be for an ordinary 20-year-old excited to be studying abroad – in Perugia, Italy – for the first time? If you set aside the salacious narrative built up around her by a rabid press and fuelled by the preconceived prosecutorial notions around the crime, that is what she was. To the second: the grief of the Kercher family, and their enduring loss, is a terrible thing. But the purpose of the series is clear – to show how this particular miscarriage of justice took place and, by implication, how different forces, prejudices and appetites can combine to bring them about in general. It is designed to give the lie to the appealing notion that justice is always blind and its administrators are always beacons of rectitude, shining light into the darkness of depraved people's souls. Over the course of eight dense and often extremely tense episodes, writer KJ Steinberg (best known for This Is Us) maps out Knox's long journey from first arrest for her flatmate's murder to eventual exoneration, via wrongful conviction, four years in prison and multiple trials. The outlines of the case are probably remembered by many of us of an age to have followed the headlines and articles that proliferated at the time, and the series does a good job of illustrating each pivotal point as it arises (the initial misstep in establishing the time of death, for example. Similarly, the misinterpretation of the English phrase 'See you later' as meaning definite plans to meet had been established between Knox and her initially co-accused, Patrick Lumumba, reminiscent of the very British 'I popped him on the bed' expression misconstrued by a US audience in the Louise Woodward trial), while a propulsive energy keeps the whole narrative going. Strenuous efforts are made to humanise public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who led the murder investigation as a man led astray by his passionate sense of duty and frustration over his experience of pursuing the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer. His subordinates are given shorter shrift, and remain ciphers who are portrayed as having taken against Knox on a whim then found more and more things to be disgusted by, such as her public displays of affection with her boyfriend and later co-accused Raffaele Sollecito, and the vibrator in her washbag. Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is the fact that Knox's ordeal continued even after the trial and conviction of Rudy Guede, the man whose fingerprints and DNA (unlike that of Knox, Lumumba and Sollecito) were all over the crime scene. Or perhaps the most shocking part is that his name hardly resonates in the public consciousness, while 'Foxy Knoxy' still has such potency. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has its flaws. The mannered, Wes Anderson-lite openings to each episode sit uneasily with the harrowing hours to which they give way and the script – particularly in those openings – can be dreadful. 'We were just getting to know our young selves in this charmed and ancient city,' says Knox in a voiceover early on. And later: 'Does truth actually exist if no one believes it?' At one point, investigator Monica (Roberta Mattei) describes Knox providing 'unsolicited information in crude American spasms'. Fortunately, the main parts are held together by an unreservedly brilliant performance by Grace Van Patten as Knox, in English and Italian (halting at first, fluent by the end of Knox's incarceration), the ebullient, naive, overconfident, shattered young woman caught in so many currents and cross-currents it seems a miracle that she ever made it back to shore. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is on Disney+ now

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

Telegraph

time2 hours ago

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

'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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